It is not known who built the house at 125 East Main Street in Clinton. Dating to around 1787, the house was in the Burnham family from the 1860s. Perhaps it was around that time that it acquired its later Gothic Revival decorative features.
The Williams Memorial institute opened as a high school for girls on Broad Street in New London in 1891. The school was privately endowed by a bequest from the estate of Harriet Peck Williams as a memorial to her son, Thomas W. Williams II, a mechant who died in 1855. After New London High School opened in 1951, the Institute became a college preparatory school. The Williams School moved to the campus of Connecticut College in 1954. The Richardsonian Romanesque-style former school building, designed by the firm of Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, became a courthouse of the Connecticut State Judicial system in 1972. The state purchased the building in 1997. It has recently been renovated.
Captain Job Camp built a house on Main Street in Durham in the eighteenth century, which later passed to his son, Manoah Camp and then to his grandson, Elizur Camp, both of whom were shoemakers. In 1861, this original house was given by Elizur Camp to his daughter, Susan E. Camp, who had married Francis Hubbard in 1857. They replaced the old house with a new one in 1862. Francis Hubbard was an owner of the Merriam Manufacturing Company. The house remained in the Hubbard family until it was sold to Frederick Brewster, a wealthy New Haven businessman who owned Brookfield Farm in Durham. Concerned about the fact that Durham did not have a resident physician, he rented the house to a series of doctors from 1928 to 1941.
As Rockville in Vernon developed as an urban center in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, known architects were sought to design prominent buildings. S.M. (or S.W.?) Lincoln of Hartford was the architect of the Citizens Block, a commercial building on the corner of Park Place and Elm Street, built in 1879 by John G. Bailey. In recent years, town officials have been seeking ways to revitalize the now dilapidated structure, ranging from sale to a developer to the use of federal funding. The building currently houses the Rockville Downtown Association.
In the early hours of September 6, 1781, Rufus Avery, on watch duty at Fort Griswold, was the first soldier to observe an approaching British fleet. This force, led by Brigadier General Benedict Arnold and Lieutenant Colonel Edmund Eyre, eventually stormed the Fort in what became known as the Battle of Groton Heights. Capt. Avery later lived in a house at 142 Thames Street in Groton, built for him in 1787 by Henry Mason, another former defender of Fort Griswold. Around 1800, Rufus Avery had a second house constructed next door for his two sons. That home is now known as the Avery-Copp House.
One of a number of Terry family houses in Simsbury is the Timothy Terry House at 90 Terry’s Plain Road. The house was built c. 1776-1778 by builder Job Case. The Greek Revival doorway, cornice and attic windows were added around 1840. The house has an ell that is said to have been used as a blacksmith shop in the nineteenth century.
St. Michael’s Lutheran Church in New Canaan was originally built as St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. The Anglican church in New Canaan originally met in a building on West Road, deeded to “professors of the Church of England” by a wealthy landowner in 1764. This was replaced by a new Episcopal church, built in 1833-1834 on God’s Acre in the center of New Canaan. The church (it was initially painted brown, but later painted white), continued as an Episcopal church until the current St. Mark’s was built in 1959-1961 on Oenoke Ridge. In 1962, the old church was acquired by the Board of American Missions of the Augustana Lutheran Church for a new Lutheran mission congregation, organized the following year as St. Michael’s Lutheran Church. That same year, St. Michael’s gave the adjacent Ludlow House, which had been included with the church property, to the New Canaan Historical Society in exchange for nearly an acre of land to be used for additional parking.
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