Videos

This is my latest video. It’s about the northwest corner of the intersection of Asylum Street with Main Street in Hartford, across from the Old State House. There were colonial farmhouses here until 1821, when Henry L. Ellsworth built a commercial building that came to be called the Catlin Building because it house the store of Julius Catlin. A later notable tenant was David Mayer, the famous Hartford jewelry seller. That building was torn down in 1897 to make way for a new and larger Catlin Building, which was in turn replaced by Hartford’s first skyscraper, built in 1912 for the Hartford National Bank and later known as the Hartford-Aetna Building. It was finally torn down in 1990 to the dismay of preservationists. Just to the north was the Hills Block, built in 1861 and replaced in 1929 by the building that was for years a J.J. Newberry store.

Here is my second video for YouTube. Discover the history of a historic corner of Hartford, Connecticut through historic images and maps. Currently dominated by the large building at 777 Main, the northwest corner of Main & Pearl Streets in Hartford has had an interesting series of buildings. The 1600s house of early settler Thomas Olcott was replaced in the 1820s by Union Hall (where Dr. Horace Wells was inspired by a demonstration of laughing gas), followed by the building of c. 1870 of the grand headquarters of the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company, which was greatly expanded by the Hartford National Bank & Trust Company in the 1920s before being torn down in the 1960s.

Hello everyone! Please check out my first YouTube video! It’s about some interesting frogs that lived in Hartford over 120 years ago. If you enjoy the video, please consider hitting the “Like” button and subscribing to the channel– It’s called “History with Dan.”