Historic Buildings of Connecticut - Exploring the Nutmeg State One Building at a Time

Conference House, Glastonbury (1830)

Happy Halloween! The Conference House is a building in Glastonbury, built around 1830, that possibly once stood where the First Church of Glastonbury was erected in 1837. It was moved to another site down Main Street, just north of the Joseph Wright House. Called the Conference House, the church used it for meetings, lectures and concerts. Starting in the late 1830s it was used as a private school run by one of Deacon Wright’s sons. In 1894, Deborah Goodrich Keene, who lived at 2016 Main Street, the Hale-Goodrich House, bought the building and moved it across the street to its current address of 2000 Main Street. In 1911 she leased the house to Glastonbury’s first telephone switchboard. She later converted it into a private residence. Floodwaters from Hubbard Brook almost reached the roofline of the house in 1936.

Chaplin Congregational Church (1815)

The Congregational church in Chaplin was organized in 1810 and the meeting house was erected in 1810-1815. As related in Richard M. Bayles’ History of Windham County, Connecticut (1889):

it was accepted as completed according to contract September 14th, 1815. It was not finished as it was intended eventually to be but so that public worship could be held in it. Neither pews, slips nor pulpit were provided, but the people went up with joy to the courts of the Lord, to worship Him in His own house. After a number of years a steeple was built upon the east end of the meeting house, a bell procured in 1837, the pews or slips were constructed, and a lofty pulpit placed for the elevation of the minister. Thus they intended to have their pastors settled over the people. Many years after, one of the pastors expressed the earnest wish to have the pulpit brought down from its great altitude, that he might be among his people as one of them, saying when his Master wished him to come up to heaven he hoped he should be ready, but while he was upon earth he did not wish to be placed somewhere between earth and heaven. The pulpit was brought down as he wished, and yet it was too high for some of his successors, and it has been brought down several feet lower, and now it has only the elevation of the modern pulpit. A number of years since, the people feeling the need of a lecture room or vestry, moved the meeting house about fifty feet on the hillside, and constructed a very commodious vestry under it, where the evening meetings and other religious and social gatherings are accommodated. Thus the same meeting house has been occupied during the entire history of the church, except for a short time when worship was held in the Center school house.

Eliphalet Ladd House (1860)

At 1248 Poquonock Avenue in Windsor is an impressive Italianate villa-style home erected c. 1860. It was built for Eliphalet Ladd, a merchant who owned a store in Poquonock Center. Eliphalet Ladd (1822-1885) was the father of Christine Ladd-Franklin (1847-1930), a noted scientist who made contributions in the fields of mathematics and psychology. Born in Windsor, she spent her first six years in New York before the family returned to Windsor in 1853. Following her mother’s death in 1860, her father remarried in 1862 and Christine was sent to live with her grandmother in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She later attended Vassar and Johns Hopkins.

In 1960, the Eliphalet Ladd House was one of a number of locations in Windsor and East Windsor used in the Hollywood film Parrish (1961), which is set on a Connecticut tobacco farm.

Sally Keeney House (1840)

Ira Anderson, a prosperous farmer, built the house at 224 Naubuc Avenue on his land in Hockanum in East Hartford c. 1840 for Sally Keeney. In 1873 she sold it to Edmund A. Fox. The house has been much altered.

Hall-Starr House (1778)

Once thought to have been much older, the small house at 223 State Street in Guilford was probably built c. 1778 by Benjamin Hall. In 1803 he sold it to William Starr, whose family lived in it until 1995. A kitchen ell was added to the house around 1940.

Amasa Hitchcock House (1800)

The house at 1151 South Main Street in Cheshire was built c. 1790-1800. It was the home of Amasa Hitchcock (1739-1827), a veteran of the French & Indian War [not to be confused with another Amasa Hitchcock (1768-1835), Cheshire’s first post master, whose house on South Main Street is no longer standing]. The house remained in the Hitchcock family until 1975.

Robert N. Jackson Cottage (1882)

The summer cottage at 29 Pettipaug Avenue in the Borough of Fenwick in Old Saybrook was built in 1882 by Robert N. Jackson of Middletown. The son of Ebenezer Jackson, Jr. (1796-1874) of Savannah, Georgia, and Middletown, Robert Nesmith Jackson (1845-1915) organized and served as president of the Middlesex Banking Company. The bank failed in 1913. In 1920 the cottage was acquired by Mitchell Little of Hartford and his wife, Elizabeth Hapgood, daughter of the architect Edward T. Hapgood. You can read more about the cottage in Marion Hepburn Grant’s The Fenwick Story (Connecticut Historical Society, 1974), pages 135-137.