Dr. Ernest A. Markham acquired a lot on Main Street in Durham in 1881 and by around 1885 his Victorian-style home was completed. Dr. Markham practiced medicince in an office in his home until his death in 1927. The house was owned by the Markham family until 1975.
The Reverend Elizur Goodrich was the second minister of Durham’s Congregational Church, from 1756 until his death in 1797. He was born in Rocky Hill in 1734 and was prepared for Yale by Rev. James Lockwood of Wethersfield. Rev. Goodrich would later prepare students for Yale himself, including Eli Whitney. Rev. Goodrich was a contemporary and supporter of Ezra Stiles, minister, theologian and educator, who was president of Yale from 1778 to 1795. Both men were among Connecticut’s intellectual leaders of the time. Elizur Goodrich the minister was the father of Elizur Goodrich the lawyer and politician. The minister’s house, on Main Street in Durham, was built in 1763. Around 1840, Goodrich’s heirs sold the house to Zebulon Hale and Enos Rogers, who ran a nearby store. Zebulon’s daughter, Olive, married Watson Davis, who replaced Rogers as his father-in-law’s partner in the store. The house remained in the Davis family well into the twentieth century.
James Wadsworth (1675-1756) was a lawyer from Farmington, who moved to Durham in 1707 with his wife, Ruth Noyes. Wadsworth, who became colonel of the Tenth Regiment of militia, also served as Town Clerk, Justice of the Peace, Speaker of House of the Colonial Assembly and Judge of the Superior Court. Wadsworth’s grandson later held the same offices: the Wadsworth family dominated local politics for eighty years. Col. Wadsworth’s house in Durham began as a single-story center-chimney house, built in 1708, and was expanded to two stories between 1720 and 1750.
Between 1771 and 1783, John Jones built a house overlooking the town green of Durham. In 1783, he sold it to Samuel Camp, Jr. (Col. Samuel Camp), who left it to his son Ebenezer upon his death in 1810. Ebenezer later leased rooms of the house from his son Charles, who died in 1828. Upon Ebenezer’s death in 1830, he left the house to another son, Samuel C. Camp. The house’s gable addition with the current main entrance was built sometime in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. In 1847, the house was sold to Horace Newton, a cloth-maker and farmer.
Durham‘s Greek-Revival Town Hall was built in 1847 to 1849 as the town’s South Congregational Church. When the town’s second meeting house burned in 1836, a split develeoped over where to build the new church. A new meeting house was eventually built again on the Green, but controversy recommenced when this third meeting house burned in 1844. One building, North Church, now Durham’s present United Church, was built north of Allyn’s Brook in 1847, while another meeting house, South Church, was built on the old site on the Green. The town’s two churches reunited in 1886 and South Church was later sold to the town for use as offices. With its steeple removed, the building now serves as Town Hall.
Located on an elevated lot, at the intersection of Madison and Higganum Roads in Durham, is the William Wadsworth House, built in 1848. Wadsworth was a farmer and a descendant of Col. James Wadsworth, one of the town’s most prominent citizens. William Wadsworth, who also served as town clerk and Justice of the Peace, sold the property to Angeline L. Scranton, although he continued to live in the house until his death in 1870. Scranton married Orrin Camp, of Oquawka, Illinois, in 1873 and sold the house before moving west. The fine Greek Revival-style house has been vacant and in a deteriorating condition for many years.
The James Curtiss House is a saltbox home on Maiden Lane in Durham. Curtiss purchased the land on which his house stands in 1722 and the house was built sometime between 1737 and 1761, when deeded half of his property to his son, Nathan Curtiss. Nathan was killed in the Revolutionary War in 1776 and his son, James, who inherited the property, was killed in an explosion at the gunpowder manufacturing mill he operated. His widow lived in the house until 1819, but his children migrated to New York and Michigan. In the 1820s, William H. Walkley bought out the shares of the various Curtiss inheritors.