Formerly the estate of Cornelius J. Vanderbilt, Jr., West Hill Drive was one of the earliest planned sub-divisions in West Hartford. Many of the Colonial Revival and Tudor Revival houses constructed there in the 1920s were designed by architect Cortland F. Luce, who also designed his own house at 6 West Hill Drive. Built in 1920, the house combines elements of the two styles which dominated the neighborhood, being a Tudor Revival cottage with a Palladian window typical of the Georgian Colonial Revival. To learn more about Colonial and Tudor Revival houses in West Hartford, check out my article on the subject in the Architecture section of this site!
The Stoner Mansion is a Tudor Revival house, on Stoner Drive, off Mountain Road in West Hartford. It was completed in 1928 for Louis Stoner, a manufacturer who became wealthy from the Jacobs Chuck company, which produces holding/clamping devices for stationary equipment and portable power tools. The family hosted famous parties at the mansion, which was situated on an extensive estate on a hillside with views of Hartford and a private golf course. Later, the family faced financial hardship and Louis Stoner committed suicide. In the 1950s, his widow, Clara Stoner, began to sell off lots of the property, with early houses being built down Stoner Drive, near Mountain Road. In the 1970s, homes were being built closer to the mansion itself. The Stoners eventually left the house and their furniture was put on auction in 1973. The mansion then had a number of other occupants: there’s a blog post by one former resident whose parents bought the house in 1974. In the 1980s, the house was owned by a man who was later arrested for tax evasion. Left empty for a decade by later owners who never moved in, the house deteriorated and had to be extensively restored by its most recent owners, one of whom owns an interior design company which, for a time, has been based in the mansion. The house will soon have new owners.
The First Baptist Church of West Hartford was established in 1858 and a meeting house was built in 1858-1859 on the north-west corner of Main Street and Farmington Avenue, just around the corner from the no-longer extant third meeting house of the town’s Congregational Church. By the early twentieth century there were great commercial pressures on the church to sell their property. In 1938, a new church was built not far away on North Main Street. The new building was modeled on the Greek Revival 1858 church and has the same stone steps, cornerstone, bell and weathervane, which were salvaged from the old building.
The land in West Hartford, where Gurdon Whiting would build a house around 1786, was originally part of a grant to Rev. Joseph Haynes, minister of First Church in Hartford and the son of John Haynes, first Governor of the Colony of Connecticut. Haynes’ daughter, Mary, inherited the property. She married Roswell Saltonstall, the son of Connecticut governor Gurdon Saltonstall. She later married Thomas Clap, President of Yale. Mary, who died in New Haven in 1769, left her land in the West Division of Hartford to her daughter, Mary Whiting, who deeded the land to her son, Gurdon Saltonstall Whiting in 1778. He built the Whiting House in the 1780s, at the time of his marriage. It remained in his family into the 1920s, when it was purchased by Philip Lawler, who had been mayor of West Hartford in 1915. The house, which has survived nearly intact, was in the Lawler family into the 1980s.
