One of a number of Terry family houses in Simsbury is the Timothy Terry House at 90 Terry’s Plain Road. The house was built c. 1776-1778 by builder Job Case. The Greek Revival doorway, cornice and attic windows were added around 1840. The house has an ell that is said to have been used as a blacksmith shop in the nineteenth century.
St. Michael’s Lutheran Church in New Canaan was originally built as St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. The Anglican church in New Canaan originally met in a building on West Road, deeded to “professors of the Church of England” by a wealthy landowner in 1764. This was replaced by a new Episcopal church, built in 1833-1834 on God’s Acre in the center of New Canaan. The church (it was initially painted brown, but later painted white), continued as an Episcopal church until the current St. Mark’s was built in 1959-1961 on Oenoke Ridge. In 1962, the old church was acquired by the Board of American Missions of the Augustana Lutheran Church for a new Lutheran mission congregation, organized the following year as St. Michael’s Lutheran Church. That same year, St. Michael’s gave the adjacent Ludlow House, which had been included with the church property, to the New Canaan Historical Society in exchange for nearly an acre of land to be used for additional parking.
The Avery-Copp House, at 154 Thames Street in Groton, was built around 1800 by Rufus Avery for his two sons and their families. It was later owned by a cousin, Latham Avery, and then was inherited by his daughter, Mary Jane Avery Ramsdell. The house was Victorianized in the Italianate style around 1870. It passed to Ramsdell’s niece, Betsey Avery Copp and her husband, Belton Copp, in 1895. Their son, Joe Copp, kept the house virtually unchanged after his parents died, preserving it as it had been before 1930. After his death in 1991, at the age of 101, his nieces and nephews sought to make the house a museum. After a period of ownership by the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society, during which restoration work began on the house, it became an independant museum and opened to the public for tours in 2006.
Adjacent to the rear of the Hotchkiss-Fyler House in Torrington is an L-shaped two-story Queen Anne and Colonial Revival-style carriage house built in 1895. It is now part of the Hotchkiss-Fyler House Museum.
The first Academy building in Orange was constructed about 1821, across from Orange Green. In 1878-1879, a larger building replaced it. The second floors of both successive buildings were used for the school, while the first floors were used as assembly rooms by the town. In the twentieth century, town offices began moving into the building, which was enlarged to the rear. Administrative use by town government continued until a new Town Hall was built in 1967. The building next served as offices for the town’s Board of Education until 1989. Since then, the Academy has been leased to the Orange Historical Society for use as a museum.
The Henry Magill House, at 390 Palisado Avenue in Windsor, is a brick French Second Empire style residence, built for Henry Magill, a farmer, in 1861.
The Crosley F. Fitton House, built around 1865, is at the corner of Elm and Prospect Streets in Rockville, Vernon. Crosley Fitton, born in England, was brought to the United States at the age of three. As described in Illustrated Popular Biography of Connecticut (1891), he
became a woolen manufacturer, as was his father before him. Twenty-six years ago he came to Rockville, and for twenty-four years he has been the agent of the Rock Manufacturing Company, being the oldest in continuous service of all who have held official connection with the manufacturing establishments of Rockville. As a woolen manufacturer he ranks among the most able in New England, and during his connection with the Rock Company it has enjoyed continued success and prosperity under his management. The mills have been enlarged, the most improved machinery obtained, the force increased, and woolen goods manufactured equal to any produced in the country. Mr. Fitton [d. 1891] was always a hard worker, and often the first man at the mill in the morning and the last to leave at night.
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