Memorial Hall, Windsor Locks (1890)

Memorial Hall in Windsor Locks was dedicated in 1890 in honor of the town’s Civil War veterans. Funds for the building‘s construction were provided by Charles E. Chaffee, a textile manufacturer. Soldiers Memorial Hall originally housed the J.H. Converse Post, No. 67, Grand Army of the Republic. The Post, formed in 1884, was named for Major Joseph H. Converse, who was killed in action at the Battle of Cold Harbor, on June 4, 1864. Memorial Hall was designed by Frederick S. Newman in the Richardsonian Romanesque style (Newman also designed the Linden apartments in Hartford and the Chicopee Bank in Springfield) The museum inside the Hall now honors Windsor Locks veterans of all wars and the building hosts the town’s American Legion post. Memorial Hall is open to visitors by guided tour. (more…)

The Isaac C. Lewis House (1868)

The Meriden Britannia Company was established in 1852. It produced the durable Britannia ware, which by the 1850s had replaced pewter in most American homes. Isaac C. Lewis was president of the company for fourteen years and served as mayor of Meriden from 1870 to 1872. Lewis built a mansion at 189 East Main Street in 1868. In 1950, the house was purchased by the Polish League of American Veterans and was used as a funeral home from 1998 to 2006. The house has since been vacant.

St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, Naugatuck (1875)

St. Michael’s Episcopal Church on the Green in Naugatuck is a High Victorian Gothic structure, built in 1875 and designed by David R. Brown, who had been an apprentice of Henry Austin. St. Michael’s Parish was formed in 1786 and a church was built in Millville in 1803. That structure was moved to what would become the center of town in 1832, to land donated by innkeeper Daniel Beecher, who also provided land next door for the Congregational Church and established Naugatuck’s Green, thereby providing the then dispersed communities of Naugatuck with an institutional center. The relocated original church was in use until 1875, when it was sold to the Naugatuck school board and removed to make way for the current church.

Squire Timothy Dutton/Caroline Kellogg House (1790)

The Squire Timothy Dutton House, at 1 West Main Street in Hebron, was built in 1790 and has a later, flat roofed entrance portico, added around 1910. The Missionary Society of Connecticut was formed in the house in 1798. The house is also known as the Caroline Kellogg House, after an early librarian at Hebron’s Douglas Library. For almost two centuries, the general store, once owned by Charles Post, who served as postmaster from 1853 to 1861, stood next to the Kellogg House, but was later removed.

21 Church Street, Waterbury (1886)

As related in Frederick John Kinsbury’s A Narrative and Documentary History of St. John’s Protestant Episcopal Church (formerly St. James) of Waterbury, Connecticut (1907): “In 1884 John C. Booth and Mrs. Olive M. Elton presented to the parish the lot at the corner of Church and West Main streets, and a rectory was erected thereon, which was completed in the spring of 1886 at a cost of about $16,000.” The Queen Anne-style building, at 21 Church Street, features a Romanesque Revival archway on the front porch. In the 1970s, this former minister’s residence was converted into an office building.