Josiah Cowles House (1750)

Captain Josiah Cowles was one of the earliest settlers of Southington. Born in Farmington in 1713, he settled in Plantsville around 1740, serving as a justice of the peace and a captain in the local militia. In 1774, he served on a committee to collect supplies for the relief of the people of Boston. He died in 1793 and is buried in Quinnipiac Cemetery. His house, at 184 Marion Avenue in Plantsville in Southington, was most likely built around 1750, two years after Capt. Cowles married his second wife. The house, which is now a bed & breakfast, has a large rear addition dating to 1988.

Melancthon W. Jacobus House (1908)

The Melancthon W. Jacobus House is a 1908 Tudor Revival mansion designed by Brocklesby & Smith and located at 39 Woodland Street in Hartford. Melancthon W. Jacobus, Jr. (1855-1957) was dean of the Hartford Theological Seminary and, as Hosmer Professor of New Testament Exegesis, delivered his Inaugural Address, entitled “The Evolution of New Testament Criticism and the Consequent Outlook for To-day,” on October 5, 1892. His father, Melancthon W. Jacobus, Jr. (1816-1876), was a Presbyterian minister and writer and his son, Melancthon W. “Chick” Jacobus (1907-1984) was an English teacher and soccer coach at Kingswood-Oxford School and an author of books on Connecticut River Valley steamboats and Connecticut railroads. The family sold the house during the Great Depression to the Hartford College of Insurance. Today the house is the offices of the Connecticut State University System.

George Palmer House (1840)

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.

Rose Hill (1852)

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.