Polish immigrants in Suffield organized the St. Joseph Polish Society in 1905 and purchased land for a church. Suffield had been under the care of priests from Windsor Locks, but the town’s Polish Catholics wanted a pastor of their own. St. Joseph’s Parish in Suffield was organized in 1916, the first parish church being the Edwin D. Morgan stable, purchased earlier by the St. Joseph Society. The parish‘s current church was built in 1951-1952.
Prominent on the campus of the Taft School, a boarding school in Watertown, is Charles Phelps Taft Hall. It was named for Charles Phelps Taft I (1843-1929), a lawyer and U.S. Representative, who was the bother of Taft School founder Horace Dutton Taft and U.S. President William Howard Taft. Built in 1929-1930, Charles Phelps Taft Hall was designed by the firm of James Gamble Rogers. A boys dormitory, the building also contains the Woolworth Faculty Room, which was formerly the school library. Charles Phelps Taft Hall connects seamlessly with other adjacent campus buildings to form a single unified structure with a shared architectural vocabulary and materials. This structure was begun in the early twentieth century with an Arts and Crafts/Gothic building designed by Bertram G. Goodhue. The complex was then expanded by James Gamble Rogers. A recently built section, which connects to Charles Phelps Taft Hall and complements its Collegiate Gothic style, is the John L. Vogelstein ’52 Dormitory, designed by Robert A.M. Stern.
Fuller Hall (185 North Main Street in Suffield) is a dormitory and admissions building at Suffield Academy. It was built in 1886 when the school was still known as the Connecticut Literary Institute (it was renamed the Suffield School in 1916 and Suffield Academy in 1937). Today it remains “the building at the heart of Suffield Academy.”
According to the sign on the Ebenezer Evans House at 17 Long Bottom Road in Southington, the house was built “before 1767.” According to Heman R. Timlow’s Ecclesiastical and Other Sketches of Southington, Conn. (1875), Ebenezer Evans was the
son of Ebenezer and Mary Gridley, his wife, b. Sept. 19, 1742, in Farmington (Southington parish); m. Jan. 19, 1769, Sarah, daughter of Reuben Munson, of Southington. He resided in Southington, where Josiah H. Merriman now lives. He removed to Conway, Mass., where he was living in 1782; but returned to Southington, where he died of influenza, March 24, 1816, aged 75 years.
Anson Merriman (1786-1853) moved to the house in 1832. His father, Chauncey Merriman, had already started a farm on land purchased from Ebenezer Evans in 1809. Anson started the apple orchard on the farm that was continued by his son, Josiah H. Merriman (1834-1912), and then by Josiah’s daughter Sarah (1867-1957) and her husband (m. 1888) Elijah Rogers (1861-1949), who was one of the first farmers in Connecticut to grow peaches commercially. The Rogers Orchard continues today.
The John Bishop House is a Federal-style house in Newent in Lisbon. The Bishop family were early settlers of Lisbon, when it was a part of Norwich. The house is notable for having a well shaft in the pantry/buttery, so the family did not have to go outside to get water. The house is now the John Bishop Museum, run by the Lisbon Historical Society. Work was done in 2011 to replace the house’s wood roofing.
The Case Block, at 22-28 Spring Street in Bristol, was built as row house block of four apartments by the builder/architect Joel Case. It was constructed a year after Case’s Castle Largo, located on nearby Center Street, which is also built of brick. Case had laid out Spring Street and, after the Case Block, proceeded to build the other houses on the street. After many years of having its original Italianate style obscured by the loss of its exterior decorative elements (including its front entry porches) and many layers of paint, the Case Block was later restored to its original distinctive appearance.
The Town Hall at 9 Devotion Road across from the Green in Scotland was built in 1896 as the Scotland Consolidated School on the site of the former Center District School. At that time the building provided space for the town hall and library on the second floor. (more…)
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