As featured yesterday, J. Merrick Bragg, a prominent East Hartford builder, and Horatio Hardendorf, a Hartford resident, developed four adjacent lots on Olmstead Street in East Hartford, each quit-claiming two of the four properties to the other in 1890. Hardendorf took the two central houses, while Bragg took the two outer ones, 85 Olmstead Street and 95 Olmstead Street (pictured above). He sold No. 85 immediately and No. 95 a year later in 1891 to Charles T. Holland of Boston, who briefly lived in East Hartford.
The house at 91 Olmstead Street in East Hartford was on one of four lots developed by J. Merrick Bragg, a prominent builder in town, and Horatio Hardendorf, a Hartford resident. In 1890 Bragg and Hardendorf split the properties, with Hardendorf taking 91 Olmstead Street and its neighbor to the west and Bragg taking the other two (85 and 95 Olmstead Street), flanking Hardendorf’s houses. Bragg quickly sold his houses, but Hardendorf held on to his for a while as properties to rent out. In 1895 he sold 91 Olmstead Street to William H. Wickham, a clerk.
According to An Architectural History of East Hartford, Connecticut (1989), edited by Doris Darling Sherrow, page 12, the house at 58 Central Avenue in East Hartford was long thought to be a Colonial Revival home built in a neighborhood that was developed in the nineteenth century. A restoration in 1987 revealed it was actually an eighteenth century building, albeit with unusual features for a colonial house in the East Hartford area: it is four bays rather than the usual five and has a double overhang and a side chimney. The house now sits on a brick foundation, typical of the nineteenth century, indicating that it was moved from elsewhere in town to the newly opened Central Avenue. When Edward W. Hayden (1840-1879) acquired the lot where the house now stands from his parents in 1870, period documentation reveals that he had already moved some buildings to the site. Hayden was a Civil War veteran, known for the diary he kept during the conflict. He lived at 1871 Main Street and rented out the house he had moved to Central Avenue. The house is thought to be the Hezekiah Roberts House (built by Hezekiah’s grandfather Benjamin), because Hayden had bought part of the Roberts estate off Main Street. Another house Hayden owned, that stood next to the Roberts House, was the home of his grandfather, Rev. Eliphalet Williams. That house was demolished early in the twentieth century, but its original Connecticut River Valley doorway is now at the Connecticut Historical Society.
The Roberts House began on Main Street with a structure that later became the ell of the later main house. That main house was built circa 1760 and is the one later moved by Hayden to Central Avenue. The Roberts House is described in Joseph O. Goodwin’s East Hartford: Its History and Traditions (1879):
[Benjamin Roberts] lived on the Hezekiah Roberts place. He brought up his family in the rear L of that house, which is very old and has a vast chimney. He afterwards built his main house, with a cellar having unusually solid walls, and a staircase down which hogsheads of rum could be, and probably were, rolled, for some of our citizens were West India traders in those days.
The similarly designed houses at 69 and 75 Olmsted Street in East Hartford were both built as rental properties about 1890 by Herbert S. Keeney, who probably did not himself reside in town. He later sold the house at #69 to Louise K. Seymour and owned #75 (pictured above) until the 1920s.
At 80 Central Avenue in East Hartford is a Queen Anne-style house. Its original facade now lies behind the later additions of a two-story entry porch and an octagonal bay and porch. The house was erected in 1891 on a property that R.W. Roberts, who owned several lots on Central Avenue, had sold to Daniel W. Green in 1889. Green, born in 1857 and originally from Sumner, Oxford County, Maine, was a contractor and builder. According to Vol. I of the Commemorative Biographical Record of Hartford County, Connecticut (1901):
Daniel W. Green was educated in the common schools of his native district, also at the South Paris (Maine) High School, and after leaving school, at the age of sixteen years, on account of weakened eyes brought about by typhoid fever, he worked in various mills until about 1882, when he went to Crescent City, Putnam Co., Fla. There he learned the carpenter’s trade, worked there five years, and then returned to Connecticut, worked one year for Cheney Brothers, in Manchester, next moved to East Hartford worked for W. J. Driggs, contractor and builder, for nine years, and in 1896 began contracting and building on his own account, in which he has met with success—a success due to his pains-taking endeavor to please his patrons. On Sept. 19, 1883, Mr. Green married Miss Emma F. Wetherell, a native of South Manchester, born April 27, 1861 [. . . .]
To the marriage of Daniel W. Green and wife have been born two children: Ernest Carlton, in Crescent City, Fla., Sept. 8, 1886, and Marian Lucille, Oct. 28, 1888, in South Manchester. Mr. Green and his family attend the Congregational Church, of which Mrs. Green has long been a conscientious member. In politics Mr. Green is inclined to Democracy, but does not always cast his vote for that party; fraternally he is a member of Wadsworth Council, No. 39, O.U.A.M., of Manchester. Through his industry, skill, and industrious habits, Mr. Green has gained a comfortable home, which he built in 1891, on a lot purchased from Watson Roberts. He is a genial, whole-souled gentleman, and he and his wife, with their two bright children, form a happy family, greatly respected by all who know them.
Today, Olmsted Street, near the central business district of East Hartford, is in a very built-up area, but over a century ago tobacco was still grown in the immediate vicinity. According to An Architectural History of East Hartford, Connecticut (1989), edited by Doris Darling Sherrow, page 195, when James Mulligan (1848-1920), a railroad engineer from Waterbury, purchased the land where the house at 107 Olmsted Street stands today in 1893 from Henry G. Beaumont, the latter (who is listed in the 1885 Hartford County Directory as a farmer) reserved the right to continue growing his tobacco crop on the property until September 15 of that year or until it was harvested, whichever came first. The house that Mulligan, an immigrant from Glasgow, Scotland, erected and occupied until his death features a spindle rail porch with a starburst design at the front entryway.
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