Nathaniel Eliot House (1755)

The Nathaniel Eliot House, built in 1755, is located at 103 Whitfield Street in Guilford. Nathaniel Eliot was a farmer. He married Beulah, daughter of Joseph Parmelee, in 1754. Their daughter, Mary, married Israel Halleck, a tailor from Duchess County, New York. Their son was Fitz-Greene Halleck, the prominent nineteenth-century poet. As related in an obituary of the poet that appeared in Putnam’s Magazine (Vol. I, No. 2, February, 1868):

His father, Israel Halleck, who followed the calling of a tailor, was an emigrant from Dutchess County, New York. He died at Guilford in 1830, at the age of eighty-four; and is remembered in the village as a man fond of books, a great reader, of extraordinary memory, full of wit and anecdote, and of most courteous manners. The poet’s mother, Mary, daughter of Nathaniel Eliot, of Guilford, a lady of irreproachable worth, was a descendant of the Rev. John Eliot, the venerable “Apostle of the Indians.” She was married in her thirtieth year, and died in 1819, at the age of fifty-seven.