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

Plainville Campground (1865-1910)

Camp meetings, religious revival meetings where parishioners would set up their carts and tents around a central preaching platform, were once a vital feature of frontier American Protestant Evangelicalism in the nineteenth century. Participants, freed from their daily routines, could attend the almost continuous services that often lasted several days. While Presbyterians and Baptists sponsored camp meetings, these religious gatherings came to be particularly associated with the Methodist denomination. Methodists soon introduced the camp meeting, originally a western phenomenon that flourished before the Civil War, to the east.

The New Haven District of the Methodist Church founded a campground for summer revival meetings in the west end of Plainville (320 Camp Street) in 1865. Methodist camp meetings would continue to be held there every summer until 1957. Initially tents were pitched around a central platform. Soon the Association Building was constructed, where equipment could be stored. Individual churches then began constructing 2-story cottages facing the center of the Campground, along what is known as The Circle. Nineteen of these central cottages survive today. Individual families also began to build their own cottages on the narrow avenues radiating from The Circle, replacing the tents of the campground‘s early years. Most of the cottages date from the 1880s to 1910, although a few were constructed as late as 1925. The present Auditorium building was built around 1905 in place of the original preaching platform. At one time a screened pavilion, the Auditorium is now open to the outside. The Plainville Campground Association purchased the property from the Methodists in 1957. 87 of the cottages are now private residences, the other 39 being owned by various churches. A few of the cottages have been modified for year-round use, while the rest are occupied in the summer. I have additional photos of the Campground: (more…)

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.