This video is about what once existed on a block of Asylum Street in Hartford, CT where the City Place office towers were built in the 1980s. This included the house where J. P. Morgan was born, the sites of many historic Hartford businesses (including music stores, Turkish baths, bakeries and clothing stores), and a controversial mural that sparked public debate in the 1970s.
My latest video is about the growth of G. Fox & Company in Hartford, from the aftermath of the fire which destroyed the store in 1917 through the expansions of the 1930s through 1960s.
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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