Saint Luke’s Home for Destitute and Aged Women (1892)

135 Pearl Street, Middletown

The building at 135 Pearl Street at the corner of Lincoln Street in Middletown was built in 1892 as St. Luke’s Home for Destitute and Aged Women. The home had been established in 1865 and members of the Church of the Holy Trinity were instrumental in establishing the endowment. St. Luke’s Home was originally located in a house at the southwest corner of Court and Pearl Streets. A large legacy enabled the construction of the new building, which had quarters for fourteen women. A new wing addition was constructed and other alterations made in about 1925. In the 1970s the Home moved to new quarters behind the Rectory of the Church of the Holy Trinity and in 1981 the building on Pearl Street was converted into nine apartments.

Bethel Opera House (1860)

Bethel Opera House

The Opera House in Bethel, located at 186 Greenwood Avenue, was built in 1860 [or perhaps as early as 1848?] by Augustus A. Fisher, a hat manufacturer. It housed a hat factory on the first floor, with a public hall above known as Fisher’s Hall. After a fire damaged the roof in the late nineteenth century, it was replaced with the current broad-eaved roof with Italianate brackets. The building later became Nichols’ Opera House, named after John F. Nichols, who ran it as an entertainment complex, with theater, roller skating rink and billiards. After his death in 1918, Daniel Brandon used the lower floor of the building as a brush factory and showed silent movies upstairs in what was called the Barnum Theatre. In the 1930s and 1940s, it was called Leeja Hall and was used for town meetings and as a high school gym. Since that time, the building has been used by various businesses, with an art gallery and later a photography studio above and a restaurant below.

Joseph Stevens House (1732)

Joseph Stevens House, Glastonbury
Joseph Stevens House, Glastonbury

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).

John Gallup House (1837)

23 Gravel Street Mystic
23 Gravel Street Mystic

John Gallup, a carpenter-builder, may have erected the house he owned at 23 Gravel Street in Mystic. Built in 1837, the Greek revival-style house had alterations in the Italianate style in later years, but was restored to its original appearance in the 1970s. A house constructed by Gallup’s brother James, also a builder, is located nearby, at 32 Pearl Street.

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Unionville Museum (1917)

The building at 15 School Street in the Unionville section of Farmington was erected in 1917 as the town’s West End Library. Designed by Edward Tilton of New York, it was one of the many Carnegie libraries built throughout the country from the later nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Not used as a library since the 1960s, it has been home to the Unionville Museum since 1984.