A block south on Main Street in Hartford from the Linden, on the corner of Capitol Avenue across from the Butler-McCook House, is another building, which like the Linden has a distinctive tower. The Hotel Capitol was built in 1875 by John W. Gilbert The building combines elements of the High Victorian Gothic and Second Empire styles. Isidore Wise operated it as residential hotel after he acquired it in 1905.
The Linden is an apartment building, built in 1891 on Main Street in South Downtown in Hartford by Frank Brown and James Thomson, owners of Brown, Thompson & Company department store. Designed by Frederick Savage Newman, the Linden was designed to echo Richardson’s Cheney block, where Brown & Thompson was then located. An addition on the south, designed by John J. Dwyer, was constructed in 1895. Having fallen into disrepair, the building was rehabilitated in the 1980s, with the storefronts and interior being significantly remodeled.
In Historic Litchfield, 1721-1907 (1907), Alice T. Bulkeley writes:
The house now occupied by Mr. Elbert P. Roberts, one of Litchfield‘s real estate dealers, on the corner of North and East streets, was built in 1792 by Charles Butler, cashier of the Litchfield Bank. It was originally a story and a half gable-roofed house. In the early part of the nineteenth century [1813] it was bought by Frederick Deming, father of the present Mr. Frederick Deming of North street, who enlarged it and built on the east wing. When Mr. Deming moved to New York he sold the place to Oliver S. Weller, and the latter built the small building where the school now is, for a small store, where he sold dry and wet goods, chiefly the latter. After his death Mrs. Weller continued the business as long as she lived, when the house went to two nieces in Woodbury who are its present owners. On the death of these ladies the house will be the property of St. Michael’s Parish Church.
Built around 1850 by the Seymour family, the house on Chapman Street in Newington known as “The Pillars” combines Italianate and Greek Revival features. The house is distinguished by its strikingly large entrance portico with Tuscan columns. Substantial restorations to the building were completed in 1986 following damage from a fire. In 1901, Amy and James Archer were hired to look after the house’s resident, an elderly widower named John Seymour. After Seymour died in 1904, his heirs turned the building into a boarding house for the elderly, with the Archers staying on to provide care for the residents. The house was known as “Sister Amy’s Nursing Home for the Elderly.” In 1907, the heirs sold the house and the Archers moved to Windsor, where they established the Archer Home for the Elderly and Infirm. Between 1907 and 1917, there were 60 suspicious deaths in the Archer Home, as well as the deaths of Amy Archer’s first husband James and her second husband Michael Gilligan. Amy Archer-Gilligan, who had purchased large amounts of arsenic, was eventually found guilty of murder in a famous case which inspired the play and film, Arsenic and Old Lace. The Seymour House in Newington was later owned by Philip Brown, who ran the Newington Junction Post Office until 1944. Today the house is subdivided into apartments.
Built in 1857-1858, the current Christ Episcopal Church in Stratford was preceded by two earlier church buildings. The first was built in 1724 and was replaced by the second, built in 1743, which stood just to the north of the current church, which was designed by architect Henry Dudley. Christ Church is the oldest parish of the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut, tracing its origins to 1707. In 1972, the interior of the church was reconfigured to its present arrangement.
Frederick Henry Cossitt was born in Granby in 1811, but later settled for a time in Memphis, Tennessee, where he ran a wholesale dry goods business. In 1859, he moved to New York, where he was involved in real estate, insurance, and banking. Before he died in 1887, Cossitt had expressed a desire to build libraries in both Granby and Memphis and his heirs carried out his wishes. The Cossitt Library in Memphis was built in 1893. The other Cossitt Library, at 388 North Granby Road in Granby, was built in 1891, across the street from the house where Cossitt had been born eighty years before. The library has recently been renovated to reinforce the main floor and reconstruct the ground floor entrance. Cossitt’s daughter Helen married Augustus D. Juilliard and on their deaths, the couple left $12 million to found what would become the Julliard School.
Durham‘s Greek-Revival Town Hall was built in 1847 to 1849 as the town’s South Congregational Church. When the town’s second meeting house burned in 1836, a split develeoped over where to build the new church. A new meeting house was eventually built again on the Green, but controversy recommenced when this third meeting house burned in 1844. One building, North Church, now Durham’s present United Church, was built north of Allyn’s Brook in 1847, while another meeting house, South Church, was built on the old site on the Green. The town’s two churches reunited in 1886 and South Church was later sold to the town for use as offices. With its steeple removed, the building now serves as Town Hall.
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