Stephen H. White House (1847)

The Greek Revival house at 585 Main Street in Portland was built in the 1840s (possibly 1847). It was originally the home of Stephen H. White. This may be the Stephen H. White, son of George White, who is described in the Memorials of Elder John White (1860), by Allyn S. Kellogg, page 206 as

born in Portland, Dec. 15, 1820. He resides there, and is a farmer and carpenter.

He married twice, first in 1844 to Sarah Risley of Glastonbury (died 1846); second in 1850 to Almira W. Ufford of Portland.

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Samuel Buckingham House (1859)

The house at 638 Main Street in Portland was most likely built sometime between c. 1855-1859. It was originally the home of Samuel Buckingham, a merchant (possibly the Samuel Buckingham who was born in 1808 and died in 1870). The former Buckingham Store, also built in the 1850s and now home to the Gildersleeve Sprit Shop, is located next door at 642-644 Main Street. Next door to that, at the corner of Indian Hill Avenue, is the former Gildersleeve Store, 646 Main Street, built in 1855.

Giles Hall House (1717)

In the early eighteenth century, English colonists were encroaching on the land of the Wangunk tribe in the area of Indian Hill in Portland. In 1716 the Connecticut General Assembly permitted Giles Hall, a mariner and shipbuilder, to purchase Wangunk land at Indian Hill, which he and others soon developed as a shipbuilding center. When Hall sold the land in 1739, there was a house at what is now 643 Main Street, which he may have built c. 1717, the same year he built a road to the Connecticut River through the Wangunk reservation to transport shipbuilding materials. It is possible that the current front of the house was constructed when it was the home of shipbuilder John Abby in the 1820s, with the rear section from 1717 forming an ell that was destroyed by fire in the early twentieth century.

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George Lewis, Jr. House (1778)

George Lewis, Jr. (1747-1826) was a shipbuilder who erected the house at 628 Main Street in Portland in 1778. His shipyard was nearby, along the Connecticut River. As described in the History of Middlesex County (1884):

For more than a century and a half shipbuilding has been the chief industry of that part of Portland now called Gildersleeve, and it was for a time the most active business in the town. Early in the last century, George Lewis built vessels on the present site of the Gildersleeve yard. The first vessel built in Portland was launched here in October 1741.

Sylvester Gildersleeve purchased the Lewis yard from George Lewis, Jr.’s son, Abel Lewis, in 1838. In 1927, the house the residence of George Lewis’s granddaughter, Elizabeth H. Gildersleeve.

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William H. Beebe House (1880)

The house at 540 Main Street in Portland was built c. 1880. According to Doris Sherrow, the house’s first owner, William H. Beebe, was a quarryman, although shortly before his death he purchased newspaper printing machinery. He may be the same William H. Beebe listed in the Middletown and Portland Directory for 1886-7 as a “molder bds.” In the early twentieth century, the property was used as a gas station. Frederick Haines ran the garage in the nineteen teens and twenties and George Bot in the 1930s. On the south front lawn, two concrete tracks, with the space between now filled in, are remnants of the garage’s old grease pit.

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