At 78 Atwoodville Road, in the Atwoodville (formerly East Mansfield) section of Mansfield, is a house built in 1778 by Arad Simons. Born in 1754, he married Bridget Arnold in 1775. Arad Simons was in the Connecticut Marine Service and was later a civil engineer. The house has had many owners over the years, including Elisha Fenton (1774-1864), a blacksmith, and his wife, Philata Storrs, whose family lived there in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Possibly built by Edwin Fitch, the Hartung-Trumbull House in Mansfield Center dates to around 1835. John Hartung, wagon-maker and town postmaster, owned the property until 1845. From 1859 to 1894, it was the home of Eunice M. Swift Trumbull, wife of William Trumbull. The Catalog of the Officers and Students of Talladega College, published in 1905, lists “The Eunice M. Swift Trumbull Scholarship of $500, established in 1895, by devise of Mrs. Trumbull, of Mansfield, Conn.” Talladega College, in Talladega, Alabama, is that state’s oldest historically black private liberal arts college, founded in 1867.
The oldest surviving house in Mansfield Center is the Williams-Salter House, built around 1711. It was first the home of Rev. Eleazer Williams, Mansfield’s first settled minister and the son of Rev. John Williams, who was famously taken to Canada, along with five of his children, after the Raid on Deerfield in 1704 (Eleazer was away at school at the time). Eleazer Williams resided in the house until his death in 1742. He was succeeded as minister by Rev. Richard Salter, who married Williams’ daughter Mary in 1744 and purchased the privately-owned parsonage in 1745. Rev. Salter and his brother, John Salter, who also settled in Mansfield, were from a prominent Boston family. Richard Salter, one of the most respected ministers in Connecticut, served in Mansfield until his death, in 1787. The property also has a notable English-style barn.
The Fitch House is a Greek Revival home in Mansfield Center, built in 1836, which is now a bed & breakfast. The house was built by the architect and builder, Col. Edwin Fitch, who was hoping to impress his father-in-law, Dr. Jabez Adams and launch his career. Fitch later designed the Second Congregational Church in Coventry. Bankrupt by 1843, Fitch sold half of the house to Edmund Golding, who bought the entire house in 1848. Golding, who died in 1854, and Lewis D. Brown, who bought the house in 1865, were both Mansfield silk manufacturers. In 1906, the house was acquired by Carrie Amidon Havens, who later married Oliver Perry, a descendant of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry. They enlarged the house, adding wings with porches on either side. The property also has two connected English-style historic barns.
The Prince Aspinwall House is on Centre Street in Mansfield Center. It was either built or enlarged by Aspinwall when he acquired the property in 1761. Aspinwall father, Peter Aspinwall, was from Woodstock and his mother, Rebecca Storrs, was the daughter of one of Mansfield’s original proprietors. From 1794 to 1799, the house was the residence of the Rev. Elijah Gridley, third pastor of Mansfield’s First Congregational Church. In the nineteenth century, a Gothic gabled front entrance was added, but this was later removed and two large dormer windows took its place.
The Congregaional Church in Storrs began as a the Second Ecclesiastical Society of Mansfield, separating from the First Congregational Church in Mansfield Center in 1737. The first meeting house was constructed in 1745-1746 at what is now the corner of North Eagleville Road and Route 195. A later church, built in the 1840s, replaced it and can be seen in many old photos of Storrs. The church was designed by builder-architect Edwin Fitch. It was here that the Second Commencement for the Storrs Agricultural School (which became the University of Connecticut) was held in 1883. That church was replaced by the current brick church, built in 1927. This church was built at the same location as its predecessors, in what was then the center of the campus. At the same time, UCONN purchased the Dunham Memorial Carillon and, not having a suitable tower to place it in, installed it in the church.
Rev. Daniel Welch, minister from 1751 to 1782 of Mansfield’s North Society Church (now the Storrs Congregational Church), constructed a house on the Old Turnpike in Mansfield, on land he had purchased in 1755. As this parsonage was his own property (not the church’s), it was passed to his children, eventually becoming the home of his son and successor as minister, Rev. Moses Cook Welch, who had earlier studied law and became known as a great ecclesiastical lawyer. When the original house burned in 1812, it was replaced by the current building. In 1825, when Moses Welch died, his son, the prominent physician Dr. Archibald Welch of Wethersfield, sold the house and farmland out of the family. The property has had a number of owners and was was bought, in 1906, by Martin Hibbard Parker, who had married Edna Mason, a daughter of Charles Mason. The house was restored in the 1990s.
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