Another house to be featured in today’s Annual House Tour by the Friends of the Mark Twain House & Museum is a 1925-1926 Norman Tudor residence at 1210 Prospect Avenue. Colonel James L. Howard and his wife were the first owners of the house, which was also designed by Smith and Bassette.
This Sunday is the Annual Holiday ouse Tour, held by the Friends of the Mark Twain House & Museum. One of the houses to be featured on the tour is the impressive mansion at 1144 Prospect Avenue. Located near the highest point in the City of Hartford and with views of the Hartford skyline, the house was built in 1912 and designed by Smith and Bassette. Earlier this year, the house’s owners won an award from the Hartford Preservation Alliance for their extensive restoration of the home’s historic facade and entry bridge.
In 1949, Rufus and Leslie Stillman became acquainted with the work of modern architect Marcel Breuer when they saw his “demonstration house” on display in the courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The couple hired him to design a modern house for their property at the end of Beecher Lane in Litchfield. The resulting structure, built in 1950 and today known as Stillman House I, brought mid-century modern style to a town town primarily associated with the Colonial Revival. The swimming pool Breuer designed for the house features a mural painted by the architect’s friend, the artist Alexander Calder. The Stillmans later lived in two other houses designed by Breuer, but eventually bought back and again lived in the original Stillman House. The above picture shows the house from the Beecher Lane side, which is not its most dramatic angle. For a more through look at the house, the Smithsonian Archives of American Art have a series of exterior and interior photographs of the house, taken when it was newly built.
The least altered Italianate house on Broad Street in Plainville is the one at #28. It was built in 1871 for Henry A. White, a dealer of sewing machines. Could this be the same Henry A. White from Binghampton, New York, who married Olive Allen in 1871?
At 4 Maple Street in Chester is the Abel Snow House. Newspapers dating to 1777 and 1785 were found in the walls of the house, indicating its most likely date of construction. Purchased by Abel Snow in 1824, the house was a divided dwelling with retail stores in the nineteenth century and continues today with two apartments above with a retail store below. During a twentieth-century restoration, a small room was found sealed-off from the rest of the house; it is believed someone had once hanged himself in this room in the nineteenth century.
A striking landmark of the village of Chester is the Old Stone Store, built in 1809. It has housed many businesses over the years, as well as a post office. In 1875, when Chester‘s earliest Library Association was founded, the library was located on the second floor of the building. At that time the building was a general store operated by J. Kirtland Denison, who also served as Town Clerk, succeeding his father Judge Socrates Denison in that position in 1877. The building’s prominent columns and Greek Revival pediment were probably added after the Store was built. The two side wings are definitely a modern addition.
In contrast to the many other Classical Revival buildings nearby in Naugatuck Center, the Naugatuck Main Post Office was constructed with elements of the Spanish Colonial Revival style, most notably a Spanish tile roof. Built in 1916, the Post Office was designed under the supervision of James A. Wetmore, Acting Supervising Architect for the Federal Government. It was one of the first post offices to be built under the Public Buildings Act of 1913.
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