Daniel Eels (1757-1851), a cooper, built a house on Main Street in Cromwell around 1782. He moved to Whitestown, New York in 1795 and sold the property, which then had a number of owners until 1802, when it was purchased by William Smith, who then sold it to his brother Capt. John Smith. The house (373 Main Street) may actually have been built at that time, instead of the earlier date of 1782. In the late nineteenth century, this Colonial/Federal house was altered in the Queen Anne style.
Having already resided in the house at 122 Windham Street in Willimantic, Wilton E. Little (1859-1903) and his wife Edith Clark Little (1862-1935), sold the house and moved to a new home they built in 1896 at 333 Prospect Street. Little had risen up through the ranks at the W.G. & A.R. Morrison Company.
At 93 Shunpike Road, corner of Evergreen Road, in Cromwell is a brick Federal-style house constructed circa 1811 to 1815. The house was built by Eber Sage (1790-1848) on land deeded to him by his father, Solomon Sage. In 1835 Eber Sage’s house and farm were purchased by Samuel Kirby (1771-1849). In 1875 the property was sold from the Kirby family to Patrick Caffrey and remained in his family until 1944.
Built around 1810, the house at 736 Main Street (at Cedar Street) in Branford was dated in a W.P.A. survey to c. 1834, perhaps because it has a later Greek Revival doorway. The house was likely constructed by Linus Robinson who soon sold it to John Hobart and Edmund Palmer. The house remained in the Palmer family through the nineteenth century and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places as the Isaac Palmer House.
Rev. John Trumbull (1715-1787) became pastor of the Congregational Church in Watertown in 1739. A slave owner, Rev. Trumbull married Sarah Whitman, daughter of Rev. Samuel Whitman of Farmington, in 1744. He was also the uncle of Connecticut’s Revolutionary War governor Jonathan Trumbull. Rev. Trumbull’s first house in town, no longer standing, was a saltbox on the east side of Main Street, south of the church. In 1772 he built a larger house just next to the church. Located at 40 DeForest Street, the house became a tavern (it was Lockwoood’s Tavern and then David Woodward’s Tavern) in the 1790s and was remodeled with a large ballroom on the third floor. Shed dormer windows on the roof and Neoclassical porches at either side of the house were added after 1900.
The house at 9 Totoket Road in Branford was built around 1757, the year that its first owner, Isaac Hoadley (1728-1812), married Elizabeth Blackstone (1731-1818). According to The Hoadley Genealogy (1894) by Francis Bacon Trowbridge:
Isaac Hoadley was a carpenter by trade and probably built the old house in which he, his son Abel, and some of his descendants lived. He inherited his father’s farm in the Damascus district of Branford, and was a well-to-do farmer. He was a leading member of Trinity Episcopal Church in Branford and was its junior warden 1794-1804 and 1806-1807, and senior warden in 1805. He and his wife were buried in Damascus burying-ground.
The house has a Greek Revival doorway, added around 1840 when the house appears to have been substantially renovated.
Christ Episcopal Church in West Haven, the second oldest Episcopal parish in Connecticut, was established in 1723, supported by the missionary work of Rev. Samuel Johnson of the state’s oldest parish in Stratford. A wood frame church was constructed in West Haven by 1740. A traprock Gothic Revival church was built on Church Street, across from the West Haven Green, in 1906 and consecrated in 1907. It was designed by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue of Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson. The church is connected to the Parish House, built in 1916. In 2006, Christ Church merged with another Episcopal church, St John’s by the Sea, to form the Church of the Holy Spirit. The former church building of St. John’s by the Sea, built in 1953 on Ocean Avenue in West Haven, was secularized in 2008 and sold.
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