Simsbury’s first meeting house was built in 1683 and was used until 1739. A reproduction of that now lost building was constructed in 1970 to serve as the Simsbury Tercentenary Celebration headquarters. It’s design was based on an earlier 1935 reproduction and it contains some windows and the door used on that building. Today, the reproduction Meeting House is a museum building on the grounds of the Simsbury Historical Society.
The Beach Memorial Library, on Main Street in Newtown, was built in 1900. It was the gift of Rebecca D. Beach, a descendant of Rev. John Beach, the first minister of Trinity Episcopal Church in Newtown. John Francis Beach, another Beach descendant, laid the building‘s cornerstone. It served as a library until 1932, when the Cyrenius H. Booth Library opened. The former library then became a private residence. The house was later home to John Reed, who served as Newtown‘s Superintendent of Schools for twenty years.
Built around 1904, the house at 176 Buckingham Street in Waterbury is notable for its stuccoed exterior. It was the home of Charles E. Puffer, an insurance agent. As described in the History of Waterbury and the Naugatuck Valley, vol 3 (1918):
In 1901 he came to Waterbury, where he entered the employ of George E. Judd, a well known and successful insurance underwriter. He bent his energies toward acquainting himself with every phase of the business and as the years passed his value to his employer so increased that on the 1st of January, 1911, he was admitted to a partnership under the firm style of Judd & Puffer, an association that has since been maintained. He has a high reputation in insurance circles and incidentally has negotiated many important realty transfers and his opinions concerning property are largely accepted as authority.
At 172 Old Tannery Road, across from the Monroe Center Green, is a house built in the 1780s by Isaac Moss. The building’s southwest wing was once a separate building and served as a general store and post office from the later eighteenth century through the 1940s, by which time a gas station, since removed, was located out front. The Moss-Clark General Store, which was run by Marshall Beach in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was attached to the Moss House in 1896. The house has had some changes made to it over the years, including the addition and later removal of a large veranda and the removal of two large chimneys in the 1890s, torn out at the request of Mrs. Beach due to fears of a potential chimney fire.
Adjacent to south of the Hotel Capitol, on Main Street in Hartford, is a commercial block, called the McKone Block, built in the same year, 1875 (as indicated along the top of the building). Between the two structures is a parking lot where an eighteenth-century house once stood, at one time owned by the Hammersley family, which burned down in the 1970s.
The first Anglican church in Milford, named St. George’s, was built from 1769 to 1772. The church was not consecrated, but rather “set apart” and dedicated for Divine Service in 1775, because Connecticut did not yet have a Bishop. In 1849, the original wooden church was demolished and replaced by the current brownstone church, designed by Frank Wills, a prominent architect and Gothic Revival churches and author of Ancient English Ecclesiastical Architecture and its Principles, Applied to the Wants of the Church at the Present Day (1850). The church was completed in 1851 and consecrated as St. Peter’s Church. The rededication of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in 1981 was followed by a disastrous flood in June 1982, after which the organ and parts of the church and parish hall had to be rebuilt.
Between 1771 and 1783, John Jones built a house overlooking the town green of Durham. In 1783, he sold it to Samuel Camp, Jr. (Col. Samuel Camp), who left it to his son Ebenezer upon his death in 1810. Ebenezer later leased rooms of the house from his son Charles, who died in 1828. Upon Ebenezer’s death in 1830, he left the house to another son, Samuel C. Camp. The house’s gable addition with the current main entrance was built sometime in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. In 1847, the house was sold to Horace Newton, a cloth-maker and farmer.
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