United Church of Stonington (1834)

The United Church of Stonington was formed in 1950 as a union of the Second Congregational Church and First Baptist Church. The church building on Main Street in Stonington Borough was built in 1834 as the Second Congregational Church of Stonington. Richard Anson Wheeler, in his History of Stonington (1900), describes the formation of the church:

The First Congregational Society of Stonington, after several unsuccessful attempts to divide itself into two societies by metes and bounds, called a meeting to assemble on the 28th day of September, 1833, and after mature deliberation took a new departure and adopted a plan for organizing a new church and society in Stonington, viz.: “That whenever forty members of the First Society should withdraw and organize a new Congregational Society at the Borough and elect society officers, and shall give notice to the old society of their doings within thirty days from the day of the meeting, the new society shall then be regarded as organized and receive $1,825 of the old society’s fund.” The conditions were immediately complied with at the meeting. Forty-five members of the society withdrew, formed a new society, and took their money and invested it in a new meeting-house. As soon as the new society was formed, ninety-three members of the First Church seceded and organized the Second Church in connection with said society Nov. 11th, 1833.

The church’s clock, in a recently restored steeple, is owned and regulated by the Borough government.

Thomas Howe House (1790)

Built around 1790, the Thomas Howe House, at the corner of Main and Church Streets in Stonington, remained in the Howe family until 1957. In 1887, when it was known as the “Aunt Mary Howe House,” it was rented for $100 a year by the Stonington Free Library Association. The house served as Stonington’s first library until 1899, when construction began on the current library building, located in in Wadawanuck Park.

The Arcade, Stonington (1837)

The Arcade building, at 61-65 Water Street in Stonington, is a nineteenth-century Greek Revival commercial building, constructed in the wake of the fire of April 1837, which destroyed the commercial center of Stonington Borough. The building has contained numerous retail establishments over the years. In 1952, the building was given as a gift by Colonel Frederick Horner to the Stonington Historical Society. The Arcade was then converted into an office and apartments. A number of Stonington locations were used in the movie Mystic Pizza (1988), including the arcade, which was temporarily repainted from white to a buff color for the filming.

Linden Hall (1857)

Gamaliel King (1795-1875) was a New York City architect who designed four houses in Stonington, by the shores of Lambert’s Cove. The house of James Ingersoll Day was lost due to the Hurricane of 1938, but the other three survive. One is the Nathaniel B. Palmer House of 1852 and another is Cove Lawn, built in 1856 for Captain Theodore Dwight Palmer. The third is Linden Hall, also known as the Stanton House, built in 1857 to 1859 for brothers Joseph Warren Stanton and Charles Thompson Stanton.