This video is about the block of Market Street, between State Street and Talcott Street, where Constitution Plaza is today. Buildings that used to be here were the Farmers & Mechanics Bank, the Nolan Building (once the home of MIckey’s Villanova Restaurant), Charles G. Lincoln (importers of coffee), the site of the 1816 Stone Schoolhouse, the Clover Leaf Cafe, the American Theater, the Barbour Silver Company, the William Rogers Manufacturing Company (producers of silver plate), Hartford original Baptist Church of 1798, the Warburton Chapel and the onetime home of the Aetna Radiophone Corporation of America.
This video is about a lost section of the old East Side neighborhood of Hartford, Connecticut. I talk about buildings and businesses that used to exist on State Street, from the Intersection with Front Street to the Connecticut River. The entire area was demolished in 1957 for the building of the Founders Bridge. In the early nineteenth century this was an affluent area. Steamships arrived at the foot of State Street and there were docks and warehouses used in the West India trade. Later in the century, as the East Side became the home of immigrant communities, various businesses flourished here, including saloons, grocery and liquor wholesalers, and manufacturers of paper and of flavoring extracts. At the foot of State Street the steamboats were joined by the Connecticut Valley railroad. In the first half of the twentieth century, the shade tobacco industry dominated the area, with blocks of buildings being used as warehouses. By the 1950s there were still various businesses here, including large stores for furniture and for heating and plumbing supplies, as well as a hotel for transients. But it was all swept away for redevelopment.
The grand residence known as Boxwood, located at 9 Lyme Street in Old Lyme, was built in 1842 for the merchant Richard Sill Griswold (1809-1849). A third story was later added by Richard Sill Griswold, Jr. (1869-1901). In 1890, his wife opened the Boxwood School for Girls in the house. The building had connections with the Old Lyme art colony. The summer Lyme School of Art held studio classes at Boxwood in 1905 and artists could rent rooms in the house while the boarding school students were not in residence. Among the residents that year were the future president Woodrow Wilson and his wife Ellen Axson Wilson, who was enrolled at the art school. When Mrs. Griswold died in 1907 the boarding school closed, but Boxwood Manor continued as a summer inn with its gardens being a celebrated attraction. On Christmas Eve, 1943, James Streeto, the caretaker of the estate, was murdered on the property. The woman he was involved with at the time, Delphine Bertrand, threatened with the death penalty for the murder, pled guilty to the charge of manslaughter, but the charges were dropped when two men later confessed to the murder and were convicted. The inn closed in 1958 and the property was bought by Dr. Matthew Griswold, who altered it into apartments and a restaurant. The Griswold family sold the building in 1975 and it was converted into condominiums.
The house at 28 Pearl Street in Middletown was built by Charles Brewer (1778-1860) sometime between 1839 and 1851. It was one of three houses he built on Pearl Street during the second quarter of the nineteenth century and may have been intended to be a rental property. The house was owned in the later nineteenth century by Rev. Eleazor Foster, who was pastor of Middletown’s First Universalist Church from 1866 to 1868, and then by the printer J. Peters Pelton, who built a house on Court Street in the 1880s.
Charles Brewer is described in the Commemorative Biographical Record of Middlesex County, Connecticut (1903):
Capt. Charles Brewer second son of George was born in Springfield Mass. March 24, 1778, and removed to Middletown on attaining his majority. He was a silversmith, and for fifty nine years was a manufacturing and merchant jeweler, being a successful and a leading merchant of his time. He was a captain in the old militia for many years, and was known as “Capt.” Charles Brewer. With his son-in-law, Edwin Stearns, he gave the real estate for and was instrumental in the building the Universalist Church at Middletown. Fraternally he was a member of St. John’s Lodge, F. & A. M., and some of his silver work was used for many years in that lodge. Capt. Brewer built the family home on the corner of Pearl and Court streets as well as the two houses south of it on the east side of Pearl street. He was married February 18, 1801, to Hannah daughter of Barakiah Fairbanks. She was born September 28, 1777, and died May 24, 1855. Capt. Brewer died May 10, 1860. They were the parents of a numerous family of children[.]
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