Masjid al-Mustafa in East Hartford (there is also a Masjid al-Mustafa in Waterbury) is a mosque located in a former house at 20 Church Street. The house was built circa 1840 and was remodeled in 1880. Before becoming a mosque, the building had been expanded in the 1950s by Father Austin Munich of St. Rose Church, located across the street, to become a convent for the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, who were the teaching staff of St. Rose School.
Three brothers, George, Clark and Thomas Greenman, founded the George Greenman & Co. Shipyard in Mystic (now the location of Mystic Seaport). Each erected a house along Greenmanville Avenue, the last being the home of Thomas S. Greenman. Erected in 1842, the house has a cast-iron fence, put up about 1866, and a porch, added in the 1870s. Thomas Greenman’s granddaughter, Mary Stillman Harkness, donated the house to Mystic Seaport in 1945. An exhibit was opened in the house in 1952, while the kitchen and upstairs rooms are used as offices.
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Abijah Catlin II (1747-1813) built the house at 1 Harmony Hill Road in Harwinton c. 1760-1765. Land in the area had been granted to his father, Abijah Catlin I (1715-1778) in 1739, soon after the Town of Harwinton was formed in 1737. In addition to the house, which he operated as an inn, Catlin also built a store just to the west on the same property. Guests at the inn included General George Washington, General Henry Knox, and the Marquis de Lafayette, who stopped there on their way back to West Pont after meeting with General Rochambeau in Hartford in September, 1780. The house is at the intersection of Burlington and Harmony Hill Roads, a crossroads that became known as Catlin’s Corners.
At 54 Lyme Street in Old Lyme is a three-quarter cape with a gambrel roof, called the Justin Smith House, which was built in 1710. In recent years, the house was saved from demolition and completely restored by its current owners, Brad and Gerri Sweet, who discovered that some of the wood rafters had come from an even earlier building. The house had many owners over the years. Samuel Mather sold it to Nathan Tinker in 1784, who himself sold it in 1790. It was then own successively by three brothers, Joseph, Charles and Simon Smith. After World War One, the house was the residence of Matilda Brown, an artist who was part of the Old Lyme art colony.
The former Locust Avenue School, at 26 Locust Avenue in Danbury, was built in 1896 as an elementary school to serve students in the eastern part of the city. The Romanesque Revival structure was designed by architect Warren R. Briggs of Bridgeport, who featured an illustration and floorplan of the school in his book, Modern American School Buildings (1899), where its referred to as “Center School.” His advanced ideas of school construction involved a ventilation system and high ceilings to keep the classrooms airy and bright with abundant natural light. Briggs had earlier designed a sister school, erected on Morris Street in 1893, that served students in the western part of the city.
In 1905, administration of the school was transferred to the Danbury State Normal School (now Western Connecticut State University), which provided teaching staff until 1965, when control was turned over to the Danbury Board of Education. The building’s last year as an elementary school was 1976. Since then, it has served as a high school for at-risk students and now known as the Alternative Center for Excellence.
An excellent example of the Colonial Revival style of architecture is a house called Knowllwood, located at 80 Broadview Street and Woodland Street in Bristol. It was designed by Goodell & Root (another example of their work in Bristol is the Newell Jennings House at 4 Oakland Street) for Howard Seymour Peck (1874-1928) and his wife, Edna R. Peck (1877-1950), who continued to live in the house after her husband’s death. In 1912, the Pecks had an address of 14 Prospect Place in Bristol. Their son, Seymour Roe Peck, was a partner in the company, Peck & Barnard, that would build Knollwood in 1923. Howard S. Peck was the son of Miles Lewis Peck, president of the Bristol Savings Bank, and grandson of the bank’s founder, Josiah T. Peck. As related in the Decennial Record of the Class of 1896, Yale College (1907):
(more…)Peck has been taken into partnership with his father, since Sexennial, and their insurance agency is now run under the firm name of M. L. Peck & Son. He has been and still is a clerk in the Bristol Savings Bank, besides. “Took a trip to New York last fall,” he writes. “Was there three days. Stayed with one Dwight Rockwell. Did not see much of him. He was too busy making money. Took in a championship ball game between New York and the Athletics, also the Vanderbilt cup race. Dropped in the Yale Club and found Publius. He was sober. So was I.”
This concise staccato pervades Howard’s answers throughout. “Have you held political office?” “Close second.” “Have you done any teaching?” “One dog. Failure.” . . . “Please give your daughter’s date of birth.” “June 30, 1904. She is a peach.”
It is not clear whether Peck absents himself from class functions from a sense of caution or a wish to hoard. Or may it be, perhaps, a compassionate determination on his part no longer to invite a possibly fatal competition with his prowess?
Today, Olmsted Street, near the central business district of East Hartford, is in a very built-up area, but over a century ago tobacco was still grown in the immediate vicinity. According to An Architectural History of East Hartford, Connecticut (1989), edited by Doris Darling Sherrow, page 195, when James Mulligan (1848-1920), a railroad engineer from Waterbury, purchased the land where the house at 107 Olmsted Street stands today in 1893 from Henry G. Beaumont, the latter (who is listed in the 1885 Hartford County Directory as a farmer) reserved the right to continue growing his tobacco crop on the property until September 15 of that year or until it was harvested, whichever came first. The house that Mulligan, an immigrant from Glasgow, Scotland, erected and occupied until his death features a spindle rail porch with a starburst design at the front entryway.
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