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

Plymouth Congregational Church (1838)

The Ecclesiastical Society of the section of Waterbury called Northbury (now Plymouth) was organized in 1739. The Society originally met in a building on the parish’s west side (now Thomaston). When plans were soon made to construct a meeting house on the east side, a number of west side settlers broke from the Congregational Society to form an Episcopal Society. (Plymouth was incorporated as a town in 1795 and Thomaston in 1875). As related in Francis Atwater’s History of the town of Plymouth, Connecticut (1895):

The Congregational society had its first home on the hill, and there it has always been, nor would an Episcopal society have been formed in Thomaston then if the church had been built here. The conflict was primarily of locality and only secondarily of ecclesiastical order.

The first meeting house (built c. 1747) was replaced by a second, built in 1792. The current Plymouth Congregational Church, which faces Plymouth Green, was built in 1838. It has wooden clockworks built by Eli Terry and donated by him to the church. (more…)

Morris I. Rome House (1925)

The house at 814 Laurel Avenue in the Statfield section of Bridgeport was built in 1914. It was the residence of Morris I. Rome, a wholesale tea and coffee dealer.

Stueck Building (1893)

One of the surviving nineteenth-century commercial buildings on Main Street in Middletown is the Stueck Building, built in 1893 (or perhaps as early as 1880?) at nos. 460 to 470. The building was constructed by Jacob W. Stueck, who operated a bakery. In 1914, his son, Philip Stueck, constructed an attached building on Washington Street that was home to a restaurant called Stueck’s Modern Tavern.

David Pamelee House (1807)

Not to be confused with the earlier David Parmelee House next door (68 Water Street; built in 1780), the David Parmelee House at 74 Water Street in Guilford is a Federal house, built in 1807 by architect Abraham Coan for the younger David Pamelee, who was a blacksmith. The house has a rear ell thought to have once been part of an outbuilding dating to c. 1640 which belonged to Samuel Desborough, an original settler of Guilford.

Powder Magazine, Fort Griswold (1843)

At Fort Griswold Battlefield State Park in Groton is a powder magazine. It was built in 1843 and served the fort‘s nineteenth-century river battery. The battery was paired with a larger one across the Thames River at Fort Trumbull.

Col. James Loomis House (1822)

The house at 208 Broad Street in Windsor was built in 1822 for Colonel James Loomis (1779-1862). Built of bricks manufactured by the Mack Brick Company in Windsor, it was once one of a number of residences that once stood on Broad Street across from Broad Street Green. A descendant of Joseph Loomis, who settled in Windsor in 1639, Col. Loomis was the proprietor of the village store, which stood just south of his house. His wife, Abigail Sherwood Chaffee Loomis (1798-1868), inherited Nancy Toney (1774-1857), Connecticut’s last enslaved person, in 1821. The children of James and Abigail would found what is now the Loomis Chaffee School. The house remained a residence until 1970, when it was converted into a bank.

John Booth Burrall House (1916)

The building at 30 Church Street in Waterbury was built as a house for John Booth Burrall (1879-1920), an industrialist, in 1916, the year he married Mrs. Margaret Fallon Barber. It was designed in the Georgian Revival style by Aymar Embury II, the noted New York City architect. A wing was added to the rear of the house in 1919. Burrall died suddenly the following year while spending the winter in Palm Beach, Florida. The house later became Notre Dame Academy, a co-ed Catholic school. A modern brick classroom wing was added in 1965. Today the building is the Enlightenment School, an alternative learning program for Waterbury students with behavioral and truancy problems.