Guilford

The William Redfield House, at 96 Broad Street in Guilford, has been much altered over the years. William Redfield sold it three years after it was built. For a time the house was the residence of Rev. Daniel Brewer, who was dismissed as pastor of the Fourth Congregational Church in 1775 but chose to live in this house, then located next door to the church, until he left Guilford in 1779. Nelson Hotchkiss, a New Haven builder and contractor, bought the house in 1872. He moved it back from the street and it was probably Hotchkiss who also converted it to a two-chimney, center-hall house and added a Second Empire front porch. In 1974, the house became a furniture showroom, but has recently been restored.

The Nathaniel Eliot House, built in 1755, is located at 103 Whitfield Street in Guilford. Nathaniel Eliot was a farmer. He married Beulah, daughter of Joseph Parmelee, in 1754. Their daughter, Mary, married Israel Halleck, a tailor from Duchess County, New York. Their son was Fitz-Greene Halleck, the prominent nineteenth-century poet. As related in an obituary of the poet that appeared in Putnam’s Magazine (Vol. I, No. 2, February, 1868):

His father, Israel Halleck, who followed the calling of a tailor, was an emigrant from Dutchess County, New York. He died at Guilford in 1830, at the age of eighty-four; and is remembered in the village as a man fond of books, a great reader, of extraordinary memory, full of wit and anecdote, and of most courteous manners. The poet’s mother, Mary, daughter of Nathaniel Eliot, of Guilford, a lady of irreproachable worth, was a descendant of the Rev. John Eliot, the venerable “Apostle of the Indians.” She was married in her thirtieth year, and died in 1819, at the age of fifty-seven.