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

John Treadwell Norton House (1832)

Born in Farmington in 1795, John Treadwell Norton (d. 1869) became successful in the hardware business in Albany, New York. Treadwelll, who had been a surveyor and engineer for the Erie Canal, returned to Farnmington to construct a feeder canal that would supply water to the Farmington Canal from the Farmington River in Unionville. On land inherited in 1824 from his grandfather, he built a Georgian-style mansion at 11 Mountain Spring Road in Farmington in 1832, where he lived as a gentleman farmer. The house of his grandfather, John Treadwell (1745-1823), who served as Governor of Connecticut, had been a station on the Underground Railroad. John Treadwell Norton was also an abolitionist. He was one of the first people to visit the Amistad captives who were confined in a jail in New Haven. He played a major role in bringing the captives to Farmington, where they lived for 8 months before returning to Africa. The property was later owned by Austin Dunham Barney and was called the Barney House. For a time, the house was a used as a conference center and bed and breakfast by the University of Connecticut. In 2001, it was sold to its current owners, who have returned to calling the house its original name of Glenbrook.

Southern New England Telephone Company Building (1937)

The former Southern New England Telephone Company Administration Building is an Art Deco skyscraper built in 1937-1938 at 227 Church Street in New Haven. Also known as The Eli (after its conversion to luxury apartments in 2004), it was designed by Roy W. Foote and Douglas Orr, who made extensive use of Stony Creek pink granite. When it was built, it was the city’s tallest building.

St. John of the Cross Roman Catholic Church (1914)

St. John of the Cross Roman Catholic Church, Middlebury

St. John of the Cross Parish in Middlebury began as a mission church of St. John the Evangelist Parish in Watertown and achieved parish status in 1916. The cornerstone of its stone church on Middlebury Green was blessed on October 4, 1907 and the church was dedicated on November 22, 1914.

Middlebury Town Hall (1936)

In 1935, a fire destroyed the Congregational Church and neighboring Town Hall (built in 1896 and remodeled in 1916) in Middlebury. They were rebuilt the following year, both to designs by the architect Elbert G. Richmond (1886-1965)

Huntley-Brown House (1795)

Gurdon Clark built the Huntley-Brown House on the Boston Post Road in Laysville in Old Lyme around 1795. Matthew Peck purchased the house in 1808 and sold it to William B. Tooker in 1827. Marvin Huntley, Jr. (1800–1886) bought the house a year later and it remained in the Huntley family for over a century. In 1959, architect Jane Carter and her daughter-in-law Sue McCloud Carter purchased the house and moved it to a lot near the Florence Griswold House. Mrs. John Crosby Brown, President of the Lyme Society, acquired the house in 1974 to serve as a home for the Society’s Director. It was later converted to administrative offices and is still on the grounds of the Florence Griswold Museum.

Corning Building (1929)

The Corning Building is at the southwest corner of Main and Asylum Streets in Hartford. Today’s Corning Building was built in 1928–30 and replaced an earlier Corning Building on the site, which dated to the 1870s. Before that, the three-story Robinson and Corning Building stood here. Dating to the 1820s, it was long home to the Brown & Gross bookstore, which later moved to Asylum Street. Arriving by train to deliver a speech in Hartford on March 5, 1860, future president Abraham Lincoln walked up Asylum Street to the bookstore, where he first met Gideon Welles, the editor of the Hartford Evening Press. Welles would later serve as Lincoln’s secretary of the navy. Dr. Horace Wells had his office here, where in 1844 he had a tooth successfully removed without pain after first inhaling laughing gas–the first use of anesthesia. A plaque was placed on the Corning Building in 1894 to honor Wells on the fiftieth anniversary of his discovery.

Heli Hoadley House (1805)

The Federal-style house at 37 Park Street in Guilford was constructed in 1805 by builder Abraham Coan for Heli Hoadley and his wife, Mabel Ann Seward. Hoadley soon moved to New Haven. As described in The Hoadley Genealogy (1894) by Francis Bacon Trowbridge:

Heli Hoadley resided in New Haven, Conn., and carried on the business of making trucks, carts, wheelbarrows, etc. His shop was situated on State street on the homestead lot, where Osborne street has since been cut through. After his wife’s death he gave up his flourishing business, and the property was sold and divided between the children. He died at his son John’s in North Haven and was buried in the Grove Street cemetery in New Haven.

The house was then owned by the Reverend Aaron Dutton, who was minister at the First Congregational Church of Guilford from 1806 to 1842. He resigned because of dissension in the church concerning his abolitionist views, which his congregation deemed too radical. The house was also once home to Charles Hubbard, a writer, teacher and artist. Hubbard referred to his third floor studio as Hobgoblin Hall.