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

Frederick Ives House (1866)

Frederick Ives (1832-1883) was an axle manufacturer in Hamden. Continuing the business started by his father, Henry Ives, he formed Frederick Ives & Co. with Willis E. Miller and George E. Ives during the Civil War. When George E. Ives left to partner with L.F. Goodyear, the company continued as Ives & Miller, later called the Mount Carmel Axle Works. Frederick Ives’ house at 478 Orange Street in New Haven was built in 1866. It has Indian-style columns of a kind favored by architect Henry Austen.

Mansfield General Store (1886)

The general store at 534 Storrs Road in Mansfield was built in 1886 by Charles H. Weeks. Above the store was Elmwood Hall, where town meetings and events were held. John Starkweather briefly owned the store in 1897 before selling it to Alfred Oden, who ran it for thirty years. In 1906, Oden, who lived above the store, fired shots from the balcony at two escaping burglars who had just blown open the store safe. One of them left behind a derby riddled with shotgun holes! In 1928, Oden sold the store to Thomas Arthur Barrows and Gustav Clauson. After the latter died, Barrows bought his share. He was later joined by his sister, Gertrude Burnham, and for many years the store was called Barrows and Burnham. It is now known as the the Mansfield General Store. The Mansfield Center Post Office was located here from 1899 to 1954.

Arnold Allen House (1805)

The brick house at 954 Main Street in South Windsor was built in 1805. There have been additions since that time. The house was built for Arnold Allen (1759-1846) of Massachusetts, a Revolutionary War veteran, the year of his marriage to Mary Elmer, who was born in South Windsor in 1775.

William H. Taft Mansion (1870)

The Mansard-roofed house at 111 Whitney Avenue in New Haven (pdf) was built in 1870. It is known as the William H. Taft Mansion because the former President (1909-1913) (soon to be Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court) owned the house around the time of the First World War, although he never actually lived in it. He sold the house in 1921. Extensively remodeled in 2008, the house was recently used as the offices of Research Edge, an independent research firm, which later became Hedgeye Risk Management. More recently, the house has become home to the William F. Buckley Jr. Program, a Yale conservative group founded in 2010.

David Hale House (1795)

Reverend David Hale of Coventry was the younger brother of Nathan Hale. He served as pastor of the Newent Congregational Church in Lisbon from 1790 to 1803. In 1795 he built a house in Lisbon (4 Newent Road) that continued to be used as the church parsonage until the late 1960s when it became a private residence. It is now home to an antiques shop known as The Skeleton Key at the Hale House.

As described in the History of New London County, Connecticut, with Biographical Sketches of its Pioneers and Prominent Men (1882), compiled by D. Hamilton Hurd:

In June, 1790, Mr. David Hale, of Coventry, was ordained. He was a brother of the accomplished and chivalrous Capt. Nathan Hale, who was executed as a spy on Long Island by order of Sir William Howe. Mr. Hale was a man of very gentle and winning manners, of exalted piety, and a fine scholar. He carried his idea of disinterested benevolence to such an extent that, if acted upon, it would overturn all social institutions. He thought it to be a man’s duty to love his neighbor, not only as himself, with the same kind of love, but also to the same degree, so that he should not prefer, even in thought, that a contingent calamity, such as the burning of a house or the loss of a child, should fall on his neighbor rather than on himself. Mr. Hale supplied the deficiencies of his salary by keeping a boarding-school. As an instructor he was popular; his house was filled with pupils from all parts of the county, but ill health and a constitutional depression of spirits obliged him to resign this employment, and eventually his pastoral office. His mind and nerves were of that delicate and sensitive temperament which cannot long endure the rude shock of earthly scenes. He was dismissed in April, 1803, returned to Coventry, and there died in 1822.

Abiel Canfield House (1784)

Abiel Canfield (1753-1812) served in the Revolutionary War. He married Mary Barlow of Statford in (1754-1840) in 1779. In the back yard of his 1784 house at 83 West Street in Seymour, Canfield had a shop where he manufactured brass and pewter buttons, buckles, and sleigh bells.

St. James Episcopal Church, New London (1850)

Happy Easter! St. James’ parish in New London began with a small group of Episcopalians in 1725. Their first church was a wooden building on New London’s Parade, opened in 1732. It was destroyed by fire when New London was burned in 1781 during the Battle of Groton Heights. Samuel Seabury (1729–1796), consecrated in 1784 as the first bishop of the American Episcopal Church, served as rector of St. James from 1785 until his death in 1796. He is now buried in the current (third) St. James Church. The second church was consecrated in 1787, but by the mid-nineteenth century a larger building was needed. By that time the parish had grown significantly and included some of New London’s wealthiest and most influential families. The third St. James Church, located at the corner of Huntington and Federal Streets, was built in 1847-1850. It was designed by the famous architect Richard Upjohn, construction starting just a year after he completed Trinity Church in Manhattan. Starting in 1910, St. James’s original stained glass windows were replaced by six new memorial stained glass windows designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany.