Maxwell Court (1904)

The Francis T. Maxwell House, at 9 North Park Street in Rockville, Vernon, is a Colonial/Classical Revival mansion, built in 1902-1904. Maxwell was a part-owner of the Hockanum Mills Company. His mansion, known as Maxwell Court, was designed by Charles Adams Platt, who was renouned as an architect and as one of America’s most influential landscape designers. Platt’s design for Maxwell Court, his first large scale project, integrates the mansion and the surrounding landscape. The house is located on a hill above the city of Rockville, near the mills but with broad views to the south and west. With its architecture, gardens and landscape, influenced by the Villa Gamberaia near Florence, the Maxwell estate was influential in the American country house movement. Maxwell Court was featured in such contemporary publications as The Country House, a Practical Manual of the Planning and Construction of the American Country Home and its Surroundings (1906), by Charles Edward Hooper and House & Garden, Vol. IV, No. 4 (October 1903)–an article whose images were reproduced in American Country Homes and their Gardens (John Cordis Baker, ed. 1906). The plan of an estate, clearly modeled on Maxwell Court, appeared in Henry Vincent Hubbard and Theodora Kimball’s An Introduction of the Study of Landscape Design (orig. pub. 1917), the principle textbook for landscape architecture courses in the United States in the early twentieth century. Today, Maxwell Court is the Rockville Elks Lodge #1359. (more…)

Dr. Frederick Gilnack House (1890)

The house of Dr. Frederick Gilnack, at 19 Elm Street in Rockville (Vernon), constructed in 1890, is a quite late example of a Second Empire house. The mansard roof had been popular some decades before, but the house’s Eastlake style ornamentation places the it stylistically in the later nineteenth century. Dr. Gilnack was born in Saxony in Germany in 1844. His family came to America when he was ten and settled in Glastonbury. He was honored by Dr. Eli P. Flint in Proceedings of the Connecticut State Medical Society (1917), who gave an account of his life:

He was graduated from the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the School of Medicine of Columbia University, New York, March 14, 1867, and only three months later, in June, he located in Rockville, Connecticut, for the practice of his profession, which he continued there successfully, for forty-five years, until failing health obliged him to give it up.

He was especially successful as an obstetrician, and the loss of sleep and other exacting requirements which that class of practice necessitates, so lowered his vitality mentally and physically that he became unable to perform the duties of his profession for fiveyears, until an attack of epidemic influenza proved quickly fatal [in 1917].

10 Ellington Avenue, Rockville (1885)

Cyrus Winchell, a real estate developer, constructed two adjacent Stick style houses on Ellington Avenue in Rockville as investment properties in 1885. The house at 12 Ellington Avenue has already been featured on this site as the Cyrus Winchell House. The house at 10 Ellington Avenue is known to have been designed designed by the firm of Palliser and Palliser of Bridgeport, and the similar No. 12 was likely their work as well. The house was a rental property until 1915, when it was purchased by Sherwood C. Cummings. It has remained in the Cummings family, which possesses original Palliser drawings of the house.

Rockville Union Congregational Church (1890)

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An excellent example of Richardsonian Romanesque architecture, the Rockville Union Congregational Church in Vernon was begun in 1889 and completed the following year. It represents the union of two congregations: In 1888, the First Congregational Church of Rockville sold its land for the building of the Memorial Hall Building, while the Second Congregational Church building was destroyed in a fire. The two voted to combine and build a new church, constructed of stone and designed by Warren H. Hayes of Minneapolis, on the site where the Second Congregational Church had stood.