West Hartford

Charles E. Shepard House (1900)

Charles E. Shepard was a general agent for Aetna Life Insurance. The architect Edward T. Hapgood designed Shepard’s 1900 Craftsman style house, located on the West Hartford side of Prospect Avenue. The house also has elements of a Swiss Chalet, most notably in the third-floor balcony. An adjacent carriage house was built in 1914, designed by West Hartford resident Cortlandt F. Luce. The house was acquired by the Oxford School, now the Kingswood-Oxford School, in 1924 and was used for a middle school. Additional facilities were attached to the original house over the years, but these were removed and the house’s exterior was restored when the entire property was converted for use by the town of West Hartford for a new middle School. The house was converted to office, library and classroom space and attached to the new Bristow Middle School building, off Highland Street, which opened in 2005. This example of adaptive reuse and restoration earned the architectural firm of Tai Soo Kim Partners a 2006 Historic Preservation Award from the Town of West Hartford.

Dr. Micheal Gill House (1901)

The Queen Anne-style house of Dr. Michael Gill, who was a prominent Hartford physician, is on the the West Hartford side of Prospect Avenue. It also features aspects of the shingle and Colonial revival styles. The house was the childhood home of the doctor’s son, Brendan Gill, who attended the Kingswood School nearby and became a well-known writer and contributer to New Yorker magazine. He was also a noted preservationist.

Burdett Loomis House (1885)

This week we look at houses on Prospect Avenue, the border between Hartford and West Hartford. An eclectic mix of large houses were constructed here in the later nineteenth century. One of the earliest is that of Burdett Loomis, an inventor and manufacturer of gas plant machinery. A civic leader in Hartford, in 1873 he also opened a trotting horse park on New Park Avenue. This would later evolve into Charter Oak Park, which early in the twentieth century would feature Luna Park, a popular amusement park. In the late nineteenth century, Prospect Avenue was considered to be in the countryside, and around 1885, Loomis bought a c. 1845 Greek Revival farmhouse and transformed it into his country estate by adding a new Queen Anne-style section on the front.

1643 Boulevard, West Hartford (1900)

Another example of an “American Foursquare” home, the house at 1643 Boulevard in West Hartford was built around 1900 in what was the town’s first modern subdivision, begun in 1896. The area is now the Boulevard-Raymond Road Historic District. The house’s current owners won a 2007 West Hartford Historic Preservation Award for their construction of a new one-story addition to their Colonial Revival-influenced home which is compatible with the original structure and matches it seamlessly.

Temple Beth Israel, West Hartford (1936)

Congregation Beth Israel, Connecticut’s oldest Jewish congregation, was established in 1843. It is now one of the largest Reform congregations in the northeast. The first synagogue was built in Hartford in 1876 and is today the Charter Oak Cultural Center. In 1936, the congregation moved to a new building, on Farmington Avenue in West Hartford. Designed by Charles R. Greco, Temple Beth Israel was built in the Neo-Byzantine style and features a prominent Byzantine dome. The congregation received a West Hartford Historic Preservation Award in 2006 for the meticulous restoration of the synagogue.

Universalist Church of West Hartford (1931)

The First Universalist Society in the City of Hartford was formed in 1821, with its first church building being constructed on Main Street, across from the Old State House, in 1824. The congregation moved to a second building in 1860, located where the Travelers Tower now stands, and to a third building in 1906, in Hartford’s Asylim Hill neighborhood. The fourth and current church, located on Fern Street in West Hartford, was built in 1931 and was designed by Walter Crabtree in the Colonial Revival style. A large addition to the rear was constructed in 1962. Known from 1870 to the early 1960s as the Church of the Redeemer, it is now called the Universalist Church of West Hartford.

John Millard House (1790)

In 1858, John Millard bought a brick Federal-style house on South Main Street in West Hartford. The date of the house’s construction is not known, but land records indicate a sale of this land in 1790 with a house and barn in existence. Part of the property was purchased in 1821 by James Hurlbut. John Millard, like his relative Samuel Millard, had a farm along South Main Street. Millard and then his daughter lived in the house until 1921, when it was bought by the current owner’s grandparents.