William Boardman East Boarding House (1847)

At 123 Main Street in the Rockfall district of Middlefield is a Greek Revival house built between 1845 and 1847. It is unusual in that the entrance is on the west side of the house instead of on the front facade that faces the street. Originally, there was also a door on the east side. The multiple entrances provided access to what was built as a boarding house for workers employed at the mills along the Coginchaug River. Now a two-family house, the building was erected by William F. Boardman, who also built another boarding house just to the west.

First Congregational Church of Danbury (1909)

Pioneers from Norwalk first settled Danbury in 1684 and the town’s Congregational Church was first organized in 1696. A meeting house had already been erected on what is now Main Street, a little north of the present Court House. The church currently occupies its fifth meetinghouse, located at 164 Deer Hill Avenue. The building, designed by the architectural firm of Howells & Stokes, was dedicated in 1909. (more…)

Reynolds-Beers House (1786)

The Reynolds-Beers House is a Dutch gambrel-roofed historic home, owned by the Town of North Branford since 1997 and operated as a museum by the Totoket Historical Society. Located at 1740 Foxon Road, the house was erected in 1786 by Hezekiah Reynolds (1756-1833), who later moved to Wallingford. A painter, he was the author of Directions for House and Ship Painting (1812). By the 1930s, the house was owned by Earle Beers. There are two ells on the rear, or east, side of the house, added at different times in the nineteenth century. The south ell is in the Greek Revival style.

Colegrove Building, Mystic Seaport (1952)

Andrew C. Colegrove, who operated an electrical appliance business in Mystic, was killed in a plane crash in California on August 24, 1951. The Colegrove Building at Mystic Seaport was built in 1952 as a memorial in his memory. Since 1962, the half of the building that faces the Mystic River has housed a printing exhibit, called the Mystic Press Printing Office. The original Mystic Press newspaper, started in 1873, had an office at West Main and Pearl Streets. The other half of the Colegrove Building contains a Ship Carver exhibit.

Fairfield Country Day School (1891)

Timothy Dwight (1752-1817) was a Congregational minister, author and educator. Before becoming president of Yale University in 1795, Dwight served as minister of the Greenfield Hill Congregational Church in Fairfield from 1783 to 1795. He also started a well-respected academy in Greenfield Hill in 1783-1784. His 1794 poem, Greenfield Hill, references “Fair Verna,” the name he gave to his house and farm in Greenfield Hill. Isaac Bronson purchased Verna Farm in 1796 and it was later inherited by his son, Frederic Bronson. Dwight’s eighteenth-century house was eventually torn down in 1891 by Frederic’s son, Frederic Bronson, Jr., a wealthy New York City lawyer, who commissioned architect Richard Morris Hunt to design a grand new house on the site. Bronson also had a windmill built on his property in 1893-1894. After his death, Verna was the home of his daughter, Elizabeth Duer Bronson (1877–1914), and her husband, Lloyd Carpenter Griscom (1872-1959), an influential lawyer and diplomat: during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, he served successively as ambassador to Iran, Japan, Brazil and Italy. In 1933, the Bronson estate was acquired by W. A. Morschhauser, who had the house remodeled and made smaller in 1900: the third story was removed and the number of rooms was reduced from 42 to 13. Since 1949, the house, located at 2970 Bronson Road, has been occupied by the Fairfield Country Day School.