The Old Academy, on Main Street in Wethersfield, was built in 1801-1804 in the Federal style by the town’s First School Society. In 1824, the Rev. Joseph Emerson moved his female seminary, which had previously operated in Massachusetts in Byfield and Saugus, to the Old Academy, where it remained until his death in 1833. The building was also used as Wethersfield’s Town Hall and Library and now houses offices and the Research Collections of the Wethersfield Historical Society.
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Edward Shepard, a cabinet-maker from East Haddam, built his Federal-style house in Wethersfield in 1807-8. It was originally located on Main Street, where a commercial block now stands, across from the Deming-Standish House. The Shepard House was moved around the corner in the twentieth century and now stands on Church Street. It was built just a few years after the 1800 adding of Federal embellishments to the Deming-Standish House and the 1804 building of the Federal-style Hurlbut-Dunham House. The Federal style of architecture had certainly arrived on Main Street in Wethersfield in the first decade of the nineteenth century! Shepard ensured that his house had extensive Federal detailing, including an elaborate composition around his front door, with a quite different treatment of the tripartite windows above the entrance than that of his two Federal-style neighbors on Main Street.
Built around 1711-1720, on Broad Street in Wethersfield, the Buttolph-Williams House was at one time thought to date to the 1690s, when David Buttolph owned the part of the Buttolph family lot on which the house was built. More recent research of land tax records now indicates that house was most likely built during the period the land was owned by Benjamin Belden, who bought the lot in 1711 and sold it to Daniel Williams in 1721, by which time the presence of a “Dwelling House” is clearly indicated in the records. Although not constructed as early as was once assumed, it is still an excellent example of a seventeenth century-style post-medieval English house and shows that a more traditional style continued to be built in the Connecticut River Valley into the eighteenth century.
What was later known as the “Older Williams House” (which can be seen as it appeared before its restoration in a 1930s photograph) was restored in the 1950s and is considered the most faithful restoration of a house of its type in the CT River Valley. The house also helped to inspire the local author, Elizabeth George Speare, to write her historical novel for young adults, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, which won the Newbery Medal in 1959. The Buttolph-Williams House was used as a model for the house depicted in the book, which takes place in Wethersfield in the 1680s.
Today, the Buttolph-Williams House is open to the public as a house museum, owned by the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society. Tours are conducted by the staff of the Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum.
Built around 1757, the Peter Burnham House was originally on the opposite side of Marsh Street in Wethersfield. It was moved in the 1960s. The doorway is a unique pedimented example to survive in Wethersfield.
Originally attached to the southern half of the John Chester Tavern, the northern half was moved by his grandchildren to its present location on Garden Street in Wethersfield.
The Tavern of John Chester on Broad Street in Wethersfield was built in the 1730s. In 1765, the Connecticut Sons of Liberty, reacting to the Stamp Act, intercepted the Stamp Master Jared Ingersoll below Wethersfield to prevent his reaching Hartford. This may have been the tavern in which Ingersoll took refuge before eventually being forced to resign his office. John Chester was an officer in the militia that went to fight at Lexington. He became a colonel in 1776 and served throughout the Revolutionary War. His house stood further south on Broad Street, on the other side of the Broad Street Green. It survived to 1869. Chester’s grandchildren split the tavern building, moving the north half to nearby Garden Street in Wethersfield.
Built around 1760 for the Wethersfield sea captain, Gershom Nott, this Georgian-style house on Marsh Street, across from the Ancient Burying Ground, has a gambrel roof, similar to that of the Webb House.
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