The house at 22 Main Street in East Hampton has a sign indicating it was the home of Franklin Ackley and was built c. 1872. This may be Franklin M. Ackley (1842-1922) who died in East Hampton and is buried in East Haddam.
The house at 25 Barton Hill Street in East Hampton was built circa 1765. The gambrel-roofed house has three dormer windows that were added in the nineteenth century. It is not known who built the house, but in 1807 the property was acquired by William Barton (1762-1849), who was the father of bell manufacturing in East Hampton (which became known as Belltown, U.S.A.). The Bevin Brothers, who were apprentices in Barton’s shop, later started their own bell factory in town, which is still in business today. The house remained in the Barton family until 1953. As related in Historic Towns of the Connecticut River Valley (1906), by George S. Roberts:
The prosperity and industrial spirit of East Hampton was very largely due to William Barton, who was born in Windsor in 1762. William Barton, the father, was a captain in Colonel Flower’s Regiment of Artillery Artificers, in the Revolution and his son William was with him as assistant. He learned his trade from his father, who was armorer in Springfield in the Revolutionary War. At the close of the war, William returned to Wintonbury, in Windsor, and made pistols and other arms. In 1790, he went to New York and started the manufacture of articles made of brass, especially andirons. He remained there for eighteen years and in 1808, went to East Hampton where he made hand bells and sleigh bells. William Barton was a man of broad mind, who loved his fellow man. He was never so happy as when benefiting others and improving the condition of the community in which he lived and worked. He taught his trade to others and it was not long before East Hampton became a thriving and prosperous community. In 1826, Mr. Barton went to Cicero, New York, where his happy influence was strongly felt. In 1846, he returned to his old home in East Hampton to spend the remaining years of his life, surrounded by his children and the friends and neighbors who honored and loved him. His death occurred, after a long life of usefulness, in 1849.
At the corner of Depot Hill Road and Old Middletown Road in the village of Cobalt in East Hampton is a building erected as a store about 1871. The Mansard-roofed structure was built by three brothers, Russell E., James N. and Rufus D. Tibbals, whose family had owned a store in the area since the late 1840s. The new store, which also contained the Cobalt Post Office, may have been built to take advantage of the opening in 1873 of “The Air Line” railroad, which had a station in Cobalt. The Tibbals also owned factories that manufactured oakum (used for caulking wooden ships), a businesses started by their father, Thaddeus, in 1828. The brothers initially leased the store building to Charles A. Bailey and Francis Kinner, who sold groceries and dry goods. In the early twentieth century, the store was owned and operated by Arthur S. Bailey. After 1940, the building was converted from commercial use into a private residence.
A fairly late example of a Federal style residence, the house at 8 Keighley Pond Road in Middle Haddam was built in 1835 by James Hurlbut. He sold it two years later because he was already building a newer and larger house, just to the south at 2 Keighley Pond Road.
Harry Shepard (1794-1839) was the youngest son of Abel Shepard, a shipbuilder in Middle Haddam. Abel gave land to his three sons and Harry built a house on his allotment (now 119 Moodus Road) in 1825. The house is transitional between the Federal and Greeek Revival styles. It was inherited by his son, Charles, who had worked for a time as a tinsmith in Cobalt, and remained in the Shepard family until 1946.
The connected commercial structures at 73 Main Street in East Hampton, known as the Buckland Block, were begun in the 1870s and added to over the years. Leonard Willey, a local merchant, constructed the south store section in 1871 and mortgaged it to finance construction of the north section: a hall erected in 1876. The building was soon acquired by George Buckland and housed Buckland and Barton’s dry goods store, with the south building being used as a post office. Attached at the rear of the post office is an elevator tower, which gave easy access to the P.O. for D. A. Williams, whose patent medicine business was located in the rear annex. The hall was used for town meetings and once was the site of a murder trial. So many spectators attended that the floor began to give way and the trial had to be relocated.
Built in 1800, the Federal-style cape house at 111 Moodus Road in Middle Haddam was constructed (literally) by a shipbuilder, Abel Shepard, and his son, Abel Shepard, Jr. In 1804, father Abel sold it to son Abel, who moved to Cleveland, Ohio five years later. A later owner of the house was Patrick Daly, an Irish immigrant, who much altered the house in 1870, reinforcing the foundation with concrete, changing the roofline and adding the two dormer windows on the front facade.
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