Henry C. Dwight School (1885)

To celebrate the release of my new book this week, A Guide to Historic Hartford, Connecticut, I’ll be featuring Hartford buildings. The Henry C. Dwight School, at 585 Wethersfield Avenue, consists of two attached structures. The earlier one (image above) was built in about 1885 and is a polychromatic High Victorian Gothic building designed by Jacob Bachmeyer. In 1901, a larger addition (see below) in the Renaissance Revival style was constructed, which more than doubled the size of the school. Known as the Wethersfield Avenue School, it was later renamed for Henry C. Dwight, wool merchant, president of Mechanics Savings Bank, mayor of Hartford in 1890–92 and chairman of Hartford’s South School District. (more…)

Saint Peter and Saint Paul Ukrainian Catholic Church (1916)

In 1897, Immigrants in Ansonia from what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire established one of the first parishes of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the United States. The first St. Peter and St. Paul Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was constructed in 1897-1898 on May Street. In 1910, the congregation purchased land at 105 Clifton Avenue, where the current church was built in 1915-1916. Plans for the church were sent by an architect from Lviv, Halychyna and the architectural firm of Johnson and Burns of Hartford was selected to complete the blueprints. The church’s roof is covered in red tiles and the domes are clad in copper. A major restoration of the building took place in 1987-1989.

Thomas-Bradstreet House (1838)

Born in Wolcott in 1785, Seth Thomas first worked in the clock business under Eli Terry and later purchased Terry’s clock-making business in 1810. Thomas moved to Plymouth Hollow (later named Thomaston in his honor) in 1813 and founded the famous Seth Thomas Clock Company, which continued in business until the 1980s. In 1838, Seth Thomas purchased the house at 237 Main Street in Thomaston from Marvin Blakeslee. It had probably been built in about 1825 and is the only remaining of the five houses owned by the Thomas family on Main Street. In 1850, Thomas sold it to his daughter, Amanda Thomas Bradstreet, whose husband, Thomas Jefferson Bradstreet, was a descendant of the Puritan poet, Anne Bradstreet. The house remained in the family until the death of Miss Edith Bradstreet Mather in 2004. The following year, the Town of Thomaston bought the property from her surviving sister, Clara-Louise Mather Riggs. The Thomas-Bradstreet House, restored by the Thomaston Historical Commission, is now a house museum open to the public.