The community of Gales Ferry in Ledyard was served for generations by a one-room schoolhouse. The surviving school building, erected in 1868, is the third to have stood on the same site (4 Hurlbutt Road) since 1750. It was used as a school until a new two-room building (now the Gales Ferry Community Center) was opened in January 1929. The former Gales Ferry School House was later restored by the Ledyard Historical Society.
The house at 14 Robbins Road in the Kensington section of the town of Berlin was perhaps built c. 1860 (it is so listed in Berlin property records). The lot (with no dwelling mentioned) was sold to the Kensington Ecclesiastical Society by Edward Cowles in 1870 and it has since served as the parsonage of the Kensington Congregational Church. A volume released to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the church in 1912 indicates that, instead of a preexisting house,
The present parsonage was built in 1869-70. A debt of $4100, incurred in part on account of the parsonage, was raised by subscription in 1871.
The parsonage is already noted on the map of Berlin in the 1869 Hartford County Atlas by Baker & Tilden.
The town of Coventry was once home to a number of water-powered mills. One in South Coventry, known as the Kenyon Mill, was built next to a mill pond in 1863, replacing an earlier mill (built in 1836) that had suffered a major fire. The mill was acquired by C. H. Kenyon from S. R. Moredock, manufacturer of satinet, in 1864. Kenyon had begun making woolen pants (Kentucky jeans) in Coventry in the 1840s and by 1870 his mill had developed into a major enterprise with over seventy employees. He later made ladies dress flannels. After Kenyon, a series of textile manufacturers occupied the mill, ending with National Silk, manufacturers of Tioga yarn, which occupied the building from 1934 until 1972. In more recent years the town was seeking proposals for the adaptive reuse of the mill. In 2007 it was acquired by the Corporation for Independent Living, which has converted it into condominium units known as Kenyon Falls.
The late Victorian/Colonial Revival two-family house at 117-119 Center Street in Manchester is a typical example of the many such houses erected in town at the turn-of-the-century. It was built c. 1897.
Charles M. Gilman was a lawyer and an incorporator of the Southport Trust Company. His large house, located at 139 Main Street in Southport, was designed J. C. Cady. Gilman hired another New York architect, William H. Beers, to design the house’s library addition. Erected in 1900, the addition well matches the architectural style of the earlier section, which combines elements of the Italianate, Gothic and Stick styles of architecture. Original plans for both the house and addition are housed at the Fairfield Museum and History Center Library.
A Baptist church was established in Ashford in the village of Westford in 1780. In 1848 a new church was built in Warrenville section of town, as Richard M. Bayles describes in his History of Windham County, Connecticut (1889):
John Warren, Esq., manifested much anxiety to have a Baptist church organized in the western part of Ashford, in a village on the turnpike from Hartford to Boston and Providence. The First, or as it was often called, the Knowlton meeting house, was not considered so central, nor easy of access as many thought desirable. But the people in the vicinity of the old church were greatly opposed to giving up worship in their sanctuary, and continued for a time to worship there after another congregation was formed in “Pompey Hollow,” as the place was then called. Mr. Warren offered a fund to support worship in the Hollow, and the name of the village was changed to Warrenville. A church was organized January 22d, 1848[.]
The meeting house was completed that same year (1848). Later called the United Baptist Church, it is now known as Living Proof Church.
The house at 221 South Road in Farmington was built by Samuel North (1671-1707), a merchant, sometime after he acquired the lot in 1701 and before his death, in Boston, in 1707. The year before he had willed the house and farm to his then one-year-old nephew, Josiah North (1705-1777), who later sold it to his younger brother Samuel (1708-1796) in 1736/7. This younger Samuel‘s house eventually passed to his son, Samuel North, Jr. (1740-1806), and then to Samuel, Jr.’s son Linus North (1774-1828). The property was sold out of the North family in 1829 and has passed through various owners. Alterations were made to the house in the mid-nineteenth century. The farm continued in operation until 1947. Much of the surrounding land has since been altered by the construction of Interstate 84 and residential development, but the house still has a prominent location on an elevated site with views of the Hartford skyline.
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