At 33 Church Street in Mystic is a brick house built in 1846 for Francis H. Rogers. This is likely the Francis H. Rogers who married Angeline E. Benedict of Sharon in 1839. He may be the Francis H. Rogers who was master of the brig Whig depicted in the painting Brig Whig Boston Francis H. Rogers Entering & Leaving the Port of Palermo.
Preserved at Mystic Seaport is a section of the original ropewalk of the Plymouth Cordage Company of Plymouth, Massachusetts. The company was founded in 1824 by Bourne Spooner, who had learned the art of ropemaking in New Orleans. He opposed slavery, so he set up his business back home in Plymouth, hiring free labor. Spooner ran the company until his death in 1870, producing rope for many kinds of vessels, including the Great Republic, the largest clipper ship ever built. By the late nineteenth century, the company had become the largest manufacturer of rope and twine in the world. The company remained in business for 140 years. The ropewalk remained in operation until 1947, when changing technology led to the end of its use by the company. In 1951, a 250-foot section of the 1,000-foot ropewalk in Plymouth was saved and reassembled at Mystic Seaport. It came with its machinery, which is no longer powered but is set up as though it were still functioning in order to illustrate the process of spinning rope.
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One of the buildings at Mystic Seaport is set up to represent the American Seamen’s Friend Society Sailor’s Reading Room. The Society was incorporated in 1833 to provide moral and religious alternatives to the saloons, boardinghouses and brothels frequented by sailors while in port. The organization is best known for the libraries it placed aboard American ships for the use of sailors. The Society’s records are now held the Collections Research Center at Mystic Seaport. This historic organization is interpreted for Mystic Seaport visitors in a building erected c. 1841 as a work shop and tool shed by Clark Greenman of the George Greenman & Co. Shipyard. Starting in 1951, it was used as the Seaport’s Children’s museum, before housing the Reading Room exhibit. The building originally stood where the Treworgy Planetarium was built in 1960. It was moved to its current location in 1959. (more…)
Born in Groton, Enoch Burrows (1770-1852) was a merchant who was part-owner of a shipyard on the east bank of the Mystic River. He served as a selectman in Stonington and in the Connecticut General Assembly. In 1791, Enoch Burrows married Esther Denison at the Denison Homestead called Pequotsepos. The couple moved into a new house, located at 24 Main Street in Old Mystic. As related by Grace Denison Wheeler in The Homes of Our Ancestors in Stonington, Conn. (1903):
The long flight of marble steps which leads up to the front door came from Mr. Burrows marble quarry, located in western Massachusetts near Pittsfield. From the same quarry was brought the marble to build the new City Hall in Philadelphia, which occupies four blocks. The house also contains a marble sink and a large stirring dish, all from the same quarry, which was brought down the Connecticut river in some kind of a water craft, and landed at the dock before the door. Mr. Burrows was a large landholder, owning many beautiful farms and Mystic Island, originally called Ram’s Island. He married Esther Denison, daughter of Grandmother Jane; she was a very energetic woman, a housekeeper and homemaker of New England’s best type, large-hearted, generous, sociable and entertaining, an excellent cook, and gave much attention to all appetizing things which please the eye and appeal to the palate. She had a good force of domestics to execute her commands, and when her table was seen covered with china, glass and silver, and loaded with choice viands, one needed no second invitation to partake of her hospitality. Her husband was a man of commanding figure, six feet two inches in his stockings; genial, kind-hearted and capable, and in his later years, in his home in West Troy, New York, was called Judge Burrows. Their son, Silas, afterwards lived here; he was interested in shipbuilding, and engaged in commercial pursuits in New York, and was also in the whaling and sealing business. He made several visits to Brazil and Hong Kong, China, where he established a commercial house; he left there in 1859 for the last time and made his home in this village, where he died in 1870. His children occupied the house as a summer home at various times, and it now belongs to his grandchildren.
Later used as a nursing home, the house is once again a private residence.
The Burrows House at Mystic Seaport, built between 1805 and 1825, was originally erected on Water Street, on the Groton side of the Mystic River. In the 1860s and 1870s, it was the home of Seth and Jane Burrows. By that time the house had been raised above a new story in which Seth Winthrop Burrows sold groceries. The house was dismantled in 1953 to make way for a bank and then reassembled at Mystic Seaport. (more…)
The house at 36 Denison Avenue in Mystic was built in 1864 for John N. Colby. He was a ship and sign carver and decorator who also held a number of patents, including one with John E. Coffin from 1875 for a combined cane and umbrella. From 1866 to 1892, the house was the residence of Capt. George E. Tripp. He had married Lydia Stanton Spicer in 1855.
The Queen Anne/Colonial Revival building at 105-107 Water Street in Stonington was built in 1901 to house a drugstore and ice cream parlor on the first floor, while the business’ owner, Francis D. Burtch, lived in the apartment above. Various other businesses have been located in the building over the years. In 1954, poet James Merrill (1926-1995) and his partner David Jackson moved into the residence. Merrill‘s epic work, The Changing Light at Sandover, incorporated messages that he and Jackson transcribed from sessions using a ouija board in the house’s turret dining room. Merrill, who was Connecticut’s State Poet Laureate from 1985 to 1995, willed his home to the Stonington Village Improvement Association. The James Merrill House Committee runs a program that makes the Merrill apartment, maintained as it was during the poet’s lifetime, available to writers for rent-free stays of one or two semesters of an academic year.
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