Choate Rosemary Hall: Hill House (1911)

In 1908, George St John became headmaster of The Choate School in Wallingford. During his forty-year tenure, he oversaw a massive expansion of the school’s campus, which featured the erection of several large red brick Georgian Revival institutional buildings. The first of these was Hill House, completed in 1911. Designed by Francis Waterman, it set the style for the growing campus. The building was extended on the south side with the construction of the original Hill House Dining Hall in 1913-1914. Over the years, additional structures have been attached to Hill House, which remains at the heart of the Choate campus.

Dr. Joel Canfield House (1829)

The house at 78 Church Street in Guilford was built in 1829, just four years after the street was opened. It was erected by Dr. Joel Canfield (1801-1877). According to his obituary by Alvan Talcott, M. D., in the Proceedings of the Connecticut Medical Society, Eighty-Sixth Annual Convention (1877), Dr. Canfield was originally from Chester and studied medicine with Dr. John S. Peters, of Hebron and Dr. Samuel B. Woodward, of Wethersfield. He then studied at Yale in 1823-1824.

He received a license to practice as a physican [sic] and surgeon in March, 1824, and on the 1st day of June following he commenced practice in Guilford, Conn., locating himself, the first year, in the parish of North Guilford. One year afterwards, he removed to the village of Old Guilford, on the same day with the decease of Dr. Joel L. Griffing, of Guilford, a physician of much promise, who died of phthisis at the age of 36. Dr. Canfield succeeded to his business, and had at once a large and lucrative practice. Other practitioners, however, came in after a few years, and divided the business with him.

On January 10, 1827, he married Lucretia M. Bartlett. She died in 1876 and, according to the doctor’s obituary, “he appeared never to have recovered from the shock.” Dr. Canfield was given an honorary medical degree by Yale in 1847. He was also active in the anti-slavery and temperance movements. As his obituary concludes:

On the morning of April 9, 1877, being in usual health, he took the cars for Saybrook, and from thence for Chester, hired some boys to row him across the Connecticut river, and was on his way to visit a brother and a niece in Hadlyme. After walking a few rods in a lonely road, and when out of sight of any human being, he was stricken down by failure of the action of the heart, and died almost immediately. Some five hours afterwards his body was found, his left hand still grasping a stone in the wall for support. His funeral was attended on the 11th, in the Third Church of Guilford, by a full assemblage of his relatives and friends, with very appropriate remarks from his pastor, Rev. George W. Banks. His age was 76 years and 30 days.

Tiffany Juliet House (1865)

The house at 82 Naubuc Avenue in the Curtisville neighborhood of Glastonbury was built c. 1865 by a member of the Welles family, which had cigar-making and shipbuilding interests in the area. In later years it housed workers from a nearby factory. The house was restored in the early 1990s and again a decade ago, when it became a bed-and-breakfast called the Tiffany Juliet House. The more recent work included the construction of a two-story rear addition to accommodate a nearly 750 square foot ballroom.

Capt. Joseph W. Holmes House (1851)

The brick house at 35 Church Street in Mystic was built in 1851. A sign on the house indicates it was the home of Capt. Joseph W. Holmes of the Corolanus. Joseph Warren Holmes (1824-1912) was noted for being the captain to have made the most voyages around Cape Horn (84). He also sailed around the Cape of Good Hope fourteen times. In 1865 he bought a larger house at the corner of High Street and Old New London Road in Mystic. According to the Biographical Review, Vol. XXVI: Containing Life Sketches of Leading Citizens of New London County, Connecticut (1898):

It is doubtful if Captain Holmes’s record as a mariner is paralleled by that of any other. For nearly or quite sixty years he has followed the sea. No vessel under his command has ever been lost or shipwrecked, and not a man of all his crews was ever lost.

The same book elaborates his career: at the age of seventeen, having made several early voyages,

in the spring shipped on the bark “Leander,” under Captain Bailey, with whom he made his first voyage around the world, completing the circuit in twenty-two months. The “Leander” was engaged in whale fishery in the South Atlantic, South Pacific, and Indian Oceans. At twenty-one he became master of the same bark, on which he made three voyages, the second and third of twenty months each. Leaving the ” Leander” in 1847, he went in the “Coriolanus” on a whaling trip to the Indian Ocean, followed by a voyage to the Arctic Ocean, where the ship was filled in sixty days. He continued to engage in the whale fishery until 1854. After leaving the “Coriolanus,” Captain Holmes was successively commander of the “Fanning,” “Frances,” “Haze,” “Twilight,” and “‘Seminole”; and for the past ten years or more he has had charge of the “Charmer,” a full-rigged merchantman, which sails from New York to San Francisco and foreign ports.

The house at 35 Church Street is nearly identical to the neighboring house, built in 1846 at 33 Church Street, but without the covered front portico and enclosed side porch that were later added to the earlier structure.

Trinity Lutheran Church, Centerbrook (1977)

The Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Trinity Church, in the village of Centerbrook in Essex, was founded in 1898. The congregation erected their original church building, next to the Falls River millpond on Main Street, in 1907-1908. Services continued to be held in Swedish until the late 1940s. The church was destroyed by fire in the early hours of March 21, 1975. A new Trinity Lutheran Church was soon rebuilt on the same site, 109 Main Street. After the fire, the congregation had investigated the old building’s cornerstone to see if something had been sealed inside by the Swedish immigrant founders of the church. Nothing was found there, but then the great-grandson of the man who had laid the original foundation shared the story, handed down to him, that there had been indeed been a box of artifacts placed in the foundation. A new search in the wall behind the cornerstone revealed a copper box, containing a historical account of the church’s founding in Swedish, coins, a 1907 Swedish almanac and other documents. The box was resealed with other items added by the congregation in a new container and placed in the new church’s cornerstone (see Emily Sigler, “Artifacts Going Back Into Church Walls,” Hartford Courant, May 25, 1976). In 2005, the church completed a renovation and expansion project that almost completely rebuilt the structure and added 1,600 square feet on its east side. A new altar was built as an extension with windows providing views of the neighboring pond and river.