George Lewis, Jr. House (1778)

George Lewis, Jr. (1747-1826) was a shipbuilder who erected the house at 628 Main Street in Portland in 1778. His shipyard was nearby, along the Connecticut River. As described in the History of Middlesex County (1884):

For more than a century and a half shipbuilding has been the chief industry of that part of Portland now called Gildersleeve, and it was for a time the most active business in the town. Early in the last century, George Lewis built vessels on the present site of the Gildersleeve yard. The first vessel built in Portland was launched here in October 1741.

Sylvester Gildersleeve purchased the Lewis yard from George Lewis, Jr.’s son, Abel Lewis, in 1838. In 1927, the house the residence of George Lewis’s granddaughter, Elizabeth H. Gildersleeve.

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William H. Beebe House (1880)

The house at 540 Main Street in Portland was built c. 1880. According to Doris Sherrow, the house’s first owner, William H. Beebe, was a quarryman, although shortly before his death he purchased newspaper printing machinery. He may be the same William H. Beebe listed in the Middletown and Portland Directory for 1886-7 as a “molder bds.” In the early twentieth century, the property was used as a gas station. Frederick Haines ran the garage in the nineteen teens and twenties and George Bot in the 1930s. On the south front lawn, two concrete tracks, with the space between now filled in, are remnants of the garage’s old grease pit.

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Grover L’Hommedieu House (1799)

Grover L’Hommedieu (1741-1841) was one of the patriot militiamen who became refugees from Long Island to Connecticut after the Battle of Long Island in 1776 during the Revolutionary War. He settled in Norwich and in 1797 leased land from Samuel Lay in Essex. There he erected the town’s first ropewalk. Around that time he also erected the house at 32 Main Street in Essex. It was later occupied by his son Ezra L’Hommedieu (1772-1860), a ship-carver who invented the double-podded center screw auger, which he patented in 1809. Grover’s daughter Sarah (Sally) married Ebenezer Hayden II, the town’s leading merchant. In 1802, Grover L’Hommedieu sold the ropewalk to his partner, Ebenezer’s son, Jared. In 1815, the L’Hommedieu House was purchased by another member of the Hayden family, John G. Hayden.