Originally from Tolland, John B. Chapman (1799-1849) settled at Warehouse Point in East Windsor where he kept a store and later a lumber yard. He also served as postmaster. He built the brick Federal-style house at 115 Bridge Street in East Windsor c. 1820 (or 1848). He went to California during the Gold Rush and died at sea.
The Gothic Revival mansion with Italianate detailing at 36 Gardner Street at Warehouse Point in East Windsor was built in 1843 (or 1847) for Avah Gardner. The Gardener estate later became a Swedish orphanage and working farm. The property was acquired by the state in 1883 when the Connecticut General Assembly decided to create an orphanage/country home in each of its eight counties. The orphanage served children who had run away from home or were truant. Known as Gardner Hall or the Administration Building, the former mansion has two additions: a north wing built c. 1890 and a section on the east side added in 1921. The building originally had a tower which has since been removed. The state’s other county orphanages closed in 1955 except for the facility at Warehouse Point, which was renamed the State Receiving Home. It was later renamed the Connecticut Children’s Place, serving as a residential and educational center for abused and neglected children. Since 2013 has been the Albert J. Solnit Children’s Center- North Campus, a psychiatric treatment facility for juvenile males.
In 1790, Captain Samuel Stiles (1757-1813), a veteran of the Revolutionary War, erected the house at 169 Melrose Road in East Windsor. As catalogued in The Stiles Family in America: Genealogies of the Connecticut Family (1895), by Henry Reed Stiles:
Capt. Samuel Stiles left the sum of $1,000 to the Scantic Parish (East Windsor) as a fund for the support of the Gospel ministry in that parish. He was also a prominent Free Mason. The following are the inscriptions on his gravestone, and that of his wife, in the Ireland St. graveyard in E. W.:
“Capt | Samuel Stiles | died of a consumption | 9th of January A.D. 1813 | His name will ever be gracious to all who knew him, especially to the congregation with whom he habitually assembled for divine worship. As a tribute of gratitude and as a testimony of respect to his beloved memory this stone is raised by surviving friends to mark the place where his body rests in the silence of the grave.”
“Mrs. Jennet, wife of Capt. Samuel Stiles, died Feb; 20, 1824, ae 62, as a testimony of respect to her beloved memory this stone is raised to mark the spot where her body rests, till it shall arise at the call of him who conquered death.”
In the Hartford City and County atlas of 1869 the house is listed as the home of J. M. Stiles. Quoting again from The Stiles Family, John Morton Stiles was
born at East Windsor, Conn., Jan. 11, 1818; married Dec. 14, 1843, Julia Ann (daughter of Eli and Rocksalena Allen) Gowdy (born Feb. 5, 1819), of East Windsor. He was a farmer at Melrose, Conn., where he died, April 12, 1886.
The was later the Melrose post office for about four decades.
St. John’s Episcopal Church (pdf) was built in 1809 at Warehouse Point, a section of East Windsor which was undergoing economic development at the time. Some of the founders of the church included former members of the First Congregational Church of East Windsor, who had wanted a new church built and been tried and acquitted of the charge of arson after a fire had destroyed their meeting house. St. John’s was constructed on the Green at Warehouse Point, the work being supervised by builder-architect Samuel Belcher. The church was moved to its current location, at 96 Main Street, in 1844. Ten years later, Henry Austin of New Haven was hired to remodel the church in the Gothic style, work which was completed in 1855. While the exterior retains an early nineteenth-century appearance, it sharply contrasts with Austin’s later English Gothic interior.
The Fourth Ecclesiastical Society of Windsor, or North Society, was established in 1752 and a meetinghouse was soon built near the Scantic River. In the late 1790s, there were intense debates over the issue of enlarging the building. A decision was finally reached to expand the meetinghouse, but it burned down on April 20, 1802. There was then a violent contoversy and accusations of arson, but a new meetinghouse on the same site was soon completed. In 1768, East Windsor had separated from the town of Windsor and in 1845 South Windsor separated fom East Windsor. The Congregational church in the East Windsor Hill section of the new town of South Windsor had been the First Church of East Windsor, but then became the First Church of South Windsor, while the former North Society Church in the Scantic section of East Windsor became the First Church of East Windsor. The church‘s exterior walls were extended in 1842. That same year, interior floor space was also enlarged, when the the empty space between the balconies above the main floor was floored over, creating a new upper floor for religious services. The lower floor was later known as Library Hall, because the town’s public library was located there from 1907 to 1920.
The East Windsor Historical Society is headquartered in the brick East Windsor Academy, also known as the Scantic Academy (pdf), which was built in 1817 by the Academy Company, a group of stockholders. It originally had a cupola containing a school bell. The first floor served as a school until 1938, except for an period between 1871 and 1896, when it was owned by the First Congregational Church and used for various meetings. It was then used as a dwelling for a number of years and was converted into two apartments for teachers in the area in 1946 by L. Ellsworth Stoughton. He later donated, first, the upper floor for a museum in 1968 and then the entire building in his will to the Society.
According to Vol. 2 of The Memorial History of Hartford County (1886):
The Rev. William H. Turkington, who occupied the pulpit of the Methodist Church at Windsorville [now Windsorville United Methodist Church] in 1882, has kindly furnished the following brief record of its history : —
“The following sketch concerning the church in this place is taken from the minutes of the Methodist Episcopal Conference. The church was built in 1829 [at Thrall and Clark roads, moved to Windsorville Road in 1858]; the name of East Windsor first appears in 1829 ; the name of Ketch Mills in 1839; the name of Windsorville, in 1850. In 1876 the church was destroyed by fire. In 1878 [1877, according to the Souvenir History of the New England Southern Conference (1897)] the present church edifice was dedicated.”
A complete list of the men who in rotation have filled the pulpit of this church since its foundation in 1829 includes more than forty names. The present pastor [1886] is the Rev. H. M. Cole.
