The Hopkins Inn, overlooking Lake Waramaug in Warren, was opened in 1847 as a summer boarding house by Deacon William Hopkins on the farm he had inherited from his father, Elijah Hopkins. His son and grandsons, including George C. Hopkins, continued to operate the boarding house. Closed during the Second World War, it was reopened in 1945 by William Hopkins’ great-grandson, George Hosford Hopkins, and continues in operation today as an inn, restaurant and vineyard.
Happy Fourth of July! During the Revolutionary War, the French General Rochambeau’s army passed twice through Newtown: first in June, 1781, during the march to the Battle of Yorktown, and again in October, 1782, during the return march. On June 23, 1781, Claude Blanchard, the French commissary officer, arrived five days before the army to make arrangements for supplying the French camps. As Blanchard related in his diary (translated by William Duane, edited by Thomas Balch and published in 1876):
Newtown is on a hill surrounded by hills which are still higher. There are only a hundred houses with two temples [churches]. One of them was near the place where I lodged; and, as it was Sunday, I saw many people from the vicinity dismount there. As all the inhabitants of the country are proprietors and, consequently, in pretty easy circumstances, they had come on horseback, as well as their wives and daughters. In the neighborhood of Boston, they come in carriages; but here the country is mountainous and the horse is more suitable. The husband mounts his horse along with his wife; sometimes there are two women or two young girls together; they are all well clothed, wearing the little black hat in the English style, and making as good an appearance as the burghers in our cities. I counted more than a hundred horses at the door of the temple, where I heard singing before the preaching, in chorus or in parts. The singing was agreeable and well performed, not by hired priests and chaplains, but by men or women, young men or young girls whom the desire of praising God had assembled.
To-day I was rejoined at Newtown, where I spent the whole day, by M. de Sançcon, my secretary and some surgeons and apothecaries. I pointed out to them the site which I had selected for the hospital, and set out, on the 25th, to proceed to the American army.
Blanchard stayed in Newtown at the Caleb Baldwin Tavern, which had been built about 1763. Caleb Baldwin was a schoolmaster, postmaster and town clerk in Newtown. The tavern is where local farmers would drink sassafras beer after the sheep grazed in Ram Pasture. According to Newtown’s History and Historian, Ezra Levan Johnson (1917):
Caleb Baldwin’s Inn had the reputation of being the pattern of neatness, homelike in all surroundings and it was also claimed that there could be had the best broiled chicken or sirloin steak to be found in Fairfield county. The motherly reputation of the hostess made it a much sought place for restfulness.
The building remained in the Baldwin family until 1917. Still standing at 32 Main Street in Newtown, the former tavern was later remodeled twice, in the Federal and Victorian eras.
Viets’ Tavern is an eighteenth century building, which was much added to over the years. It is located just across the street from Old Newgate Prison in East Granby and served as an inn and tavern. According to Francis Hubbard Viets, in A Genealogy of the Viets Family (1902), Captain John Viets (1712-1777),
worked for a time with his brother Henry in the Simsbury copper mines at Newgate. It is said that while working in the mines at Newgate he met Lois Phelps, an unusually charming girl, who had come with others to visit the caverns, which, then as now, were objects of curiosity. Lois afterwards became his wife. […] He settled on an estate near Newgate and became a farmer, store and hotel keeper, and an extensive trader. His homestead is now in possession of his descendant, Virgil E. Viets. The present house, however, or the greater part of it, was built at a later day. Tradition gives John Viets the credit of introducing potato culture into this part of Connecticut; he is said to have brought the seed from Rhode Island in his saddlebags. […]
He was first a lieutenant and afterwards captain of militia. […] In 1773 Captain John Viets was appointed master or keeper of Newgate prison for the ensuing year. In 1775 he was again appointed keeper of Newgate during the pleasure of the Assembly; he was paid this year for his services as keeper £149, 17s, 8½d.
As further related by Richard H. Phelps in Newgate of Connecticut: its Origins and Early History (1876):
Lieutenant Viet’s tavern, a few rods from the prison, was an especial accommodation, not only for travellers, but for the better sort of convicts. He who could muster the needful change, would prevail on some one of the guard to escort him over the way to the inn of the merry old gentleman, where his necessities and those of his escort were amply supplied at the bar.
John’s son, Luke Viets, was tavern-keeper through 1834. The tavern sign from his time displayed the date 1790. More recent estimates give a date for the Tavern of c. 1760. The unrestored tavern is now part of the state’s Old New-Gate Prison and Copper Mine site and museum.
In 1794, Giles Pettibone, Jr., son of Col. Giles Pettibone and grandson of Jonathan Pettibone of Simsbury, built a tavern on the Green in Norfolk. After Giles Pettibone died in 1811, according to The Norfolk Village Green (1917), by Frederic S. Dennis,
His son Jonathan Humphrey Pettibone, who died in 1832, succeeded his father as Tavern keeper. This Tavern a little later was kept by John A. Shepard […] This Tavern was known as Shepard’s Tavern and during the stage coach era was a place of great activity. Here the stages stopped to change horses en route between Hartford and Albany and between Winsted and Canaan. This Tavern was in late years rebuilt for a private residence by Mr. Frederick M. Shepard, the son of Capt. John A. Shepard, and was occupied by him and his family as a summer residence. […] An interesting fact connected with the old Tavern is that seven generations of the Shepard family have lived in it.
The Tavern is now covered with aluminum siding, but the central doorway surround is the original wood.
The Windham Inn is a notable landmark in Windham Center, at the intersection of Scotland Road and Windham Center Road, near Windham Green. Known as the Windham House prior to 1890, the building was constructed in 1783 and was originally three stories. It began to buckle around 1850 and was then reduced to two stories. The three dormer windows were added around the same time. Also added at some point was a front porch, later removed. The Inn, which is believed to be haunted, was converted into apartments in the mid-twentieth century. The inn sign from the 1890s is in the collection of the Connecticut Historical Society.
Located across from where Pearl Street splits from South Main Street, on a high bluff above the Naugatuck River, is a structure that was perhaps built as early as 1740. It was acquired around 1778 by E. Turel Whittemore and served as a tavern. At that point, the building was only one story high. The second story was added in 1867 by Martin Castle, who dismantled the building’s old chimney and used the stones to constructed the terraced wall in front of the property. On the northwest corner of the old tavern was a barroom, where in 1780 a group of Torries planned the robbery of the home of the Patriot, Capt. Ebenezer Dayton, which was located in Bethany. This infamous incident led to the dramatic kidnapping, in nearby Oxford, of the Patriot boy, Chauncey Judd, a 16-year-old member of the Oxford militia, who ran into the fleeing robbers. They were later captured and sent to Newgate Prison and Judd was freed. The Whittemore Tavern has housed various businesses over the years.
Stephen Hanford was a weaver and New Canaan’s first licensed tavern keeper. In 1764, he moved into a new house with his new wife, Jemima. The house was both his home and an “ordinary,” or inn and tavern. After his wife died in 1784, Hanford sold the house to Elisha Leeds, who gave it to his daughter Martha, and her husband, Joseph Silliman, as a wedding present. The Hanford-Silliman House remained in the Silliman family into the 1920s. Acquired by the New Canaan Historical Society in 1957, it now one of their museum properties.
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