The house at 283 Brewster Street in Black Rock, Bridgeport was built in 1840 for George Palmer, an oysterman. The house’s unusually high basement may have been used to store oysters for shipment. In 1850 the house was bought by Daniel Golding, who managed the mills at Ash Creek. He changed his name to Goldin for business reasons because the “g” at the end of his name wouldn’t fit on the barrels of flower that he produced. The house was in the Brady family from 1860 to 1950.
Samuel Hart of Old Saybrook was the son of Rev. William Hart and brother of Gen. William Hart. His house, built about 1773, is at 395 Main Street.
At Town House Road and Maple Avenue in Durham is the old Center School House, built in 1775. The town’s first school house, built in 1722, had stood on the same site. It may not have served as a school after the 1830s, when new district schools were erected. Now home to the Durham Historical Society, the second floor of the building is being renovated for meeting and exhibit gallery space.
Rose Hill is a Gothic Revival house at 63 Prospect Street in Waterbury and was home to three of the city’s most prominent manufacturing families. Designed by Henry Austin of New Haven, it was built in 1852 in the “cottage style” popularized by A.J. Downing in such books as The Architecture of Country Houses. It was constructed near the base of a hill that would soon be developed as a neighborhood filled with many other Victorian-era houses. Rose Hill was built for Wlliam H. Scovill, who lived in the house for only six months before his death. The house was then vacant for a decade, until in 1863 it became home to the successful businessman Joseph Chauncey Welton and his wife, Jane Porter Welton. The couple loved to entertain and the house became a center of Waterbury society. Their daughter, Caroline Josephine Welton, was known for her fondness for her black stallion Knight, although the horse had kicked her father in the head and killed him. She never married and after her death in a blizzard on Longs Peak in Colorado in 1884 she left money for a bronze statue of Knight to be placed on a memorial fountain on Waterbury Green. Her relatives contested her will, which also gave $100,000 to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, on the grounds that she was insane, but they failed to stop the bequest. The statue was carved by Karl Gerhardt, whose trip to study in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1881 was financed by Mark Twain. The Rose Hill estate was next purchased by Augustus Sabin Chase. He added porches to the first and second floors. Today the mansion is home to Stepping Stone, the local program of the North American Family Institute (NAFI). It is currently a 22 bed secured residential facility with a treatment program serving delinquent girls committed to the Department of Children and Families. Plans to expand the facility a decade ago met with local resistance.
In 1845-1846, a Greek Revival flushboard-sided house was built at the corner of Hempstead and Granite Streets in New London for William Albertson, who owned a successful cotton gin manufactory. The house was located on the spot where the New London plantation’s first house of worship, a large barn, had stood in the seventeenth century. In the later nineteenth century, a cast iron front porch and Italianate bay windows and cupola were added to the Albertson House. In 1973, the house was moved to the corner of Channing and Vauxhall Street to make way for the construction of Saint Sophia Church.
In 1795, John Cooke purchased property (current address: 143 New Britain Avenue in Plainville) from Luther Shepard of Farmington and constructed a house/tavern (or was it already built in 1789?) for travelers along the Old College Highway. Originally it contained six rooms and a ballroom, but the building was much added to over its years as a tavern. The basement kitchen was later used as a blacksmith’s shop until 1880 and the old forge remains. In 1934, a great-great-grandson of John Cooke reopened the old tavern as a restaurant called Cooke’s Tavern. Today, the tavern is home to a restaurant called J. Timothy’s Taverne.
Since 1960 a former schoolhouse on the Canton Village Green has been home to the Canton Artists’ Guild. Now called the Gallery on the Green, the building dates to 1872, when it was known as “The Academy.” It was later called the Canton Street School House and functioned as an elementary school until it was closed in 1949. The Canton Volunteer Fire Department used it for meetings from 1950 to 1958, when a fire station was built. The schoolhouse was then rented by the Artists’ Guild until 1971, when the Fire Department deeded the building to the Guild for $1.
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