The Isaac Tucker House is one of only a few to have survived the burning of Fairfield by British forces on July 7, 1779. The house was built in 1766, two years after Tucker married Mary Wakeman in 1764. Tradition holds that a servant, hiding upstairs, put out the flames and saved the house from destruction. There are still burn marks inside from the attempted torching. The house was later owned by Edmund Hobart, who served as postmaster in Fairfield in the mid-nineteenth century.
Moorlands is the name of the circa 1836 house that was the Fairfield home of Henry Sheaff Glover, who also resided in New York City. In later years, after their father’s death, Dawson Coleman Glover, married Elizabeth Fowler (1913) and Harriet Coleman Glover married Gardner Willard Millett (1914). Their brother, John Le Roy Gover, attended Yale in 1914-1916. The house, at 290 Beach Road, was built on the site of the Buckley Tavern, built around 1740-1750. According to Benson J. Lossing’s Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution, vol. I (1851), when the British forces of Major General William Tryon landed and burned Fairfield in 1779, the Buckley Tavern was saved:
Tryon made it his head-quarters. The naval officer who had charge of the British ships, and piloted them to Fairfield, was Mrs. Buckley’s brother, and he had requested Tryon to spare the house of his sister. Tryon acquiesced, and, feeling his indebtedness to her brother, the general informed Mrs. Buckley that if there was any other house she wished to save she should be gratified. After the enemy left, the enraged militia, under Captain Sturges, placed a field piece in front of the dwelling, and then sent Mrs. Buckley word that she might have two hours to clear the house, and leave it, or they would blow her to atoms. She found means to communicate a notice of her situation to General Silliman, who was about two miles distant. He immediately went to the town, and found one hundred and fifty men at the cannon. By threats and persuasion he induced them to withdraw. The next day Colonel Benjamin Tallmadge, with his regiment, arrived from White Plains, and, encamping on the smoking ruins, made Tryon’s quarters his own
Observing the Buckley House not long before it was replaced, John Warner Barber wrote in his Connecticut Historical Collections (1836) that:
At the time of the invasion of the British, a 24 pound shot which was fired from Black Rock, entered the chimney. In the entrance at the door, are still to be seen the marks of twenty seven bullets, on the stair way. The heat was so great during the conflagration, that all the window glass in front of this house were broken.
Penfield Reef Light, built in 1874, was one of the last masonry residence and tower lighthouses on a masonry foundation to be built in the United States, a design that was being replaced at the time by cast iron towers. The lighthouse is on the south side of Black Rock Harbor, at one end of a dangerous reef that extends to the southwest from Fairfield Beach into Long Island Sound. The reef, one of the most treacherous areas of the Sound, had earlier been marked by a can buoy, but increased commercial traffic in the area after the Civil War led to the construction of the lighthouse. The mansard-roofed design of Penfield Reef Light was also used fo several other lighthouses, like Sabin Point Light on the Providence River in Rhode Island. In 1969, the Coast Guard planned to replace the lighthouse with a steel tower, but a public outcry prevented this from happening. The Light was automated in 1971 and is still an active aid to navigation. In 2008, Beacon Preservation‘s bid to assume ownership of the lighthouse was approved under a program of the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act.
Fairfield‘s First Church Congregational has had six successive church buildings, the third having been destroyed when the British burned Fairfield in 1779 and the fifth burned down, apparently due to an arsonist, the night before Memorial Day in 1890. As described by Frank Samuel Child in An Old New England Church (1910):
The first Meeting-House was a small, rude building made of logs and rough hewn timbers, probably erected in 1640. Town meetings as well as church services were held in it. The second Meeting-House was built in 1765—a larger and more comfortable structure —a frame building forty feet square clapboarded, and a tower in the center of the roof. The third Meeting-House was reared in the year 1745—sixty feet in length, forty-four feet in breadth, twenty-six feet in height, with a spire one hundred and twenty feet. The Rev. Andrew Eliot called it an “elegant Meeting-House.” The fourth Meeting-House was modeled after the one destroyed in 1779. The congregation worshipped in it for the first time March 26th, 1786, but it was forty-two years before it was properly finished—a fact which suggests the slow recovery of the people from the losses of the American Revolution. A part of the funds came from the town and the confiscated property of traitors and a part from the subscriptions of the people. The Meeting-House erected in 1849 was the first one that came as the result of voluntary offerings. More than eight thousand dollars was raised for this Romanesque structure. The length of it was ninety-five feet and its breadth forty-seven. The spire extended to the height of one hundred and thirty feet. The seating capacity of this handsome Meeting-House was five hundred and fifty persons. The later changes adapted the structure to the needs of the day—a chapel being added during the pastorate of Dr. McLean and the church parlors when Dr. Bushnell was pastor.
