In this video I talk about the growth and development of G. Fox & Company department store from its early days in 1847 as a small fancy goods store, to a large department store occupying several contiguous buildings. I focus on the various buildings the store occupied. I end by describing the fire that destroyed the store in 1917. In another video I will describe the rebirth of the store and its continued expansion into the 1960s.
A mansion erected by a member of the Vanderbilt family once stood along Farmington Avenue in West Hartford, Connecticut. In this video I explain how the mansion came to be built, mention a notable artistic couple that was married in it, and tell how the mansion was replaced by an exclusive housing development.
A postcard in the collection of the Gunn Historical Museum in the town of Washington depicts the house at 250 New Milford Turnpike in the village of Marbledale in Washington, describing it as the Tomlinson Home. A real estate site gives a construction date for the house of 1860. Presumably this house is associated with the family of Philo Tomlison, who conducted marble quarrying in Marbledale in the early nineteenth century.
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Last Sunday I featured St. Andrew’s Church in Kent, erected in 1826. Not far away, in the village of Marble Dale in the town of Washington, is another St. Andrew’s Church built about four years earlier, between 1821 and 1822. Both of these Episcopal churches (as well as ones in Caanan and Salisbury) were built at a time when these parishes had Reverend George B. Andrews as their pastor. The parish in Marble Dale was originally established in 1764 in New Preston. Harassed during the American Revolution because they were predominantly loyalist, the members of the congregation temporarily abandoned their original building, but after the war were formally organized as the New Preston Episcopal Society in 1784. After plans to move their church building to be near the Congregational Church fell through, they rented and then purchased a Quaker meeting house, which was used for services until the current church was built. The building was enlarged in 1855 to plans by the Rev. Nathaniel Sheldon Wheaton (1792-1862), who also underwrote for the project. Rev. Wheaton later served (1831-1837) as second president of Trinity College in Hartford.
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The earliest part of the house at 613 Main Street in Portland was constructed in 1703 for Jonathan Warner. It was one room over one room with an end chimney (a style typical of Rhode Island). The house was enlarged over the years. Behind the northwest part was a section built in 1764 by sea captain Ithamar Pelton (1744-1806). The south part of the house was added in 1912 by William Gildersleeve.
Now comprising part of the “Main House” on the campus of the Rectory School in Pomfret is a house erected circa 1795 for Thomas Grosvenor (1744-1825), a lawyer who served in the Revolutionary War. Wounded in his right hand at the Battle of Bunker Hill, Grosvenor ended the was as a Lieutenant Colonel. The house was remodeled and greatly enlarged in about 1885 by Thomas Skelton Harrison, a Philadelphia industrialist. In 1925, Rev. Frank H. Bigelow and his wife, founders of the Rectory School in 1920, acquired the Harrison estate to become the school’s campus. In the ensuing years they erected a complex of wood-framed colonial revival buildings on the estate, which has been the school’s campus ever since.
The house at 27 Main Street in Bethel was built circa 1840 by Isaac H. Seeley (1793-1880), the son and partner of hatter Nathan Seeley. He later operated his own company, I. M. Seeley & Son. His brother, the merchant Seth Seeley, lived in the house that is now the Bethel Public Library. The eastern section of Isaac’s house (on the left in the image above) is much older than the main block, perhaps dating to as early as 1795.
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