The Jonathon Weston House, located at 5 Common Road in Willington, was built before 1835 as a story-and-a-half Cape Cod-type house attached to a to a single story earlier building. Between 1897 and 1955 the house was converted to two stories. The maple trees on the front lawn were planted by W.W. Curtiss in 1877.
The Samuel Weed House, at 2 Park Street facing Norwalk Green, was built in 1917. It may be named for the Samuel L. Weed who was cashier of the Fairfield County National Bank. The house is now used as offices.
The H. E. Bishop House, at 87 East Avenue in Norwalk, is a Colonial Revival residence, built c. 1905-1906. Designed by Joy Wheeler Dow of Wyoming, NJ, architect and author of American Renaissance: A Review of Domestic Architecture (1904), the house is modeled on the c. 1723 house at Shirley Plantation, on the James River in Virginia. The Bishop House attracted much attention after it was built, being featured in several magazines. In “Residence of H. E. Bishop, Esq., at Norwalk, Connecticut” (American Homes and Gardens, Vol. V, No. 21, February, 1908), Francis Durando Nichols writes:
The site chosen for the house was fortunately an elevated corner lot, more spacious by far than is usually to be had in the popular residential section of a city. Taking its situation as a keynote, the designer has given his composition an effect of massive elegance which makes it one of the most striking houses in its vicinity.
In “A New House Inspired by an Old One” (House & Garden, Vol. XVI. No. 1, July, 1909; reprinted in Distinctive Homes of Moderate Cost, 1910), Henry Lorsay, 3rd writes:
The house is surely not one of the million that we are perfectly content to pass by with never a second look. It compels attention, not because of any eccentricity in design, not because of any weird hybrids among its architectural motives, nor because of any unusual and dazzling color scheme, but solely because it does have that elusive quality of architectural distinction.
In “Four Colonial Houses” (American Forestry, Vol. 23, No. 279, March, 1917), Rawson Woodman Haddon writes:
The way by which we may preserve in the domestic architecture of today an undefinable charm—a certain warmth of personality with which American history has invested the wooden house——is what Mr. joy Wheeler Dow shows us in the buildings he has designed, and in his writing upon the various developments of American architecture, both historic and modern.
Christ Church, an Episcopal church at 470 Quaker Farms Road in Oxford, was built in 1812 and was consecrated on September 3, 1817. It was designed by George Boult of Southford. Begun as a mission of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Oxford center, Christ Church became a separate parish in 1826. The church has a crystal chandelier that it received in 1881 as a gift from Trinity Church, Seymour, which itself had received it as a gift from St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn, New York, where it originally hung. The steeple of Christ Church was rebuilt in 1968.
The Pequot School is a former public elementary school building located at 214 Main Street in the Southport section of Fairfield. Designed by W. H. McLean and built in 1917-1918 (it opened for classes in January 1918), it replaced an earlier Pequot School building erected in 1854. The school closed in 1972 and the town’s Board of Education used the building until 1984. Local citizens, concerned about intrusive commercial development targeting the building, formed the Southport Conservany, which purchased the former school and has since leased it to the Eagle Hill School, a private school for children with learning disabilities.
In 1738 the Rev. Hezekiah Bissell became the first pastor of the parish of Wintonbury (now the First Congregational Church in Bloomfield), serving 45 years until his death in 1783. Rev. Bissell’s house, built in 1750, is located at 669 Bloomfield Avenue. His table stone is located in the Old Wintonbury Cemetery.
When the house at 86 Green Hill Road, across from the Green in Washington, was built in 1795 it was a story and a half with a rear lean-to and was known as Squire Marshall’s. Daniel Canfield bought the house in 1798 and raised it to two full stories. Not wishing to pay the $200 required to raise the first floor’s seven feet six inch ceilings, he made the second floor ceilings ten feet high instead. The house remained the residence of the Canfield family until the death of Daniel N. Canfield. Daniel and his brother Lewis were carpenters, farmers and abolitionists. Daniel N. Canfield was town clerk and treasurer and started the Washington public library association. In the 1890s his daughter Florence Canfield Kinney inherited the house, which was rented out for many years. In 1899 one of the small rooms was given to the D.A.R. to use as a historical room. Rev. Herbert B. Turner bought the house to use as a summer home around 1920 and hired architect Ehrick K. Rossiter to redesign the interior, replacing its many smaller rooms with larger spaces.
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