The house at 222 Saybrook Road, in the Higganum section of Haddam, was built in 1895. It is a good example of a vernacular house that has applied Victorian-era decoration and an Eastlake style porch. Adella Tabor bought the land in 1893 and built the house two years later. In 1908, the house was inherited by two sisters, Ella Virginia Burr and Abby Burr, who both died in 1924. The house was then sold out of the family by their niece, Ruth A. Burr.
The front section of the house at 7 East Street, facing the Green in Litchfield, was added in 1770 (or 1782) to an older section that possibly dates to the mid-eighteenth century. The land was once part of a homelot that was set aside for Rev. Timothy Collins, minister of the First Congregational Church. The older section of the house is thought to have been Rev. Collins’s house, while the front section was added by his son John to serve as a tavern (although it may not have been used as one). In 1913, with the building’s owners were threatening to demolish the house, local residents formed the Phelps House Corporation to purchase the building in order to protect the historical character of the north side of the Green. Today the house is privately owned.
The house at 32 Pearl Street, at the intersection with Clift Street in Mystic was built in 1854 in the Greek Revival style by James Gallup, a carpenter-builder. Describing the community of West Mystic around the year 1850, the book Historic Groton (1909) notes that “At the same period the Messrs. Gallup brothers, James, John and Benadam, carpenters, had a shop and lumber yard on the east side of Gravel St.”
Yesterday I featured the factory of the J. H. Sessions Clock Company, which is located at 61 East Main Street in the Forestville section of Bristol. Part of the factory complex is the company’s former main office building, a Jacobethan Revival-style structure erected c. 1918. It was designed by Bristol architect Harold A. Hayden, who also drew the plans for the Soldiers’ Memorial Monument of Bristol after serving in World War One.
In 1870, John Humphrey Sessions (1828-1899) of Bristol merged his wood turning business with a trunk hinge factory that had been established by his late brother, Albert J. Sessions. The company expanded in the following decades under the leadership of J. H. Sessions, who brought his son, John Henry Sessions, on as a partner. After the elder Sessions’ death in 1899, the family would continue to run the business well into the twentieth century. In addition to the hardware business, the family built a huge foundry on Farmington Avenue in 1895 and acquired a large clock factory on East Main Street in Forestville after taking over the E. N. Welch Manufacturing Company in 1902. Elisha N. Welch (1809-1887) had started manufacturing clocks in the 1850s. The company he founded began to decline after his death in 1887. Although it rebuilt its East Main Street factory complex a year after it was devastated by two fires in 1899, the firm had had to borrow money and continued to suffer financially. William E. Sessions, a son of John Humphrey Sessions, and his nephew, Albert L. Sessions, son of John Henry Sessions, soon bought enough Welch stock to take control of the company in 1902. They changed its name to the Sessions Clock Company on January 9, 1903. The company would flourish for many years, but went into decline after World War II. The company was sold in the 1950s and eventually liquidated. By the early 1970s the various factory buildings were sold off. The complex is now known as the Forestville Industrial Center and is now used by small industrial and commercial firms.
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The Congregational Church in Pomfret Center was organized in 1715 and its first meeting house was erected on White’s Plains, located on Pomfret Hill, just north of Needle’s Eye Road. The next meeting house was built on the town common in Pomfret Center in 1762. Interestingly, the church was painted orange. (In the coming years, the neighboring towns of Windham, Killingly, Thompson, and Brooklyn would emulate Pomfret’s example!). The church’s third meeting house was erected in 1832 on land acquired from a Dr. Waldo. The land was purchased with proceeds generated by the women of the church, who had knitted a hundred pairs of stockings to sell. In erecting the new church, builder Lemuel Holmes salvaged much of the building materials from the previous structure.
On December 7, 2013, a fire (likely caused by an accident during the repair of the building’s front steps) destroyed the historic church. It was soon rebuilt, following the original design as closely as possible, while creating a building that is a little larger than the original and set further back on the property at 13 Church Road. Construction took three years, with the new steeple being raised into place on August 30, 2016.
Happy Independence Day! To celebrate I’m sharing some photos I took last October at Fort Griswold in New London. First established in 1775, at the start of the American Revolution, the fort was the site of the Battle of Groton Heights, fought on September 6, 1781, during Benedict Arnold’s destructive raid on New London. In use as a fort at different times until after the Spanish-American War, today the site can be visited by the public at Fort Griswold Battlefield State Park. On this site I’ve previously featured two structures at the park: the monument, erected in 1830 to commemorate the 1781 battle, and a powder magazine built in 1843. Click below for more pictures and have a safe holiday!
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