For the Fourth of July, here is a saltbox house at 16 Tolland Green in Tolland that was built in 1776. One known resident of the house was a man named Winters. According to Around and About the Tolland Green (2002) by Christine Gray, he was a proprietor of the County House, the hotel attached to the Tolland County Jail, whose wife refused to live at the jail.
In 1778, residents of the area around what is now Prospect Green withdrew from the Congregational church in Cheshire and formed their own ecclesiastical society, known as the Columbia Society. Their meeting house was located on the Prospect Green, which is the highest inhabited elevation in New Haven County. The Prospect Congregational Society was formally established in 1798 and continued meeting in the original simple structure until a new edifice was erected in 1841, to the west of the Green. The previous meeting house was moved to a another site nearby where it was used by the Methodist church until 1858. After a fire destroyed the 1841 building, a new fieldstone church was erected. This too was destroyed by fire and was replaced by the current church, built in 1941.
The Greek Revival house at 118 Broad Street, across from Broad Street Green in Wethersfield, was built by Frederick Bulkeley in 1825. The Greek Revival house has later nineteenth-century stylistic alterations. Frederick’s son Stephen Bulkeley later built an Italianate house next door.
Benjamin Bulkeley was the cousin of Capt. Charles Bulkeley, who built the impressive gambrel-roofed house at 56 Broad Street Green in Wethersfield. Benjamin built his own house at 106 Broad Street c. 1792. The house has later nineteenth-century alterations.
The single-story brick structure at 9 State Street in North Haven once served as the Smith Brothers carriage parts factory. The nomination document for the Pines Bridge Historic District gives the building a date of 1868, although the North Haven Historical Society website says it was built in 1846 by John F. Bronson, possibly as a match factory, and was acquired by the Smith Brothers in 1856. Because of a plaque found in the building engraved “Runaway Hole” it has been speculated that it was part of the Underground Railroad. Around the turn-of-the-century Angelo Ghiselli acquired the property, which became a restaurant. It was next used as apartments and is now a private residence.
Built in 1922 on the site where a train station had once stood for 28 years in Meriden, the Colony Building (39-49 Colony Street) is a Neoclassical Revival-style structure. The original occupants of the building included Emerson & Whitney Shoe Co. and Jepson’s Book Store. The latter store later moved to 31 Colony Street. It had been founded in 1910 by Louise J. Jepson and was later run by George S. Jepson and Mildred Jepson.
Pictured above are two buildings on Main Street in Middletown that are joined together with a bracketed cornice. The one on the right, 420 Main Street, was built between 1867 and 1868 by Ephraim Sheldon, who had his furniture store in the building until 1892. The building was modernized c. 1895 with a Pompeian brick facade and brownstone window surrounds. Probably around that same time the cornice of the adjacent Fagan Building was extended across the Sheldon Building. Fagan’s Block, at 422 Main Street, was built in 1868 by Patrick Fagan. After his death in 1869, his sons continued their father’s real estate business with an office in the building. They added an addition on the north side that was demolished in the late 1930s to make way for the Woolworth Building.
You must be logged in to post a comment.