Edward Hooker House (1811)

On High Street in Farmington is an 1811 Federal-style house built for Edward Hooker, a descendant of Thomas Hooker (Hartford’s first minister) and Samuel Hooker (Farmington’s second minister). Edward Hooker was a farmer and operated a small preparatory school for boys, called the “Old Red College,” in his parents old farmhouse in Farmington. He closed the school in 1816, when the town was planning to open its own academy in the village center. Deacon Edward Hooker’s daughter, Elizabeth, married Francis Gillette, a future senator. The house was inherited, after Edward Hooker’s death in 1846, by his son, John Hooker, a lawyer, who in 1841 had married Isabella Beecher Hooker, the younger half-sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe. The couple lived in Farmington until they moved to Hartford in the early 1850s, establishing the neighborhood of Nook Farm together with the Gillettes. The Farmington house remained in the Hooker family until it was sold in 1864.

John Hooker was an abolitionist. On Mill Lane in Farmington is Deming’s Store, where Hooker rented an office, next to a room used by the Africans from the Amistad during their stay in Farmington. John Hooker also helped the Rev. James Pennington, a former slave in Maryland who had escaped to Connecticut, attended Yale and become a Congregational minister. After the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1850, African-Americans living in the North who were still regarded as slaves in the southern states were in great danger. In 1851, Hooker legally purchased Pennington’s freedom from slavery from the estate of his former owner. Pennington wrote a book about his experiences, called The Fugitive Blacksmith, published in 1849. Later, influenced by his wife Isabella, Hooker became involved in the Women’s Suffrage Movement, presenting a bill in the state legislature making husbands and wives equal in property rights, which finally passed in 1877.

Hill-Stead (1901)

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Constructed between 1898 and 1901, the Pope Riddle House, centerpiece of the Hill-Stead estate in Farmington, was constructed as a retirement home for the industrialist and art collector Alfred Atmore Pope and his wife, Ada Lunette Brooks. It was designed by their daughter, Theodate Pope Riddle, working with Edgerton Swartout, an architect with the firm of McKim, Mead, and White. Gaining a valuable apprenticeship in architecture through this experience, she would go on to design many buildings over the next 30 years, including the 1920 reconstruction of the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace in New York and the Avon Old Farms School, which she founded.

Once described by Henry James as, “a great new house on a hilltop,” the Colonial Revival-style building combines various influences, from the traditional New England farm house to George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Various additions were made in the following years by Theodate Pope Riddle (who married diplomat John Wallace Riddle in 1916). She later inherited the house and left the estate to become a museum after her own death in 1946.

The museum showcases Alfred Pope’s art collection. Begun in the 1880s, it includes works on paper, Japanese woodblock prints, and Impressionist paintings by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Mary Cassatt and James M. Whistler. It was featured in the 1907 book, Noteworthy Paintings in American Collections, edited by John LaFarge and August Jaccaci.

Rev. Noah Porter House (1808)

The Rev. Noah Porter House (1808)

When the Reverend Noah Porter, minister of First Church in Farmington for sixty years, 1806-1866, married Mehitable Meigs in 1808, he built a brick house on Main Street. The children he and is wife “Hetty” would raise in the house included Dr. Noah Porter, Jr., a philosophical writer and president of Yale, and Sarah Porter, who founded Miss Porter’s School. In 1810, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the oldest society for foreign missions in the United States, was established in a meeting at the Porter House. The first missionaries would be sent overseas in 1812. In 1841, Margru, one of the three girls who survived from the Amistad, lived in the Porter House for eight months. Sarah Porter continued to live in the house after her father’s death in 1866, adding the third floor in the 1880s. (more…)

Asa Andrews House (1804)

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Asa Andrews was a tinsmith in Farmington whose Federal-style house on Main Street was probably built sometime after he purchased the land in 1804. Nearby stands his c. 1803 tin shop (which perhaps originally dates to the 1690s). After Andrews‘ death in 1831, his widow, Nancy Bidwell Andrews, ran a school for young children in the house. In the mid-nineteenth century, the house was owned by Deacon Simeon Hart, a teacher and headmaster at the Farmington Academy, who later ran his own boarding school in his home. Deacon Hart was the Farmington Savings Bank‘s first secretary and treasurer and the bank was originally located in his house. After his death, in 1853, the bank moved down Main Street to the home of Samuel Smith Cowles, its second Treasurer.