The house at 1035 Worthington Ridge in Berlin was built circa 1895. With its varied form, combination of clapboards and several types of shingles and ornamental woodwork, the house is an excellent example of the Queen Anne style. It was the home of Charles A Gillin, who was a surgeon. (more…)
The house at 914 Worthington Ridge in Berlin was built around 1790 for Deacon Daniel Galpin (1754-1744), a veteran of the Revolutionary War. In her History of Berlin (1916), Catherine M. North quotes a letter of Mrs. Margaret Dunbar Stuart describing the Deacon:
Deacon Daniel Galpin was brother to Col. Joseph Galpin and lived next door to Parson Goodrich, my grandfather. He was of a more ardent temperament than Col. Galpin. He spoke in prayer meetings, and was a warm abolitionist.
In a wing of his house was a shop where he whittled logs into pumps. Also his daughter Mary utilized this shop for her dame school.
One day there was a sudden noise and my brother, a little boy saying his letters, was greatly pleased to find the Deacon had fallen over his pump log.
At one time Deacon Galpin put up a sign on his pump shop, “Anti-Slavery Books for sale here.”
This subjected him to some persecution and it was torn down by the roughs of the village.
The house was moved to its current address in the late 1840s to make way for the building of the Congregational Church.
The house at 1015 Worthington Ridge in Berlin was built circa 1895. It was the home of Leland Gwatkin, whose father Walter Gwatkin resided in the house at 1006/1008 Worthington Ridge. Leland W Gwatkin (1882-1949) was secretary and manager of the White Adding Machine Company of New Haven.
There is some uncertainty about the date and exact address of the Walter Gwatkin House on Worthington Ridge in Berlin. The nomination form for the Worthington Ridge Historic District lists it as no. 1008 and gives the date as c. 1905. A walking tour booklet (doc) for the District gives the address as 1006 and the date as c. 1861, noting that the porch dates to the early 1900s. Walter Gwatkin (1856-1921) was a prosperous butcher, farmer and landowner. Catharine M. North, in her History of Berlin (1915), makes note of the house that existed before the current one:
In 1817 Horace Steele, Elishama Brandegee’s next door neighbor on the south, was engaged in the business of bookbinding. Afterwards he made bandboxes, which he carried to Hartford to sell to the milliners.
Mr. Steele’s children were Eliza (mother of the Rev. Andrew T. Pratt, missionary in Turkey), Caroline (Mrs. Joseph Booth), Mary, Jane, Lucy Ann (Mrs. Lorenzo Lamb), and William.
Their home, a large colonial house set well back from the street, was, in its day, socially a center of attraction, filled as it was with bright, merry young people. The old house was torn down by William Steele and the house which he built on its site is now owned by Walter Gwatkin.
Brandegee Hall, at 983 Worthington Ridge in Berlin, was built in 1884 by William Brandegee to be used for concerts, plays and other entertainments such as roller-skating. In 1907, the building was acquired by the town of Berlin and used as a Town Hall until 1974. Over the years it also housed a post office, the Berlin Grange and the Berlin Playhouse, a local theater group. With the erection of a new Town Hall, the old building was sold to a private owner and used for storage. Having fallen into disrepair, the Hall was renovated in the early 2000s in response to the town’s new blighted property ordinance.
The Phineas Squires Case House, at 1121 Worthington Ridge in Berlin, is a central-chimney colonial house, built c. 1750-1770. The property, later owned by the Bunce family, has a barn which once housed a disassembled homebuilt replica of a Curtiss-Type Pusher plane, built by 17-year old Howard S. Bunce in 1912. Unable to afford a Curtiss engine, Bunce used a 4-cylinder air-cooled engine constructed by Nels J. Nelson of New Britain. The oldest surviving airplane in Connecticut, it was discovered in the barn in 1962 and can now be seen at the New England Air Museum in Windsor Locks.
In a 1753 division of Wethersfield common land, Ezekiel Kelsey was granted a lot for his farm in what is now East Berlin. Ezekiel Kelsey built a house at what is now 429 Beckley Road around 1760, either for himself or for his son Asahel, to whom he gave the residence in 1768. Ezekiel Kelsey (1713-1795) also owned a share in a saw mill and was skilled as a cooper and a carpenter-joiner. He married Sarah Allis (1715–1798) in 1741. Ezekiel Kelsey’s brother, Enoch Kelsey, built a house that is also still in existence in Newington.
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