Last week the Hartford Courant published a story about Hartford Hospital‘s plan to demolish the century-old Hall-Wilson Laboratory to expand its electrical power plant, a move opposed by preservationists. I found two Hartford Courant articles about the building at the time of its construction and its dedication.
(more…)
My latest video is about a photograph of State Street in Hartford from c. 1900. I describe all of the buildings that lined the street and what became of them. This is an expansion of my previous post about this photo. If you enjoy the video, please remember to hit the “Like” button. Also, please consider subscribing to the channel!
Mystic Seaport recreates a drugstore of the period 1870-1885 in a building the museum erected in 1953. A small recreated doctor’s office adjoins the drugstore building. The store is named for the Binghurst family of pharmacists, which began with Joseph Bringhurst (1767-1834), who operated a drugstore in Wilmington, Delaware. The Bringhurst collection was given to Mystic Seaport by Smith, Kline & French Laboratories, which had acquired it after the store closed. The building also contains the Abram P. Karsh collection of pharmaceutical items from the Philadelphia area.
Israel H. Wilson moved from Danbury to Bethel in 1836 and operated an undertaking business until 1851. He then opened the town’s first hotel, which was located in the house at 4 Chestnut Street. The house was built about 1761 and and at one time was a tavern, operated by P. T. Barnum‘s grandfather, Phineas Taylor, and then by his parents, Philo and Irena Barnum. Wilson was a advocate of the temperance cause: he named the hotel Temperance House and he also erected a temperance hall (no longer standing) just south of the hotel. By the late 1870s the hotel was known as the Bethel House or Bethel Hotel. Wilson retired from the hotel business in 1885. For some years the house was home to the Mead family and it is now a duplex. The house was much altered in the Italianate style in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
A good example of the American Foursquare style is the house just east of the Market on Bantam Road in the Bantam section of Litchfield (its official address is 15 Tulip Drive). It was built in 1915 to serve as the parsonage of the Bantam Methodist Church. The church sold the property to the Bantam Lumber Company in 1973. The house was likely a mail order precut kit house produced by The Aladdin Company.
The William T. Tibbals House, at 11 Old Middletown Road in the Cobalt section of the town of East Hampton, has an unusual shape that some have classified as an octagon but seems closer to an oval and is said to be known as “the round house.” The roof may have had an octagon shape at one time, but today it seems to have the sides of a dodecagon, or 12-sided polygon. The house was built in 1857, which was during the peak of the fad in construction of octagon houses, and it has the stucco exterior and bracketed roof typical of octagon house construction, so perhaps we could consider it a relative of the octagon houses. It was built for William Thadeus Tibbals, operated an oakum works (used for caulking wooden ships) on Cobalt Stream that had been started by his father, Thadeus Tibbals, in 1828. After William’s death, his widow lived in the house and his son, Irvin Tibbals, who continued the oakum business with William’s brothers.
(more…)
You must be logged in to post a comment.