Gallaher Mansion (1931)

Gallaher Mansion

The Gallaher Mansion in Norwalk was built in 1929-1931 for the inventor and industrialist Edward Beach Gallaher (1873-1953). A graduate of the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., Gallaher became a pioneer in early automobile design. In 1910 he settled in Norwalk and established the Clover Manufacturing Company, a producer of industrial abrasives. In 1917 he purchased land for an estate from Dr. Edwin Everett Smith. The site where the mansion would eventually be built, in the Cranbury section of Norwalk, had been the location, from c. 1886 to 1912, of Dr. Smith’s Kensett Sanitarium, which served people suffering from mental disorders and addictions. After a fire destroyed the sanitarium and Dr. Smith’s private cottage in 1912, the institution was moved to 65 East Avenue, on the Norwalk Green, where it operated until Smith’s retirement in 1914. The fieldstone Gallaher Mansion was designed by Percy L. Fowler in the Tudor Revival style. After Gallaher’s death, his wife Inez followed his wishes in bequeathing the mansion to the Stevens Institute. The Institute’s plans to house research projects in buildings to be erected on the estate’s grounds did not materialize. After Inez Gallaher died in 1965, the City of Norwalk acquired the 227-acre property from the Stevens Institute for use as a public park called Cranbury Park. Recent efforts by the city and the Friends of Cranbury Park, a non-profit citizen’s alliance formed in 2006, have restored the mansion and grounds. The mansion can now be rented for weddings and other events.

Trinity Parish Chapel, Southport (1872)

Trinity Parish Chapel

Trinity Episcopal Church in Southport was built in 1862. Eight years later the parish began to consider plans to build an adjacent chapel that would serve as a Sunday school. The Parish School opened on September 23, 1872 in the new Carpenter Gothic-style Chapel, which features board-and-batten siding. Originally a free-standing structure, the Chapel, which now serves as a parish hall, has been connected to the church complex through twentieth-century additions.

Cahill Beef Block (1902)

Cahill Beef Block

The building listed in the nomination to the National Register of Historic Places for the Colony Street/West Main Street Historic District as the Cahill Beef Block (55 Colony Street [historically 57 Colony Street] in Meriden) is a Georgian/Neoclassical Revival structure built in 1902-1903. It was also a branch of the Swift Beef Co., as described in Meat-packer Legislation: Hearings Before the Committee on Agriculture, House of Representatives, Sixty-Sixth Congress, Second Session, on Meat-packer Legislation, Tuesday, March 18, 1920:

C. W. Cahill, Meriden, Conn.: Local slaughterer became Swift agent, organized Cahill Beef Co. 1909. Sold out his interest to Swift 1915 because he had to handle Swift goods exclusively. Corporation dissolved 1916. Now Swift branch house.

A more detailed account of Cornelius W. Cahill’s career can be found in An Historic Record and Pictorial Description of the Town of Meriden, Connecticut and the Men Who Have Made It, AKA A Century of Meriden (1906):

He was born in Ireland, Februarv 12. 1844, and his parents located in Middletown when he was three years old. . . .

In 1865 he came to Meriden and became a clerk in the provision store of Samuel C. Paddock where by courteous attention to patrons he made himself not only valuable to his employer but popular with a large number of customers. When he was offered a more lucrative position in the same line of business he made up his mind that he could be as much value in his own store as in that of others and encouraged by his customers, of whom he had made personal friends, established the City Market. After carrying on the business for some time alone he took in a partner, John W. Coe, and continued the business for three years. John W. Coe sold his interest to Patrick Cahill and M. O’Brien. It then became known as Cahill & O’Brien Later with Bartholomew & Coe he went into the pork packing business, but within a year returned to the retail business at the City Market. Some time afterward he retired from the retail business, selling his interest in the City Market to B. B. Lane, and became again the partner of Bartholomew & Coe, who in the meantime had become the Meriden agents for Swift’s beef. At the end of a year Messrs. Coe and Bartholomew retired, selling their interest to Mr. Cahill,; who for the past twenty-five years has continued the wholesale commission business in handling the Swift beef, which at the close of the first century of Meriden’s history has increased to almost mammoth proportions.

In 1903 Swift & Co. erected their present handsome brick building on North Colony street which is equipped with every modern facility for receiving, keeping and handling the large amount of beef shipped daily from Chicago and supplied by Mr. Cahill to the meat markets in the vicinity of Meriden.

The former Swift/Cahill building is now known as The Studios at 55 and features band rehearsal rooms, a recording studio, and a performance hall.

Amariah Storrs House (1760)

Amariah Storrs House

Amariah Storrs (1728-1806), a tavern-keeper, built the house at 526 Storrs Road in Mansfield around 1760. In 1761 there were several meetings “of the proprietors of the new incorporated Township of Lebanon in the Province of Newhampshire legally warned and Convened at the house of Amariah Storrs inholder in Mansfield.” [see the History of Lebanon, N.H., by Rev. Charles A. Downs (1908) and “Early History of Lebanon” (The Granite Monthly, Vol. II/XII, Nos. 3,4, March, April 1889).] Amariah Storrs sold the house to Rev. John Sherman, who only owned for six months, in 1798-1799. The house was later owned by two carpenters: Joseph Sollace bought it in 1815 and exchanged houses with Charles Arnold in 1845. The house has been much altered over the years.