Hello everyone! Please check out my first YouTube video! It’s about some interesting frogs that lived in Hartford over 120 years ago. If you enjoy the video, please consider hitting the “Like” button and subscribing to the channel– It’s called “History with Dan.”
Just south of the Mill Pond, at 25 Main Street in the Ivoryton section of Essex, is a house built in 1809 by Daniel Griswold (1780-1870). In 1801 he had married Fanny Babcock (1779-1859). After her death in 1859, Daniel, who was then 79 years old, married Fanny Spencer. Daniel’s son William inherited the house. He would supply land for the new business enterprise of Comstock & Griswold, started in 1834 by his brother Edwin Griswold and Samuel M. Comstock, that would soon start producing ivory combs, launching the ivory industry in Ivoryton.
The house at 259 Cherry Brook Road in Canton was built sometime before 1800 (an chestnut beam in the attic is inscribed with the date 1789). It was the home of Jesse Barber, a cobbler who had a shop north of his house and also a tannery. He would fix the shoes of the children who walked by his home on their way to school. For many years the house’s residents got their water from a spring on the hill to the east which traveled through a system of split and grooved logs laid end-to-end. This was later replaced by a lead pipe that had to be kept unfrozen in the winter to prevent clogging. New owners, Dennis and Wanda Mahoney, replaced this system with an artesian well in 1953. They also extensively restored the house and totally rebuilt the rear ell. An earlier owner, Ambrose Norman, had kept riding horses, but gave up the house to a grain merchant from Granby to satisfy an unpaid feed bill.
Christ Church in Pomfret, consecrated in 1882, was designed in a rural Victorian Gothic style by architect Howard Hoppin. It was constructed through a memorial gift of the Vinton family in honor of the Rev. Dr. Alexander H. Vinton and his wife, Eleanor Stockbridge Thompson Vinton. Their friend, Rev. Phillips Brooks of Boston, who wrote “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” preached at the laying of the church’s cornerstone. The building is architecturally distinctive, with an interesting use of rubble stone and brick and an exaggerated roof line. It replaced an earlier church building, built the 1820s, that once stood to the north of the church’s current location. The church has six Tiffany stained glass windows.
The Henry B. Bissell House, built in 1850, is located at 202 Maple Street in the Bantam section of Litchfield. In an area with numerous eighteenth and nineteenth-century wood frame farmhouses, it is a rare example of a stone house, being constructed of ashlar granite. The Bissell family, descended from one of Litchfield’s earliest settlers, were major landowners in Bantam. Henry B. Bissell (1814-1897), who built the house, was a deacon of the Congregational Church. He was described in 1896 in a Biographical Review volume entitled The Leading Citizens of Litchfield County, as “one of the most respected and prosperous agriculturists of this section of the county.” The book goes on to explain:
Deacon Henry B. Bissell had better educational advantages than were generally given a farmer’s son in his time. After finishing with the district schools he was sent to the seminary, where he was under the instruction of John P. Brace. He subsequently engaged in teaching, which he continued for six winters. His chief occupation, however, was assisting on the home farm, where he remained until twenty-eight years of age. Having by that time much experience in general farming he then bought the property on which he now resides. Since that time he has placed the two hundred and thirty acres of fertile land in a yielding condition and made many other valuable improvements, sparing neither time nor expense for that purpose. In 1850 Deacon Bissell erected his present residence, which stands on rising ground overlooking the village three miles distant, the granite used in its construction having been quarried on his own farm. He pays a good deal of attention to dairying, keeping some twenty head of fine cows, and finds this branch of his business quite profitable.
The house remained in the Bissell family until 1985, a period of 135 years.
The Boardman School at Mystic Seaport is a one room schoolhouse that was originally built in the town of Preston. It may date to as early as 1765 (or c. 1840) and was named for the Boardman family whose land was adjacent to the schoolhouse. When the section of Preston called Glasgo, where the school was located, became the separate town of Griswold in 1815, Boardman School became District Seven School (it was also known as Potter Hill School). It served as a school until 1949, when it was moved to Mystic Seaport.
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The historic Porter Gristmill, which started operation in 1740 under the original mill operator Ebenezer Fuller, is located along Jeremy Brook at the west end of the Hebron Center Historic District. The original millworks were later moved to Old Sturbridge Village, where the millstones and other parts are now located in the village‘s 1938 Gristmill building. One of the surviving mill buildings, at 55 West Main Street in Hebron, is the miller’s house (pictured above), which was erected in 1790. The house’s front façade is one story, while the rear is three stories.
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