Historic Buildings of Connecticut - Exploring the Nutmeg State One Building at a Time

West Street School (1760)

The West Street School is a one-room schoolhouse at 1432 West Street in Southington. It was erected about 1760 and was in continuous operation, serving the northwest quarter of town, until 1946. It has been little changed over the years, retaining its eighteenth-century exterior features and a nineteenth-century interior, which includes a pot-bellied wood stove. The site also has the school’s associated outbuildings: a woodshed and a privy. In 1933, the West Street School Alumni Association was formed. In 1947, a year after the school closed permanently, this group, by then called the West Street School and Community Association, obtained a 99-year lease on the building from the town. The West Street School is currently maintained by the Southington Historical Society. The school originally sat closer to the roadbed, but West Street was widened and lowered in front of the school in 1977, so that the building is now at least twelve feet above the road.

Burbank-Wolfe House (1864)

Yesterday’s post featured the c. 1875 Christian Swartz House, which is today part of an upscale housing complex called Haviland Gates in South Norwalk. Another Victorian-era home that is part of Haviland Gates is the Burbank-Wolfe House at 12 Haviland Street, built c. 1864. It contains two of the development’s 21 apartments. Unlike the Swartz House, the Burbank-Wolfe House was moved in 2002 to its current location from 61 South Main Street, where the City built a new police station. In the early twentieth century, the house was owned by Dr. Robert M. Wolfe (died 1940), who served as mayor of South Norwalk from 1909 to 1910 and again from 1912 to 1913. He was the last mayor of the municipality of South Norwalk before it was integrated into the City of Norwalk in 1913.

Christian Swartz House (1875)

Christian Swartz (1846-1932) served as mayor of South Norwalk in 1880 and again in 1882. He was born in Württemberg, Germany and came to America with his parents in 1849 at the age of three. In 1868, in partnership with Jeremiah Bernd of Danbury, Swartz opened a cigar shop in South Norwalk called C. Swartz and Company. In 1880, this became the Old Well Cigar Company. As related in Vol. IV of Men of Mark in Connecticut (1906), by William R. Goodspeed:

In 1882 the business of South Norwalk had grown to such large proportions that another bank was deemed a necessity. In company with Hon. R. H. Rowan, Hon. John H. Ferris, Hon. Talmadge Baker, and other prominent men, he was one of the organizers of the City National Bank, and has continued as a director of said bank since that time. In the re-organizatíon of the Norwalk Lock Company, he became one of the directors and has continued as such.

Christian Swartz‘s public services began before he entered business life. At the age of eighteen years he enlisted in the Union cause in the Civil War and served until peace was established, a period of ten months. Since that time his public services have been political rather than military, and to him politics has always meant service to his fellows of the best and highest kind. He has followed the tenets of the Democratic political body and became a Gold Democrat. He was city councilman in 1878, mayor of South Norwalk in 1880 and again in 1882, sheriff of Fairfield County from 1884 to 1887, and he has been a member of the state shell-fish commission since 1893. He is the present chairman of the city water commission, president of the board of estimates and taxation of the town of Norwalk and President of the Norwalk Hospital. He has been in many other ways a strong factor in local politics and civic growth and prosperity.

A man of deep religious convictions and training, Mr. Swartz is a devoted and regular member of the South Norwalk Congregational Church. He is a chairman of the business committee of that church and a member of the Christian Inquiry Club connected with that body. He has many fraternal and social ties, and is a Mason, and a Knight Templar. He was elected Grand Commander of the Knights Templar of Connecticut in 1892. He is a member of the South Norwalk Club, the Norwalk Club, and the Norwalk Country Club. He is fond of outdoor life, particularly at the sea-shore, and of late years has become a devotee of physical culture.

Swartz’s Italianate house, built circa 1875, is at 16 Haviland Street in South Norwalk. It contains two apartments and is part of a 21-unit rental housing enclave called Haviland Gates.

Gilbert Sisson House (1819)

Attention Readers: I will be at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center tonight at 5:00 PM discussing and signing copies of my book, Vanished Downtown Hartford. Please come to this Nook Farm Book Talk if you are in the area! The house at 85 Main Street in North Stonington was built in 1819 (according to the sign on the house) or circa 1790 (according to the nomination for North Stonington Village Historic District). It was the home of Gilbert Sisson, a cabinetmaker and merchant. Born in 1769, Sisson married Desire Main in 1791. One of their sons, Charles Grandison Sisson (1807-1874), became a contractor and railroad president in New Jersey. Another, Noyes Sisson (1798-1872), was a cabinet maker and farmer in North Stonington.

Norwalk Savings Society (1923)

Chartered in 1849, the Norwalk Savings Society occupied various spaces, including rooms in the United Bank Building from 1868 into the early twentieth century. The bank constructed a Classical Revival building at 48 Wall Street in 1923. An interesting incident in the history of Norwalk’s banking industry is related in the 1901 volume Norwalk After Two Hundred & Fifty Years as follows:

The history of a savings bank, as a rule, does not make an exciting narrative, particularly when it is carefully managed and its depositors successful and thrifty. Norwalk’s savings banks have enjoyed every advantage contributing to a peaceful financial life. Once only the Norwalk Savings Society by having a “run,” precipitated by the thoughtless attempt at wit on the part of a local newspaper. In the rear of the Street Railway barn was a high mound which had furnished the building sand of Norwalk for several years and was believed to contain a further abundant supply. Without previous indication the sand was exhausted and cobbles only were found. The local paper, departing from its usual course of recording the sickness of Mrs. Smith’s child or the painting of Brown’s rear fence, essayed a “scoop” on the sandbank incident and announced that the managers of the oldest bank in town were astounded to discover that their reserved deposits, which they believed to be good were on examination found to be worthless. The explanation that the statement referred to a sandbank was never read bv many bank depositors, but grabbing their books, they demanded payment from the old Norwalk Savings Society. To the credit of the paper it must be said that every effort was made by it to overcome the ill effects of its silly joke. Unauthorized statements and injudicious news items have in other cases and in other papers done harm to the business interests of Norwalk, even where every wish of the publishers was for the growth of the industry referred to.

John Mather House (1827)

Born in Westfield, Massachusetts in 1780, by age twenty-one John Mather was a merchant running a store in Hartford. In 1806 he started a glass works in Manchester (then still a part of East Hartford). It was soon destroyed in a fire, but the following year Mather was back in business, producing a variety of glass bottles. A hurricane in 1821 destroyed his glass factory and there is no evidence it was ever rebuilt. The location of the glass works was behind the current brick homes in the area of 109-119 Mather Street in Manchester. Mather’s home in Manchester, where he lived from 1827 to 1844, is located at 97 Mather Street, at the corner of Eastfield Street. Mather was a Mason and the local Lodge met in his house from 1829 to 1844. A painting of the house by Manchester artist Russell Cheney (1881-1945) is in the Masonic Temple on East Center Street in Manchester. A hearth with original paneling, taken from the Mather House, is also now located in the Masonic Temple with an inscription recognizing Mather’s contributions to Masonry.

Christ & Holy Trinity Episcopal Church of Westport (1863)

Christ & Holy Trinity Episcopal Church of Westport was formed in 1944 as a merger of two earlier Episcopal parishes. Christ Church (built 1833), which stood at the northeast corner of the Post Road and Ludlow Street, was consecrated on November 2, 1835. As the town grew new residents arrived who wanted a more progressive parish. In 1863 they built another Episcopal church, the Memorial Church of the Holy Trinity at 75 Church Lane. The new church was built on the site of the Disbrow Tavern, where George Washington stopped on June 28, 1775, on his way to Boston to assume command of the Continental Army. The two congregations merged in 1944, selling the former Christ Church and retaining the larger Holy Trinity Church building.