Frederick Crum House (1836)

120 Main St., Unionville

At 120 Main Street in Unionville is a Greek Revival house (pdf) built in 1836 by Frederick W. Crum (1813-1895) and his wife Ellice C. Crum (1812-1846). Crum’s second wife was Susan M. Crum (1822-1902). His company, Hill and Crum, manufactured saws. As related in the second volume of the Memorial History of Hartford County (1886):

in 1854 Mr. Albert Hills and Mr. Frederick W. Crum built a small factory on the Cowles Canal. The business continued until the rise of the great saw-factories in Pennsylvania, during the war period, made competition too severe for small concerns. They sold out their factory to the Union Nut Company.

Crum later made caskets and became an undertaker.

Samuel Lay House (1732)

Samuel Lay House

Samuel Lay married Hannah Hayden in 1726. In 1732, they built a house at 57 Main Street in Essex, near the boat wharf. It was on this property that the earliest Lay home in Essex had been built. The Lay House had numerous owners over the years. By the turn of the twentieth century it had become a crowded tenement. In 1907 it was leased to the Dauntless Yacht Club, which is now located across the street. The house was remodeled in 1939. Among later twentieth century residents was the author Hartzell Spence. In 2012 the house was acquired by the neighboring Connecticut River Museum.

Gridley-Munson House (1849)

Gridley-Munson House

Having built a store north of the Congregational Church in Watertown in 1846, Amos Gridley built his Italianate-style house next door (10 Deforest Street) in 1849. Gridley eventually went bankrupt. The house had other owners. In 1912, James Woolson remodeled it in the colonial revival style, adding the porches on the side of the house (the front portico is original). The house was later owned by William J. Munson, who donated the house and land to the town in 1928 in memory of his wife. The house now contains the Board of Education offices and the land, known as the Marion B. Munson Memorial Park, is joined to the Watertown Public Green.

St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, East Haddam (1890)

St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, East Haddam (1890)

An Episcopal Society in East Haddam was formed in 1791 by members of the First Congregational Church, who perhaps left that congregation because of plans to build a new meeting house too far from the Connecticut River landings. In 1795, the Society built the first St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church on a hill overlooking the East Haddam river landings. The current church building, at 31 Main Street, was consecrated in 1890. It was built on land offered to the church by Judge Julius Attwood. The church was constructed in an eclectic Victorian mode in which the Shingle style predominates. The church’s bell, acquired in 1834-1835, came from a Spanish monastery and bears an inscription with the date 815. After the congregation moved to the current church, the bell sat on a wall near the church until a bell tower was completed in 1904.