The house at 218 Main Street South in Woodbury was built about 1798 or a little earlier by Lee Terrill, who sold it just two years later. In 1816, owner Herman Stoddard sold part of the property to the First Congregational Church to build a new meeting house.
Yesterday I featured the Harvey Elmore House in South Windsor. Across the street, at 78 Long Hill Road, is another Elmore family house. It was built by a member of the Elmore family as a one-story gambrel-roofed house sometime before 1816, when Sarah Elmore Burnham moved in. In the 1840s her son Timothy altered and enlarged the house, at the same time altering it in the Greek Revival style. The house remained in the family until 1973.
The Greek Revival house at 87 Long Hill Road in South Windsor was built in 1843 by Harvey Elmore, who first demolished an earlier house on the site. The Elmore family settled the Long Hill area in the early eighteenth century and built many houses along Long Hill Road. Harvey Elmore (1799-1873) farmed the land and was a member of the general assembly of Connecticut in 1842 and 1844 and captain of an independent rifle company attached to the Twenty-fifth Connecticut Militia from 1836 to 1838. He married Clarissa Burnham in 1830 and the couple had two children. Their son, Samuel Edward Elmore, became president of the Connecticut River Banking Company. Their daughter, Mary Janette Elmore (1831-1922), never married and lived in the house until her death at the age of ninety-one. After her death her reminiscences, written when she was eighty, were found in the house’s attic. They were published by the South Windsor Historical Society in 1976 under the title Long Hill, South Windsor, Connecticut. The house was sold out of the family after her death.
Methodist meetings were held in Higganum (in Haddam) in the Old Red Schoolhouse from 1834 until it burned down in 1857. The congregation then met in private home until they built a church at 248 Saybrook Road in 1862. It is the only Methodist Church remaining in the town of Haddam (an earlier church erected in 1837 on Walkley Hill Road is no longer standing).
The complex of buildings along the Farmington River at 37 Mill Street in Unionville were once the factory of the Upson Nut Company. The company, which produced nuts and bolts, was founded by Andrew S. Upson (1835-1911), as described in his obituary in The Iron Trade Review, Vol. XLVIII, No. 14 (April 6, 1911):
After receiving his early education in public and private schools, he entered business on his own account. He bought a stock of nuts and bolts made by his brother-in-law, Dwight Langdon, in his shops at Farmington, and with horse and wagon sold his goods throughout New England. Finally he was engaged as regular salesman by Langdon. Upon the death of Langdon, in 1860, Mr. Upson and George Dunham bought the works, adding improved machinery. In 1863 a company formed including Messrs. Upson and Dunham, Samuel Frisbie, Dr. William H. Sage and Gilbert J. Hines, to purchase a patented hot forged nut machine, and in 1864 they organized the Union Nut Co. to manufacture hot forged nuts. In 1865, Mr. Upson purchased Mr. Dunham’s interests and in 1866 he sold out to the Union Nut Co., of Unionville, Conn.
In 1872 the Union company established a western branch in Cleveland, in partnership with the Aetna Nut Co., of Southington, Conn., and the Lamson & Sessions Co., of Cleveland, the organization being known as the Cleveland Nut Co., and erecting a large factory there. By 1877 the interests of the other partners had been purchased by the Union Nut Co., and in 1883, by act of the Connecticut legislature, the name was changed to the Upson Nut Co., the capital being increased finally to $300,000. In 1890 the Upson company absorbed the bolt works of Hotchkiss & Upson, Cleveland, and of Welch & Lea, of Philadelphia. Mr. Upson was elected president and treasurer of the company Sept. 3, 1864, and held the former office until his death. In 1866 he resigned the treasurership and was succeeded by Samuel Frisbie, who held this office and that of secretary until his death in 1897. In 1889, Mr. Upson removed his residence to Cleveland and from that time forward the Cleveland end of the company became the more important, although the works at Unionville have been maintained.
A gable-roofed brick building (c. 1860) is the oldest on the site, while another long flat-roofed building [pictured above] (29 Mill Street, c. 1870) has a facade enhanced by a stepped parapet. The buildings were later owned by the Pioneer Steel Ball Company (established in 1946), but they had been vacant for twenty years when restoration work began in 2013 to develop them for commercial and residential use.
The large Italianate house with a cupola at 17-19 Wall Street in Madison was built in 1854. It was the home of Alva Orrin Wilcox (1799-1887). His entry in the 1893 book The Descendants of William Wilcoxson, Vincent Meigs, and Richard Webb, complied by Reynold Webb Wilcox, reads as follows:
Alva Orrin Wilcox, of Madison, Ct, son of Return of Madison, Ct., kept a hotel and ran a stage line from New Haven to New London, carrying the mail for thirty years, m. Sept. 27, 1826, Rachel, dau. of Billy Dowd, d. Aug. 21, 1889.
“Green Side” is the name of a house located at 19 Britton Lane in Madison, built around 1840 (or 1850). It faces Madison Green.
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