Gen. Gold Selleck Silliman House (1756)

Known as “The Orchard,” the Gen. Gold Selleck Silliman House is located at 506 Jennings Road in Fairfield. A general in the Revolutionary War, Silliman took part in the Battle of Ridgefield in 1777. In May 1779, Silliman and his son were captured in their home by a party of tories who had crossed Long Island Sound in the night. U.S. Navy Captain David Hawley later captured Thomas Jones, a highly reputed loyalist, to exchange for Silliman a year after his capture. Gen. Silliman‘s house was also used as a place of refuge by citizens fleeing the British burning of Fairfield on July 8, 1779. Gen. Silliman’s son, Benjamin Silliman, became the first professor of science at Yale University and the first to distill petroleum.

William H. Barns House (1852)

Dates given for the William H. Barns House, at 17 Granite Street in New London, vary widely, including 1850, 1852, 1865 and 1875. Perhaps the house was built in the 1850s in the Italianate style, with the Second Empire mansard roof being added later. The Colonial Revival front entrance is probably also a later alteration. The house also has unusual flush board walls. William H. Barns, son of Acors Barns, succeeded his father as president of the National Bank of Commerce, serving from 1862 to 1866. He was also involved in the founding of other banks.

Robert Coit House (1856)

The Robert Coit House is a brick Italianate house on Federal Street, facing the mouth of Prospect Street, in New London. It was built in 1856 for Robert Coit (1785-1874), a merchant who dealt in lumber and coal and owned a chandlery, which outfitted ships for whaling voyages. Coit was also a founder of the Saving Bank of New London, formed in 1827, and served as the bank’s president from 1852 to 1858. The house originally had a wooden bay window over the front that was later removed and bricked in.

Jabez Smith House (1793)

The Jabez Smith House in Groton has remained virtually unchanged since it was built in 1783. The original farmer on the property, in 1652, was Nehemiah Smith, who raised sheep and horses and grew flax and tobacco. His descendant, Nathan Smith, built the current house after the original house burned down. He then passed it on to his son, Jabez and two more generations of Smiths followed in the house. It was later used by Ann Graham Clarke of New York as a weekend retreat. She left it to the town in 1974 and, after her death in 1980, the house became a museum.

Saint John the Baptist Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church (1945)

In 1900, Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants in Bridgeport formed the Greek Catholic St. John the Baptist Church and in 1907 purchased property for use as a church at 717 Arctic Street, near Hallet Street. Beginning in the 1920s, there was tension within the church and with the Catholic hierarchy in Rome over the issue of married priests. St. John’s defended married clergy and joined in the action of a Congress of Churches in Pittsburgh that severed all relations with the Roman Catholic Church. A new Orthodox church was thus created, called the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church. Back in Bridgeport, a group of Uniates, who remained loyal to the Roman Catholic Church, sued to gain control of St. John’s church property, which they reoccupied in 1944. This Greek, or Byzantine, Catholic St. John’s Church relocated to Trumbull in 1976. The Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic St. John’s Church, now denied the property on Arctic Street, constructed a new church in 1944-1946 at 364 Mill Hill Avenue in Bridgeport. The church successfully defended against another Catholic civil suit to obtain this new property in 1947. The interior was expanded and renovated in 1956-1959.

City Savings Bank of Bridgeport (1914)

The City Savings Bank of Bridgeport was incorporated in 1859. As explained in Samuel Orcutt’s A History of the Old Town of Stratford and the City of Bridgeport (1886):

About the beginning of the year 1884 it was felt by the trustees that the rooms on Wall street which had hitherto been rented for banking purposes, though twice enlarged, had become entirely inadequate, and that the City Savings Bank should possess a permanent home of its own. After careful deliberation it was decided to purchase one-half the lot of the Bridgeport National Bank, on the corner of Main and Bank streets, and that both institutions should unite in erecting a structure to be known as the United Bank building, of Bridgeport.

The 1885 United Bank Building was torn down in 1912 and replaced by a new Classical Revival-style City Savings Bank building, completed in 1914. Both structures had been designed by architect Warren R. Briggs.