In 1776, Martin North moved from Danbury to Winchester Center and built a saltbox house at what is now 102 Newfield Road. In 1941, new owners jacked up the original saltbox roof in order to add a bathroom and two full bedrooms to the rear of the second floor. There is a rear ell that now has the garage.
This historic photograph of State Street in Hartford was sent to me by Richard Walsh and is used here with his permission. It was taken c. 1900 by his great-grandfather, Richard Nichols (1850-1935). This was before the Isle of Safety was built.
On the right is the Old State House. Left of that is a row of buildings along State Street. Going from right to left the buildings are: Long’s Hotel (there is a sign for the hotel on the side of the building that mentions “lager”; building erected c. 1871, demolished in 1936); the Exchange Bank (built in 1834 with a new façade in 1869; transformed into the Far East Garden Restaurant in 1917 and demolished c. 1936); the Hartford Courant Building (built in 1880 and designed by George Keller; demolished in 1951); the Hartford National Bank (built in 1811; replaced by the Princess Theater 1912); the First National Bank (built in 1898 and designed by Ernest Flagg); a remnant of the former United States Hotel (Honiss Oyster House started in the basement) that would be replaced in the 1920s by the Regal Theater and a W. T. Grant store. Part of the sign atop the building on the far left is visible. The full sign reads “Elihu Geer’s Sons City Directory” (they published the famous Geer’s Directories of Hartford). The building was replaced in 1928 by a new one erected by Federal Bake Shops.
Other than the Old State House, the only building that survives from this photo today is the façade of the First National Bank, which was incorporated into the State House Square Complex, built in 1985.
This is my latest video. It’s about the northwest corner of the intersection of Asylum Street with Main Street in Hartford, across from the Old State House. There were colonial farmhouses here until 1821, when Henry L. Ellsworth built a commercial building that came to be called the Catlin Building because it house the store of Julius Catlin. A later notable tenant was David Mayer, the famous Hartford jewelry seller. That building was torn down in 1897 to make way for a new and larger Catlin Building, which was in turn replaced by Hartford’s first skyscraper, built in 1912 for the Hartford National Bank and later known as the Hartford-Aetna Building. It was finally torn down in 1990 to the dismay of preservationists. Just to the north was the Hills Block, built in 1861 and replaced in 1929 by the building that was for years a J.J. Newberry store.
Here is my second video for YouTube. Discover the history of a historic corner of Hartford, Connecticut through historic images and maps. Currently dominated by the large building at 777 Main, the northwest corner of Main & Pearl Streets in Hartford has had an interesting series of buildings. The 1600s house of early settler Thomas Olcott was replaced in the 1820s by Union Hall (where Dr. Horace Wells was inspired by a demonstration of laughing gas), followed by the building of c. 1870 of the grand headquarters of the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company, which was greatly expanded by the Hartford National Bank & Trust Company in the 1920s before being torn down in the 1960s.
Hello everyone! Please check out my first YouTube video! It’s about some interesting frogs that lived in Hartford over 120 years ago. If you enjoy the video, please consider hitting the “Like” button and subscribing to the channel– It’s called “History with Dan.”
Just south of the Mill Pond, at 25 Main Street in the Ivoryton section of Essex, is a house built in 1809 by Daniel Griswold (1780-1870). In 1801 he had married Fanny Babcock (1779-1859). After her death in 1859, Daniel, who was then 79 years old, married Fanny Spencer. Daniel’s son William inherited the house. He would supply land for the new business enterprise of Comstock & Griswold, started in 1834 by his brother Edwin Griswold and Samuel M. Comstock, that would soon start producing ivory combs, launching the ivory industry in Ivoryton.
The house at 259 Cherry Brook Road in Canton was built sometime before 1800 (an chestnut beam in the attic is inscribed with the date 1789). It was the home of Jesse Barber, a cobbler who had a shop north of his house and also a tannery. He would fix the shoes of the children who walked by his home on their way to school. For many years the house’s residents got their water from a spring on the hill to the east which traveled through a system of split and grooved logs laid end-to-end. This was later replaced by a lead pipe that had to be kept unfrozen in the winter to prevent clogging. New owners, Dennis and Wanda Mahoney, replaced this system with an artesian well in 1953. They also extensively restored the house and totally rebuilt the rear ell. An earlier owner, Ambrose Norman, had kept riding horses, but gave up the house to a grain merchant from Granby to satisfy an unpaid feed bill.
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