In 1833, the Litchfield merchant Julius Deming had a Greek Revival style house built for his favorite daughter, Clarissa, on North Street. Clarissa Deming attended Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Female Academy and married Charles Perkins, a lawyer who had studied at Tapping Reeve’s Litchfield Law School. Their son, Julius Deming Perkins, inherited the house and doubled its original size. The home remained in the Perkins family into the 1920s.
The First National Bank of Litchfield began in 1814 as a branch of the Phoenix Bank of Hartford. Benjamin Tallmadge was one of its founding directors. Its impressive Federal style building on North Street was built in 1816. The bank was reorganized as the First National Bank of Litchfield in 1864 and remains the oldest continuosly operating business in Litchfield and the oldest nationally chartered bank in Connecticut.
In the late nineteenth century, Litchfield became a showplace for the Colonial Revival movement. Old houses were restored and new ones constructed in the Colonial Revival style. One such home is the Charles Deming House on North Street, built in 1900. The architect was E. K. Rossiter and the house was built for Charles Deming, a grandson of Julius Deming, whose house is also on North Street.
The oldest surviving commercial structure in Litchfield is the Apothecary Shop of Dr. Reuben Smith. Built in 1781, the Apothecary Shop was formerly located next to his house on North Street, but in 1812 was moved to its current location north of the Green, to become Luke Lewis‘s grocery shop. It has served various commercial purposes over the years.
The Timothy Skinner House, built around 1785-87, is located next to the First Congregational Church in Litchfield. Skinner was a Brigadier General of the militia and served as constable, treasurer and selectman in Litchfield. The house was later owned for many years by Seth Beers. In 1948-49, the house was restored to a Colonial appearance and was moved back from the street to line up better with the church, which has owned the house and used it as a parsonage since 1943.
Built on South Street in Litchfield in 1877, when the Gothic Style was still popular, the Buell-Cook House survived the early twentieth-century Colonial Revival transformation of the town, although the home is now painted a Colonial Revival influenced white, rather than its original dark colors. The house was originally a duplex, but in 1982, it was converted for use by a single family.
The house built by Elisha Sheldon, on North Street in Litchfield in 1760, is commonly known as Sheldon’s Tavern, because it served as one in the late eighteenth century. There is a tradition that George Washington slept in the house. In 1795, the house’s then owner, Uriah Tracy, hired builder William Sprats to add the central pavilion and Palladian window, which resemble those of the house Sprats designed for Julius Deming across the street. Tracy was a US Congressman and Senator. His son-in-law, James Gould, was the partner of Tapping Reeve at the Litchfield Law School and continued running it after Reeve’s death. The Tavern, also once known as the Gould House, is notable for having shingles rather than the clapboards typical in the eighteenth century.
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