The Amos Hollister House at 58-60 Tryon Street in South Glastonbury, built in about 1725 (or perhaps as early as 1695) for a member of the prominent Hollister family, maintains many of its original features, including its saltbox form.
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The house at 120 High Street in South Glastonbury is listed as 118 High Street in the 1978 Historical and Architectural Survey of Glastonbury, where it is described as the John Killbourne House, built in 1740. A plaque on the house reads “Spar Mill, Est. 1740.” Feldspar was quarried in the area in the early twentieth century and the nearby house at 9 Tryon Street is believed to have once been the mill’s office.
The building at 9 Tryon Street in South Glastonbury may have been built as early as 1720. Around that time Thomas Hollister and Thomas Welles started a saw mill on the east side of nearby Roaring Brook. The mill was linked to the shipbuilding industry in the area at the time. By the mid-eighteenth century this early operation had developed into what was known as the “Great Grist mill at Nayaug.” The house at 9 Tryon Street may have been the bake house associated with that mill that is mentioned in a 1783 deed. According to one source, the Welles-Hollister grist mill and bake oven on Roaring Brook at Nayaug was completely destroyed in the great flood of 1869 and the mill had to be rebuilt on the northwest side of the bridge over Roaring Brook at the foot of High Street. Later, in the early twentieth century, there was a feldspar mill on the east side of the brook and the building at 9 Tryon Street may have served as the mill office of owner Louis W. Howe and then as housing for a spar mill worker’s family. Howe sold the house c. 1928 to Mrs. Aaron Kinne, who had the interior remodeled c. 1940 to designs by restoration architect Norris F. Prentice. It was remodeled a second time in 2002.
The house at 171 Ferry Lane in South Glastonbury was built circa 1850 by James Lyman Kellam (1824-1897), a farmer, on land his father, James Kellam (1789-1878), had acquired in 1816. It is a Greek Revival-style house with a later nineteenth-century front porch. In 1893, James Lyman Kellam took over the job of keeping the system of kerosene lamps along the shore of the Connecticut River that guided ships to the correct channel at a challenging location where the river bends. After his death, two of his sons who lived in the house took over the job: Arthur Lyman Kellam (1873-1936), who was the official light keeper, and Walter Bulkeley Kellam (1863-1958), who became assistant keeper in 1905. For decades, Walter Kellam, who was blind, would make his way down a narrow catwalk every night to light the oil lamps. On May 31, 1931, the Hartford Courant had a profile of Walter Kellam (“Blind, He Lights the Way for Others: For Past 25 Years, Walter Kellam Has Tended River Beacons At South Glastonbury”), in which he describes lighting the lamps during a blizzard in 1926 and during the flood of 1927. Near the house is a historic barn which today is part of Horton Farm. The farm also has a number of historic tobacco sheds.
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Around the time of his first marriage in 1732, Joseph Stevens (1711-1801) erected the house at 1212 Main Street in Glastonbury on land he had inherited from his father, Rev. Timothy Stevens. Around 1982, the original gambrel roof slope of the front façade was raised to two full stories, but the rear of the house still maintains a gambrel roof profile. The house remained in the Stevens family until 1804 and was later owned by Dr. John Wheat (1779-1831).
The house at 78 Ferry Lane in Glastonbury, near the Connecticut River, was built c. 1800 (with a much later rear addition). It is traditionally thought to have been a home of the Tryon family and it has been speculated that it might have been the home of Thomas Tryon, a ship’s carpenter, who is known to have lived in the neighborhood. He was master carpenter for the sloop Mary, built at a nearby shipyard in 1808.
The house at 1200 Main Street in Glastonbury was built c. 1770 by Samuel Rice. His niece, Anna Cornwall (1778-1855), ran a school for girls in the house in the nineteenth century. She was the daughter of Nathaniel Cornwall, who operated a textile mill in Chatham. A number of nineteenth century samplers survive that share characteristics indicating they were all produced by Miss Cornwall’s students.
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