Built around 1785 by Moses Downs, the house at 639 South Britain Road in Southbury served for many years as the parsonage of the South Britain Congregational Church. The house has a Greek Revival door surround, added in the 1830s or 1840s.
Happy Independence Day! The Nathan Lester House & Farm Tool Museum on Long Cove and Vinegar Hill roads (153 Vinegar Hill Road) in Gales Ferry is owned by the town of Ledyard. A typical Connecticut farmhouse of the period, the Lester House was built in 1793 by Nathan Lester, whose father, Peter Lester, had originally purchased the farm. The house is also known as the Larrabee House because Hannah Gallup Lester, Nathan’s only child, married Captain Adam Larrabee. The house remained in the family until 1908, when it was bought by Dr. and Mrs. Charles B. Graves. In 1965, as a memorial to her parents, Elizabeth Graves Hill gave the house and 11 acres of land to the Town of Ledyard. This property included the Ledyard Oak, which was the second largest white oak in the country and appears on the Ledyard town seal. The tree was officially declared dead in June, 1969. A new white oak was planted near the original Ledyard Oak in 2009.
In 1796, Daniel Copp (1770-1822) married Sarah (Sally) Allyn and purchased land in Gales Ferry in Ledyard. Soon thereafter he built a house (64 Hurlbutt Road) and ran a merchant shop in a building next door. He sold the property in 1802 and later moved to Florida. He died in St. Augustine during a yellow fever epidemic in January 1822. His Gales Ferry property was bought by Daniel Williams in 1827 and remained in his family for almost a century. It is said that James McNeil Whistler visited the house and admired its large central hearth.
The house at 37 Main Street in North Stonington was built in 1791 by Noah Grant Jr. (1747-1801), a distant relative of Ulysses S. Grant. The rear ell was originally a separate building that was used as a general store by Hosea and Ephraim Wheeler in the late eighteenth century. The house was altered in the first half of the 1860s, when the windows were enlarged and the bay window was added. For a brief time in the early 1960s, the house was owned by the North Stonington Congregational Church and was used as a parish and Sunday school.
The former Wassuc schoolhouse, at 184 Wassuc Road in Glastonbury was built around 1840 to serve students in the east part of town. The building has since been converted into a residence and has a later wing addition.
Located across from the triangle in New Haven formed where Temple Street diverges from Whitney Avenue is the home of Berzelius, a senior society at Yale University. Founded in 1848, it is a secret society named for the Swedish scientist Jöns Jakob Berzelius. It was originally founded as part of the Sheffield Scientific School, which was later integrated into Yale University. The building, built in 1910, is located at 78 Trumbull Street. It was designed by architect Donn Barber.
The Baptist Church in Lyme was established in 1752 and the first meeting house was built in 1754 on Meetinghouse Hill. By the later eighteenth century, membership in the church had grown to point that Baptists outnumbered Congregationalists in the parish. Repairs were made to the meeting house in 1788 and in 1804 the building was plastered for the first time. Originally known as the Lyme Baptist Church, the name was changed around 1810 to the “First Baptist Church of Lyme” after a second Baptist Church was formed in town. In 1839, when the area containing the church became part of the new town of East Lyme, the church became the First Baptist Church of East Lyme. A separate Baptist church in Niantic (part of East Lyme) was formed in 1842. By that time, demographic changes had resulted in the meeting house no longer being as centrally located as it had once been. With new churches established in Niantic and Old Lyme, the First Baptist Church moved to the village of Flanders in East Lyme, completing enough of the new meeting house to make the transfer from Meetinghouse Hill to Flanders in the spring of 1843. The old meeting house was taken down and sold for lumber to help pay for construction of the new building. A parsonage was built next door in 1879. The church has been known as the Flanders Baptist and Community Church since 1929.
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