Chief Henry J. Eaton House (1908)

A 3-story blue colonial revival-style house.

The house at 36 Magnolia Street in Hartford was built in 1908 and shortly thereafter became the final home of Henry J. Eaton, Hartford’s former fire chief (from 1868 to 1903), who died in 1922. You can read more about Chief Eaton in my Substack article about him, his white horse, and an 1897 film they appeared in together. I also have a piece about the Chief’s mysterious disappearance in 1876. For at least a few years after his death, his daughter Henrietta Alice Eaton resided in the house with her mother, who died in 1926. During this time, H. Alice Eaton continued two businesses out of the house that had been started by her parents: she carried on her mother’s work as an expert dyer and cleaner of fine clothing and her father’s role as a fire extinguisher agent. You can read more about her and these businesses in my recent Substack article.

Thomas B. Chapman House (1895)

The Post-Chapman House, a two-story Colonial Revival-style residence that the Hartford Courant described in 1895 as painted yellow with white trim and is still painted those colors today.

The house at 706 Prospect Avenue in Hartford was built in 1895 for businessman Thomas B. Chapman (1859-1904), a grandson of Episcopal Bishop Thomas Church Brownell. As the Hartford Courant reported on July 24, 1895: “The house was built from plans prepared by W. F. Becker, Edward O’Neil was the contractor, Olds & Whipple did the plumbing and Walter F. Blake did the decorating. The house cost about $9,000.” Chapman initially rented the house to his father-in-law, William H. Post (1833-1899), a prominent Hartford merchant who sold carpets, curtains, and wallpaper. Post passed away in 1899 and Chapman was living in the house at the time of his own death in 1904. His widow, Helen Post Chapman (1860-1941), continued to reside in the house into the 1920s. Her memoir, My Hartford in the Nineteenth Century, was published in 1928. To learn more about the house and about a dramatic explosion in 1919 that destroyed its kitchen, read my Substack article: https://oldhartford.substack.com/p/when-an-explosion-destroyed-a-hartford?r=4j8x6h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Asa S. Cook House (1870)

On 20 Charter Oak Place in Hartford is a three-story mansard-roofed Second Empire-style brick house erected in 1870. The entrance to the house is on the south side while the street-facing side has a two-story bay window above which is a pyramidal roof. The house was the residence of Asa S. Cook (1823-1916), a manufacturer who invented several machines for making wood screws. Born in Sandwich, New Hampshire, Cook learned the machinist’s trade while working in the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts. He came to Hartford in 1850 and worked for a time in the Colt Armory before establishing his own business in 1858. It was incorporated as the Asa S. Cook Company in 1896. In addition to wood screw and bolt machines and various wooden machine parts, the company‘s plant also for a time manufactured Stephen’s patent Parallel Vice.

In the early twentieth century the house was divided into apartments. Although it was later restored to be a single-family dwelling again, by the early 2000s it had fallen into disrepair. After 2013 the house was lovingly restored and modernized by the Lotstein family.

Schwab-Cook House (1870)

The Italianate-style double house at 22-24 Charter Oak Place in Hartford was erected c. 1869-1871 by Joseph Schwab (1826-1914), an insurance agent, who lived at No. 24. His father Jacob Schawb served in Napoleon’s army and survived the disastrous invasion of Russia, although he never recovered the full use of one of his legs that had been frozen during the Moscow Campaign. Jacob later emigrated to America and became a butcher in New York. His son Joseph Schawb was born in Gruenstadt, Germany. In his youth he worked as a manager for a mercantile house in Bühl, just south of Baden-Baden and during that time supported the German revolutionaries of 1848. He arrived in New York at the age of twenty-eight and worked for a German banking house in the city before joining a dry goods and millinery business in Hartford. When that partnership dissolved in 1877, he went into the insurance business, only retiring in 1912, two years before his death at the age of eighty-eight. In addition to building up a large fire and life insurance writing business, Schawb served as manager for New England of the Germania Life Insurance Company of New York. For forty years he also served as the first president of the Ladies’ Deboarh Society of Hartford, which raised funds to build the 1886 Deborah Chapel at Beth Israel Cemetery in Hartford, a building that was recently demolished. For thirty-seven years he also served on the city’s High School committee, being treasurer for eighteen terms. During that time another building which has since been demolished, the Gothic-style Hartford Public High School, was erected on Hopkins Street.

House at 16 Charter Oak Place, Hartford (1894)

According to the nomination for the Charter Oak Place National Historic District, the house at 16 Charter Oak Place in Hartford was erected in 1894 for Philemon Robbins, a furniture manufacturer, but Robbins had passed away in 1890. In the 1830s he was a partner with Isaac Wright and Joseph Winship in Isaac Wright & Company, one of Hartford’s leading furniture companies. After Wright’s death in 1838 his partners formed Robbins & Winship, which became Robbins Brothers in 1878.

The house’s first story is brick, with its upper two stories being shingled. There is a Palladian window in the upper story’s triangular gable.

The ninth chimney fire was added to the fire department list yesterday, when the headquarters chemical company answered a telephone call just after noon to the house of Mananger Norman McD. Crawford of the street railway, at No: 16 Charter Oak Place. The chimney burned Itself out and no damage was done.

Hartford Courant, February 14, 1901

Hartford Hospital: Brownstone Building (1923)

One of the older buildings on the campus of Hartford Hospital is the Brownstone Building, located at 79 Retreat Avenue. It opened in November, 1923 as the hospital’s Women’s Building, with a focus on maternity care. It was designed by Carl J. Malmfeldt of Hartford and was the subject of an article, “The Women’s Building of the Hartford Hospital, Hartford Conn.” by L. A. Sexton, MD, that appeared in Modern Hospital, Vol. XXII, No. 5 (May, 1924). The builders were the R. F. Jones Company and its construction was the last time that stone was used from the famed brownstone quarries in Portland. Along the sidewalk next to the building is a fence with a cast iron gate that features the symbol of the Caduceus and the letters “HH.” The building has housed various departments of the hospital over the years, currently being home to the Adult Cystic Fibrosis Clinic and the Department of Dentistry. Long known as the Brownstone Ambulatory Care Services Building, it formerly housed the outpatient Brownstone Clinic, which recently moved to a new space on Jefferson Avenue and is now called Hartford Hospital Community Health.