Captain Elisha White House (1750)

Capt. Elisha White was born in Windsor in 1706. As recorded in the Memorials of Elder John White (1760), by Allyn S. Kellogg, “He settled early in Bolton, but removed to East Guilford, (now Madison,) Conn., about 1744, and thence to the adjoining town of Killingworth, about 1749. He lived in that part of Killingworth which is now Clinton, and was for a while engaged in mercantile business. He died there, probably about the year 1778.” In 1750 he purchased the land in Clinton on which he soon built a house, constructed of brick thought to have been brought from England by ship as ballast. Known as “Old Brick,” the house is now a museum, owned by the Clinton Historical Society.

George Eliot House (1783)

At 62 East Main Street in Clinton, is a house built in 1783 by George Eliot, a farmer and likely a descendent of John Eliot, the seventeenth-century Puritan missionary to the Indians of Natick, Massachusetts. In the 1770s and 1780s, George Eliot was chosen moderator for a number of important town meetings in Killingworth, of which Clinton was then a part. The house, which remained for generations in the Eliot family, was later moved back from the street line when land was given to the town to straighten the road. Around that time, the building’s large central chimney was removed, a front porch, since removed, was added, and the house was altered to the Greek Revival style.

Adam Stanton House (1789)

Adam Stanton moved from Rhode Island to Clinton during the Revolutionary War and operated a general store and salt distillery on his property. This land had earlier been the site of Reverend Abraham Pierson‘s house, built in 1694. It was there, from 1701 to 1707, that Rev. Pierson taught the first classes of the Collegiate School, which was later moved to Saybrook and then to New Haven, where it eventually became Yale University. Adam Stanton took down the Pierson House when he built his own house on the site in 1789-1791, using parts of the earlier structure in the construction of the new one. Today, the Stanton House is a museum of American antiques with almost all of the furnishings being original to the house.