Trinity Episcopal Church, Tariffville (1872)

Trinity Episcopal Church in Tariffville, Simsbury was founded in 1848 and began holding worship services in Mitchelson Hall on Elm Street in Tariffville. Trinity purchased a former Presbyterian Church in 1856, but this building was seized to make way for railroad tracks in 1871. The present church, designed by Henry C. Dudley, was constructed on Church Street in 1872-1873. A parish house was built behind the church in 1932 and a modern classroom and office wing was added in 1968.

John Warburton House (1803)

The first house to built in what would become the manufacturing village of Talcottville in Vernon was the brick Federal-style house of John Warburton, constructed in 1803. Warburton was a skilled mechanic who emigrated from England in 1792. He introduced mechanized cotton spinning to Connecticut in 1795, creating a water-powered cotton mill while he was working for the Pitkin family of East Hartford. In 1802, he left the Pitkins and, with his partner Daniel Fuller, built the first cotton-spinning mill on the Tankerhoosen River in Vernon (then called North Bolton). The Warburton House still stands at 19 Main Street in Talcottville, next to the old dam and mill pond. The house has notable brick fringe work found only on its north-facing corner. A second and grander Warburton House, known as the “Four Chimney House,” once stood nearby, but no longer survives.

James Warner House (1760)

The house at 447 Old Main Street in Rocky Hill was built around 1760 and was home to the Deming family. The covered Federal-style front doorway portico was added to the house around 1800. The property was later owned by members of the Merriam family. Around 1863, James Warner acquired the house, which was valued at $10,000 in the 1860 census. The property continued to be farmed by members of the Warner family over several generations. It was passed down to Carl Warner, an optician who later retired to St. Petersburg, Florida, where he died in 1967. Carl Warner also owned the house next door, which was built in 1773 and later demolished. The current owners of the James Warner House purchased it in October 2011 and have a blog called Confessions of An Antique Home in which they relate their adventures in owning a historic house.

Charles Bulkeley II House (1785)

Charles Bulkeley the 2nd was a ship captain who built the house at 530 Old Main Street in Rocky Hill between 1785 and 1790. He lived just down the street from the house of his father, Charles Bulkeley, Sr. The younger Charles Bulkeley married Eunice Robbins in 1785. After her husband died of smallpox in the West Indies in 1799, Eunice stayed on in the house until her own death in 1835 and passed it down to her unmarried daughter Augusta.

Nellie E. McKnight Museum (1812)

The Nellie E. McKnight Museum is a historic house owned by the Ellington Historical Society. Located at 70 Main Street, the brick Federal house was built in 1812 for Charles Sexton, a farmer and store owner. Howard McKnight, the father of Nellie E. McKnight, bought the house in 1922. Nellie McKnight had been born on her father’s farm in Ellington in 1894. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1917 and taught school until 1929, when she return to Ellington and became the librarian of the Hall Memorial Library, a position she held until her retirement in 1967. She continued to live in the Sexton/McKnight house until her death in 1981, when the house and its contents were bequeathed to the Historical Society to become a museum.

Hall Family School for Boys (1840)

The Hall family of Ellington had a long association with education in the nineteenth century. As related in vol. 1 of The History and Genealogies of Ancient Windsor, Connecticut (1891):

In 1825, Mr. John Hall opened a school, primarily for the instruction of his own children, though it was not limited to them. […] This school was continued till 1829. […] This was succeeded by “the Ellington School,” which was incorporated by the General Assembly in 1829. A large and handsome building, 128 feet in length, was erected on the gentle rise of ground west of the village […] and the school was opened in the autumn of 1829. Mr. Hall was principal for ten years from that time, and his assistants were mostly graduates of Yale. […] The pupils, who were boys exclusively, came not only from Connecticut, but from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and other states as far south as Louisiana; also from the West Indies and Brazil. They were prepared either for college or for business life, and some of them afterward became men of prominence.

The school was continued, with several changes of management, until 1870. A dedication to education continued in the next generation:

In 1844, Edward Hall, the oldest son of the founder of the Ellington School, established a family school which in a few years acquired an excellent reputation. The boys that were placed in his charge received a thorough training, both morally and intellectually. The school was maintained successfully for nearly thirty years, and many boys living in the town, as well as those from abroad, were profited by the opportunities which it afforded. For nearly half a century the two men, father and son, were foremost in promoting education in the community.

Among the pupils of Hall’s school in the 1870s was a student from Japan, Yanosuke Iwasaki, who became the second president of the Mitsubishi Corporation.

Edward Hall’s school, at 107-109 Main Street in Ellington, is now an apartment house. The building began with the west section on the left, a Greek Revival house that was later duplicated for the east section on the right. The two sections were joined by the higher central section. The school was closed in 1875, the year of Edward Hall died. In 1891, his widow and daughter sold the house to Theodore C.F. Berr, a blacksmith. (more…)