James Gladwin (1774-1850), a farmer in the Higganum section of Haddam, purchased a tract of land along what is now Saybrook Road in 1806. Soon thereafter, around 1810, he built the house at 352 Saybrook Road for his new wife, Margaret Tripp. They had twelve children, nine boys and three girls. After Gladwin’s death, the other siblings quitclaimed the house to his youngest daughter, Julia Ann Taylor, wife a Warren Taylor, a farmer who also owned a livery stable. The house was sold out of the family in 1875. Julia Gladwin Taylor later lived in Clinton and died in 1909 at the age of 85.
In 1848, William Planter and Samuel Q. Porter purchased the Stone and Carrington paper mill in Unionville. They soon built another mill and in 1860 organized the Planter & Porter Manufacturing Company, which produced fine writing paper and book paper. As one of Unionville’s largest employers, they needed housing for their workers and erected at least five rental houses in the neighborhood. They erected the rooming and boarding house at 28 Elm Street in 1854. Franklin C. Chamberlin, a Hartford lawyer, bought the building in 1878 and continued to rent its rooms out to local factory workers. In 1889 the house became the residence of Thomas Mulrooney, an Irish immigrant who worked at the American Writing Paper Company (which had acquired Planter & Porter in 1877), and his wife Mary Jane Mulrooney, who was born in Burlington to Irish immigrant parents. Mrs. Mulrooney rented out rooms in the house to supplement the family’s income. The house remained in the family until 1941.
In the early nineteenth century, Methodists in Unionville traveled to Burlington for services. Eventually they began to hold their own meetings in Unionville on the second floor of the Tryon and Sanford store at the intersection of Main and Lovely Streets. Unionville soon grew as a population center and a number of Methodists in Burlington eventually joined their coreligionists in Unionville to build a church on Farmington Avenue in 1867 (near the site that would later have a Friendly’s restaurant). By the 1920s, the Methodists had outgrown their church building and they erected a new one on School Street, on a site where the Solomon Richards Mansion, one of the grandest in Unionville, had been taken down in 1925. Completed the following year, the church, built by local builder John Knibbs, displays the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement. Sometimes called the “Stone Church,” it’s design was modeled on the Lake Mahopec Methodist Church in Mahopec, New York. In 1929 the church officially adopted the name of “Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church.” A parish hall to the rear was erected in 1959. Urban renewal in Unionville in the late 1960s provided the opportunity for the church, now called Memorial United Methodist Church, to relocate again, this time to West Avon Road in Avon. The former church in Unionville is now used by the Town of Farmington as a Youth Center.
Standing in front of the former Willimantic Linen Company’s Mill No. 2 in Willimantic is a smaller stone structure, built in 1866, that once served as the office building housing the company‘s executives and bookkeepers. The building originally had windows with accents of colored glass. The interior featured marble mantels, woodwork of chestnut and walnut, and plaster ceiling moldings. All that survives of the interior finishes today is a marble mantel on the west wall.
The Archbold Building, on the campus of Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, was erected in 1928 and opened in 1929 as the school’s infirmary – the largest school infirmary in the country at the time. Designed by Ralph Adams Cram, the building was a gift of Anne Saunderson Archbold in recognition of the care her son received from Clara St. John, the headmaster’s wife, during a long illness when he was a student. After forty-five years as an infirmary, the building became a girl’s dormitory in the 1970s, when the school became co-ed. In 1998, the Archbold Building was renovated to incorporate the headmaster’s office and admissions offices, with dormitory housing on the upper of its three floors.
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