Branford - Historic Buildings of Connecticut

Pine Orchard Union Chapel (1897)

The borough of Pine Orchard in Branford is a small community of 300 households that started as a summer colony in the late nineteenth century. Landowners Frank and Henry Wallace provided land on Chapel Drive for the construction of a non-denominational chapel to be used for summer services. Between 1872 and 1892, the Wallace brothers and their father, Robert Wallace of Meriden and later Wallingford, had developed what is now Island View Avenue in Pine Orchard as a waterfront residential enclave. Plans for the Pine Orchard Union Chapel were approved on July 4, 1896 and the building, designed by the New Haven architectural firm of Brown and Berger, was completed a year later. The Chapel had no resident minister, so ministers came from neighboring communities to lead services. The Chapel was originally painted in a darker color, but in the early twentieth century it was painted white. The chapel was closed for regular services in 1963. Community residents worked to preserve the building, which is now regularly rented out for weddings. (more…)

Isaac C. Lewis Cottage (1882)

The Isaac C. Lewis Cottage (although it’s much bigger than what people think of as a cottage!) is located at 255 Thimble Island Road in the Stony Creek section of Branford. It is an impressive eclectic Victorian house with an outstanding variety of detail that features elements of the Gothic Revival, Second Empire, Eastlake, and Stick styles. It was built as a seaside cottage for Isaac Chauncey Lewis (1812-1893), president of the Meriden Britannia Company and one of Connecticut’s leading industrialists. The cottage was designed by the architect Henry Martin Jones (1828-1908), who had also designed Lewis’s much larger house in Meriden. The cottage was shifted about a hundred feet east, from one side of its lot to the other, in 1917. (more…)

Harrison-Linsley House (1724)

Nathaniel Harrison II (1692-1760) built the house at 124 Main Street in Branford in 1724. The house was once thought to have been built around 1680, at which point the land was owned by Daniel Swain, so it is listed as the Swain-Harrison House in the National Register of Historic Places. The house passed to Nathaniel Harrison III and then to his daughter Martha, who married Nicodemus Baldwin. Martha sold the house to Joseph and Lorany (Bradley) Linsley in 1800, so it is also known as the Harrison-Linsley House. The Linsleys’ daughter, Lorany Linsley Smith, lived in the house until her death in 1915 at the age of 100. The Smith family owned it until 1938, when it was acquired by the architectural historian and preservationist J. Frederick Kelly, who restored the house. Upon his death in 1947 Kelly bequeathed the house to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, now Historic New England. Under a long-term lease, the house is maintained by the Branford Historical Society as its museum and headquarters.

Stony Creek Church of Christ Congregational (1903)

Church of Christ Congregational, Stony Creek

The Congregational Church in the village of Stony Creek in Branford was gathered in 1877 and soon purchased a building known as Union Chapel for its services. Union Chapel had been constructed in 1866 by the Union Religious Society, formed in 1865 by Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Congregationalists in Branford as a missionary outreach to Stony Creek. The old wood structure was destroyed by fire in 1900. It was replaced by the current Stony Creek Church of Christ Congregational, a Norman Gothic edifice constructed between 1901 and 1903 of Stony Creek red granite. A basement kitchen and meeting room were added in 1907.

Isaac Palmer House (1810)

Built around 1810, the house at 736 Main Street (at Cedar Street) in Branford was dated in a W.P.A. survey to c. 1834, perhaps because it has a later Greek Revival doorway. The house was likely constructed by Linus Robinson who soon sold it to John Hobart and Edmund Palmer. The house remained in the Palmer family through the nineteenth century and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places as the Isaac Palmer House.

Isaac Hoadley House (1757)

The house at 9 Totoket Road in Branford was built around 1757, the year that its first owner, Isaac Hoadley (1728-1812), married Elizabeth Blackstone (1731-1818). According to The Hoadley Genealogy (1894) by Francis Bacon Trowbridge:

Isaac Hoadley was a carpenter by trade and probably built the old house in which he, his son Abel, and some of his descendants lived. He inherited his father’s farm in the Damascus district of Branford, and was a well-to-do farmer. He was a leading member of Trinity Episcopal Church in Branford and was its junior warden 1794-1804 and 1806-1807, and senior warden in 1805. He and his wife were buried in Damascus burying-ground.

The house has a Greek Revival doorway, added around 1840 when the house appears to have been substantially renovated.

Trinity Episcopal Church, Branford (1852)

An Episcopal Society comprising Branford, Guilford and New Haven was established in 1748, but it was not until 1784 that Episcopalians in Branford legally organized Trinity Parish and erected a church, completed in 1786. This original church, a wooden structure without a steeple, was used until a new church was constructed just southeast of the old one. The cornerstone was laid in April 1851 and the church was consecrated by Bishop Brownell on January 27, 1852. Trinity Episcopal Church was designed in the English Gothic style by Sidney Mason Stone of New Haven. Some of the church‘s original exterior decorative elements were removed over the years. In 1920, the outside walls were covered with white stucco as a protection. The stucco was replaced with long leafed southern pine in 1944. A parish hall was added next to the church in 1916. It served as an infirmary during the great influenza epidemic of 1918.