The building which now houses the Middle Haddam Public Library was originally built as a store by Cyrus Bill and Daniel Tracy. Tracy was a master carpenter who also owned a shipyard. He soon left the partnership and was replaced by Seth Overton. The gambrel-roofed structure continued as a commercial establishment until 1825 and then became a residence. In 1908, it was donated by Delia Rounds to the library committee.
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Edward M. Simpson, who lived in Middle Haddam at Knowles Landing, was a steamboat captain and pilot on the Connecticut River in the mid-nineteenth century. His daughter, Harriet M. Brainerd, was married to Edward R. Brainerd, a marble dealer in Chicago. The couple built a summer house near her father’s home in Middle Haddam in 1886. At the time, Knowles Landing was a destination for tourists and steamboats would dock at the landing. Harriet Brainerd built a Steamboat Dock House in the early 1890s to replace an earlier structure, built in the 1860s. Later used as a residence, this boat house burned down in the 1980s, but the Queen Anne-style Harriet M. Brainerd House (pdf) survives, displaying Victorian-era features, like the decorative stickwork on the front veranda. (more…)
As requested, the octagon house built for Henry S. Smith in 1855 is located at the dead end of Bevin Boulevard in East Hampton. Smith was the son of Nathaniel C. Smith, who represented his town six times in the Connecticut General Assembly and served as town clerk for twenty-five successive years. The house, which has a porch and a later ell, has been owned by the Clark family since around 1900.
The Deming Sexon House is an octagon house on Middletown Avenue in East Hampton. The house appears to have two floors in the picture above, but on the other side the house’s basement is exposed and has windows, revealing that it actually has three floors. Deming Sexton was an East Hampton bell manufacturer.
Joseph Parke was a cooper who moved from Groton to Middle Haddam in 1758, when the community was still developing into what would become an important shipbuilding port on the Connecticut River. One of Parke’s sons built an asymmetrical saltbox house at Knowles Landing in 1770. After the Revolutionary War, it was occupied by Chauncey Buckley, a wealthy merchant and owner of privateers during the war.
St. Patrick’s Church in East Hampton began as the Mission of East Hampton in 1857, with the first church building being constructed in 1869. The current church, located half a mile east of the first building, was dedicated in 1897 and a rectory was built in 1901. Originally served by St. Mary’s Church in Portland, St. Patrick Parish was set apart from Portland in 1900.
A succession of Congregational Church buildings have stood on the same spot in East Hampton. The congregation was established in 1746 as the Third Society of East Middletown (the Second Society was in Middle Haddam, now the Second Congregational Church of East Hampton). East Middletown later became Chatham, which later became the towns of Portland and East Hampton. The first church building was constructed in 1755 and the second a century later. This church was destroyed by fire in 1941 and the current church, built in the same Greek Revival style as its predecessor, was completed in 1948.
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