At 8 Dust House Road in Hazardville is a small brick building constructed in 1850. It is a rare survivor among the 125 buildings built by the Hazard Powder Company, which produced gunpowder and explosives in Enfield from 1835 to 1913.
The house at 44 Cherry Brook Road in Canton was built c. 1810 by Ansel Bristol, a farmer. It was later home to Anson W. Bristol, Jr. A tradition holds that the carpenters who built the house came from working on the Canton Center Congregational Church, which would date the house to c. 1815. The house is also said to have floors that were reused from one of Canton’s earliest churches, dating to the seventeenth century. There is an ell that may have been added from earlier house, built in the middle of the eighteenth century by Isaac Tuller. The house is also said to have been home to the first telephone in Canton. (more…)
The house at 392 Saybrook Road in Higganum (in the Town of Haddam) has a sign that reads “Geo. W. Smith c. 1815.” There was a George W. Smith who represented Haddam in the legislature in the 1820s.
The Queen Anne Victorian house at 187 South Main Street in Colchester was built c. 1886. It is listed in the Colchester Village Historic District as the Retta Buell House. Could this be I. Loretta Tew, who in 1877 married Harley P. Buell, the druggist?
The house at 43 Waterside Lane in Clinton was long thought to have been built c. 1790 by Charles K. Rossiter, who actually lived in it later on. It was actually built c. 1805 by ship master Daniel Vail on land purchased by his son, Silas Vail, in 1804.
The formation of the Methodist Church in Bethel grew out of a religious revival in the 1830s. With churches in Danbury being too crowded, in 1837 Methodists in Bethel began meeting in a private home. In 1847-1848, the congregation erected their own hall on a site where a Masonic Hall would later be built. Work on the current Bethel United Methodist Church, located at 141 Greenwood Avenue, began in 1860 and the building was dedicated in August, 1861. It is a stylistically eclectic edifice that features a Greek Revival cornice and pilasters, Italianate round-arched windows, and a Gothic Revival tower. The church had to be restored after a fire in 1884. The steeple was also rebuilt after a lightning strike in 1971.
Built about 1823, the Varick Dey House at 39 Meeting House Lane, in the Greenfield Hill section of Fairfield, displays a Dutch Colonial influence combined with elements of the Federal style. The long steep-pitched roof extends to the level of the first floor, which has a recessed veranda. Tradition holds that the house was designed by Lavinia A. Scott, the young bride of Rev. Richard Varick Dey (1801-1837). He was pastor of the Greenfield Hill Congregational Church from 1823 to 1828. As related in Ye Church and Parish of Greenfield: the Story of an Historic Church in an Historic Town, 1725-1913 (1913), by George H. Merwin:
There are very few persons living to-day who can remember Mr. Dey, but he has gone down in history as being a handsome young man of commanding presence and a pastor who at once became a general favorite in the parish. He also became popular outside of his own parish, and multitudes flocked to hear him; in fact it has been said that the old meeting-house was not large enough to accommodate the congregation.
[. . .] Not since the days of Dwight had there been such a flow of eloquence from the Greenfield pulpit, and it is doubtful if any of his successors for many years compared with him as a public speaker. Many of his parishioners who recognized his ability were loath to part with him when the consociation dissolved the pastoral relation in December, 1828. So great was the attendance when he delivered his farewell sermon that the galleries of the old meeting-house were propped to sustain the additional weight.
When Rev. and Mrs. Dey first came to Greenfield they boarded with Captain Nichols, the father of Mrs. Milbank. Later Mr. Dey’s father built for him the house now standing northwest of the present church, and known as the old Samuel Nichols place. Members of the parish assisted in building the house and also furnished much of the lumber. Mrs. Dey drew the plans for the house and planted the shrubbery and trees which still adorn the place.
Rev. Varick Dey was also known to the young P. T. Barnum, and the famous showman relates several stories about the reverend in his autobiography. As related in Funny Stories Told by Phineas T. Barnum (1890):
In my young days the Rev. Richard Varick Dey, of Greenfield, Conn., often came to Bethel to preach or lecture. He was a very able and eloquent, though somewhat eccentric man, popular even with people who did not go to church regularly, but not liked, and perhaps feared, by the too strait-laced; and his lectures and also his sermons were rich in wit as well as pathos. He was very free in saying exactly what he believed and thought, both in and out of the pulpit, and never hesitated to rub against or to knock in the head any particular popular dogma or theological tenet that he himself did not hold. This proclivity now and again brought him into uncomfortably warm water with the church, and he was either suspended or brought to trial for some alleged heresy or breach of ministerial duty. At such times he lectured in different towns, and so supported his family. My grandfather was a Universalist, and “on general principles” was opposed to Presbyterians, though many of them were among his warmest personal friends. He was very much attached to Mr. Dey, and induced him to deliver in Bethel a series of Sunday evening lectures. I remember one of them on “Charity,” which resulted “practically” in a contribution of more than fifty dollars.
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