The house at 199 Huntington Street in Shelton was built around 1810 for John Thompson, a miller. The house is just north of the bridge over the Farmill River and there are two millponds in the immediate vicinity. The side porch on the house’s south side is a later nineteenth-century addition.
With a commanding location overlooking Washington Square at the intersection of Church, Main, Water and Washington Streets in Norwich is the Beriah S. Rathbun House and Apartments. It was built about 1869 at 6-8 Church Street by Beriah S. Rathbun, a carpenter who lived in the building and took in boarders. He came to Norwich in 1840 and built a house in the winter of 1841-1842 which he sold in 1868 when he constructed his house/apartment building. In Norwich he was one of thirty-seven people who organized the Central Baptist Church, constructing the stairs of the original church building..
Rathbun (see pdf) married Martha D. Coburn, his second of three wives, in 1846. She was a soprano in the choir of the Central Baptist Church. One Sunday in 1849, Ithamar Conkey, organist and choir master at the church, became very irritated that Mrs. Ratbun was the only member of his choir to show up for the morning service. After playing the prelude, he closed his organ and went home in disgust. Later he felt remorse for having walked out. Reflecting on one of the hymns to have been sung that morning to John Bowring’s text, “In the Cross of Christ I Glory,” Conkey decided to write a new tune for the text and named it Rathbun, in honor of the faithful soprano (see pdf).
To the left of the Rathbun Building is a house built around 1737 by Captain Joseph Kelley, one of Norwich‘s earliest shipmasters.
According to A History of the Old Town of Stratford and the City of Bridgeport, Connecticut, Volume 1 (1886), by Rev. Samuel Orcutt:
St. Paul’s Church (Episcopal), was organized June 4, 1858, at the house of William H. Noble, on Stratford avenue, and the Rev. G. S. Coit, D.D., of St. John’s Church, was chosen rector. The Sunday school met, at first, in the coal office of D. W. Thompson, near the east end of the Centre Bridge, afterwards in rooms over a store upon the corner of Crescent avenue and East Main street. The Rev. N. S. Richardson, D.D., was the first settled pastor of this parish, his ministry beginning in January, 1868. The corner-stone of St. Paul’s Church, a handsome stone building upon Kossuth street, fronting Washington Park, was laid by Bishop Williams, October 6, 1868; the edifice was dedicated and occupied for worship July 29, 1869, but not consecrated until May 18, 1880. It cost about thirty thousand dollars.
The church was designed by E.T. Littell of New York. Today, it is St. Luke’s/St. Paul’s Church. (more…)
The house at 213 Ellsworth Street in the Black Rock neighborhood of Bridgeport was built in 1854 by Capt. Charles Allen. As described in Volume II of the History of Bridgeport and Vicinity (1917), Capt. Allen
came to Bridgeport in an early day and ran a packet between this city and New York. He was commander of the packet Emily and of the schooner Ella Jane for a number of years, owning both boats. He was afterward with the Bridgeport Steamboat Company as pilot of the Crystal Wave and he became a prominent representative of navigation interests in this city. He was a native of Westport, Connecticut, and arrived in Bridgeport in the late ’60s. He married Amanda J. Fairchild, a native of this city […] Throughout his entire life Charles H. Allen was identified with marine interests and became recognized as the most competent pilot on the Sound. He was owner and captain of his own boats, and for a number of years, with his brother, Sereno G., ran a packet line from Westport to New York. He was, moreover, a public-spirited citizen, active in support of measures and movements for the general good, thus displaying the same spirit of loyalty and patriotism which characterized his ancestors who served in the Revolutionay war.
The Isaac Jones House, at 227 Ellsworth Street, next door to the Allen House, was built the same year and was originally an identical Italianate structure, but was much altered in 1910.
Designed by James Gamble Rogers and built in 1930-1931 at 127 Wall Street in New Haven, the Sterling Law Building is the building of Yale Law School. Modeled on the English Inns of Court, it features a great variety of Gothic architectural detailing. Rising impressively above the rest of the structure, with its rows of Gothic windows, is the Lillian Goldman Law Library. The Sterling Law Building, which occupies one city block, was named for John William Sterling, a corporate attorney and major benefactor to Yale University.
The Noah Webster School is an elementary school on Whitney Street in Hartford’s West End. It was named for the famous lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and prolific author, Noah Webster, who was born in West Hartford. The school was designed in the Tudor Revival style by architect William C. Brocklesby. Additions were made to the building in 1906 and 1909 by Brocklesby & Smith, in 1932 by Malmfeldt, Adams & Prentice, and most recently by DuBose Associates as the school was converted into a “MicroSociety Magnet School.”
In 1851, local joiner Lewis Rowell built as his residence the brick house at 25 Lewis Street (a street renamed in his honor in 1883). The house has a 1926 addition by architects Smith & Bassette, projecting out to the sidewalk. Lewis built the adjoining house, at 27 Lewis Street, in 1855 as a mirror image to his own house. He purchased the house at 30 Lewis Street as a wedding present for his daughter, Mary Rowell Storrs, in 1874. She later lived in an 1899 house on Farmington Avenue.
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