The current church was completed in 1892 and has Tiffany windows.
The Old Town Hall in Fairfield was built in 1794 as a county courthouse, replacing its predecessor, built in 1769 and burnt by the British in 1779. That structure had replaced the earliest courthouse in town, built in 1720. According to the Centennial Commemoration of the Burning of Fairfield, Connecticut (1879), the 1769 building “had only recently been erected in place of one standing before where Mr. Hobart’s store now stands. A noted thief named Fraser, confined in the jail then connected with it, had set that building on fire on the 4th of April, 1768. Hence had come the rebuilding, and the erection of a separate prison which was located where St. Paul’s church now stands.” The 1794 building also served as the Town Hall and in 1870, it was aggrandized by being converted into the Second Empire style. In the late 1930s, the building was again remodeled and restored to a Federal-style appearance by local architect Cameron Clark, with two new wings added on either side. Town offices moved out when a new building, Independence Hall, was completed in 1979.
The Burr Homestead, on the Old Post Road in Fairfield, is a mansion built in 1790 by Thaddeus Burr (pdf) a wealthy landowner and uncle of Aaron Burr. It replaced the original Burr Mansion, built in 1732, which stood on the same site. In that earlier house, in 1775, Burr‘s friend John Hancock had married Dorothy Quincy, whose father was also an old friend of Thaddeus Burr. The old mansion was burned in the British raid on Fairfield in 1779, in spite of the pleas of Burr’s wife, Eunice, who even had the silver buckles stolen from her shoes by British soldiers. According to A general history of the Burr family in America (1878), by Charles Burr Todd:
A few weeks after the burning, Gov. Hancock paid his old friend a visit, and while they were surveying the ruins, he remarked to Mr. Burr that he must rebuild, and offered to furnish the glass needed, provided he would build a house precisely like his own in Boston—not an inconsiderable gift, as all who have seen the Governor’s unique mansion, fronting on Boston Common, must admit. Mr. Burr accepted the offer, and built a house the exact counterpart of Mr. Hancock’s. The site of the mansion burned in 1779 is now occupied by the residence of Wm. Jones, Esq.
Gen. Gershom Burr inherited the new house, built by architect-builder Daniel Dimon, from his uncle Thaddeus, who died in 1801. The next owner, Obadiah W. Jones, remodeled and enlarged the mansion in the 1840s. As described in An Historic Mansion, Being an Account of the Thaddeus Burr Homestead, Fairfield, Connecticut, 1654-1915 (1915), by Frank S. Child, the alterations included, “taking out the dormer windows and lifting the roof, taking away the porch and building the broad veranda with its lofty massive fluted columns.” The mansion had other owners over the years. Now owned by the Town of Fairfield and managed by the Fairfield Museum and History Center, the Burr Homestead has restored gardens and the house can be rented for events.
Sun Tavern, on the Fairfield Green, was built about 1780, replacing an earlier Sun Tavern, burnt during the British raid of 1779. The Tavern was operated by Samuel Penfield, who acquired the property in 1761. George Washington stayed at the Tavern the night of October 16, 1789, during a presidential tour of New England. The building, which had an early ballroom on the third floor, remained a tavern until Penfield’s death in 1811, after which it passed through several owners as a private home. It was purchased by Robert Manuel Smith in 1885 and remained in the Smith family until 1977. The following year, it was acquired by the Town of Fairfield and was used as the Town Historian’s residence into the early 1990s. Still owned by the town, Sun Tavern has been recently restored and is now managed as a historic site by the Fairfield Museum and History Center.
You must be logged in to post a comment.