Buckland & Barton Store and Post Office (1871/1876)

The connected commercial structures at 73 Main Street in East Hampton, known as the Buckland Block, were begun in the 1870s and added to over the years. Leonard Willey, a local merchant, constructed the south store section in 1871 and mortgaged it to finance construction of the north section: a hall erected in 1876. The building was soon acquired by George Buckland and housed Buckland and Barton’s dry goods store, with the south building being used as a post office. Attached at the rear of the post office is an elevator tower, which gave easy access to the P.O. for D. A. Williams, whose patent medicine business was located in the rear annex. The hall was used for town meetings and once was the site of a murder trial. So many spectators attended that the floor began to give way and the trial had to be relocated.

Downs House (1750)

32 East Flat Hill Rd., South Britain

According to a guide to the South Britain Historic District, produced by the Town of Southbury, the house at 32 East Flat Hill Road, called the Downs House, was acquired as a residence by the minister of the South Britain Congregational Church in 1791. Does this relate it to the Moses Downs House at 639 South Britain Road? Further, the guide indicates that it was used in the 1870s for a school for girls and the lower level was once a tavern. The National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination for the South Britain Historic District dates the house to 1750 (based on assessor’s records) and indicates it was once a toll house.

Tower House (1875)

The unusual building at 926-940 Farmington Avenue in Kensington was built c. 1875 by the brothers, Augustine F. Wooding and Ralph A. Wooding. They started a business making dog collars, later expanding to harness trimmings and saddlery hardware. In the 1896, they built a dam and pond and were granted a contract to supply water to trains on the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad. The building’s tower was then erected to serve as a water tower. Known as the Tower House, in later years the building was used as apartments. (more…)

Waterbury Assembly of God (1900)

Waterbury Assembly of God is a church located at 101 Prospect Street in Naugatuck. The church was built c. 1900. I think it may have been built originally as a Baptist Church, as described in History of Waterbury and the Naugatuck Valley, Connecticut, Vol. I (1918), by William J. Pape:

Among the citizens living in the Salem society soon after 1800 were a number of Baptists, who first worshipped in the church in Waterbury. In October, 1817, sixty persons living in Salem, Prospect and Bethany were set off from the Waterbury society to organize a new church in the localities indicated. Two meeting-houses were built, one on Fulling Mill Brook, and by December 22, 1819, the second was organized in the Straitsville locality.

It is the one on Fulling Mill Brook which later became the Naugatuck Baptist Church, with a fine church edifice on Prospect Street, in Union City.

William H. Thompson House (1850)

William Howe Thompson (1813-1901) acquired his father’s farm in the village of Melrose in East Windsor after his marriage to Huldah Chapin (1818-1897) in 1836. There he erected a Greek Revival farmhouse in 1850 (219 Melrose Road). Thompson had an office in the wing of his home from which he managed his various farms. He was also a civic leader, serving as selectman and tax assessor in East Windsor and as a representative in the state legislature in 1861-1862. Deacon Thompson was also one of the founders of the Broad Brook Congregational Church. Shortly before his death Thompson sold the farm to his neighbor, John Pease. In 1957 the farm passed from the Pease to the Smigiel family, which grew tobacco. Today the property survives as a particularly well-preserved example of a Connecticut River Valley farmstead, with associated nineteenth-century barn, tobacco shed and pumphouse.