St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Milford (1851)

The first Anglican church in Milford, named St. George’s, was built from 1769 to 1772. The church was not consecrated, but rather “set apart” and dedicated for Divine Service in 1775, because Connecticut did not yet have a Bishop. In 1849, the original wooden church was demolished and replaced by the current brownstone church, designed by Frank Wills, a prominent architect and Gothic Revival churches and author of Ancient English Ecclesiastical Architecture and its Principles, Applied to the Wants of the Church at the Present Day (1850). The church was completed in 1851 and consecrated as St. Peter’s Church. The rededication of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in 1981 was followed by a disastrous flood in June 1982, after which the organ and parts of the church and parish hall had to be rebuilt.

Jones-Camp House (1780)

Between 1771 and 1783, John Jones built a house overlooking the town green of Durham. In 1783, he sold it to Samuel Camp, Jr. (Col. Samuel Camp), who left it to his son Ebenezer upon his death in 1810. Ebenezer later leased rooms of the house from his son Charles, who died in 1828. Upon Ebenezer’s death in 1830, he left the house to another son, Samuel C. Camp. The house’s gable addition with the current main entrance was built sometime in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. In 1847, the house was sold to Horace Newton, a cloth-maker and farmer.

Hotel Capitol (1875)

A block south on Main Street in Hartford from the Linden, on the corner of Capitol Avenue across from the Butler-McCook House, is another building, which like the Linden has a distinctive tower. The Hotel Capitol was built in 1875 by John W. Gilbert The building combines elements of the High Victorian Gothic and Second Empire styles. Isidore Wise operated it as residential hotel after he acquired it in 1905.

The Linden (1891)

The Linden is an apartment building, built in 1891 on Main Street in South Downtown in Hartford by Frank Brown and James Thomson, owners of Brown, Thompson & Company department store. Designed by Frederick Savage Newman, the Linden was designed to echo Richardson’s Cheney block, where Brown & Thompson was then located. An addition on the south, designed by John J. Dwyer, was constructed in 1895. Having fallen into disrepair, the building was rehabilitated in the 1980s, with the storefronts and interior being significantly remodeled.

The Charles Butler House (1792)

In Historic Litchfield, 1721-1907 (1907), Alice T. Bulkeley writes:

The house now occupied by Mr. Elbert P. Roberts, one of Litchfield‘s real estate dealers, on the corner of North and East streets, was built in 1792 by Charles Butler, cashier of the Litchfield Bank. It was originally a story and a half gable-roofed house. In the early part of the nineteenth century [1813] it was bought by Frederick Deming, father of the present Mr. Frederick Deming of North street, who enlarged it and built on the east wing. When Mr. Deming moved to New York he sold the place to Oliver S. Weller, and the latter built the small building where the school now is, for a small store, where he sold dry and wet goods, chiefly the latter. After his death Mrs. Weller continued the business as long as she lived, when the house went to two nieces in Woodbury who are its present owners. On the death of these ladies the house will be the property of St. Michael’s Parish Church.

The Pillars (1850)

Built around 1850 by the Seymour family, the house on Chapman Street in Newington known as “The Pillars” combines Italianate and Greek Revival features. The house is distinguished by its strikingly large entrance portico with Tuscan columns. Substantial restorations to the building were completed in 1986 following damage from a fire. In 1901, Amy and James Archer were hired to look after the house’s resident, an elderly widower named John Seymour. After Seymour died in 1904, his heirs turned the building into a boarding house for the elderly, with the Archers staying on to provide care for the residents. The house was known as “Sister Amy’s Nursing Home for the Elderly.” In 1907, the heirs sold the house and the Archers moved to Windsor, where they established the Archer Home for the Elderly and Infirm. Between 1907 and 1917, there were 60 suspicious deaths in the Archer Home, as well as the deaths of Amy Archer’s first husband James and her second husband Michael Gilligan. Amy Archer-Gilligan, who had purchased large amounts of arsenic, was eventually found guilty of murder in a famous case which inspired the play and film, Arsenic and Old Lace. The Seymour House in Newington was later owned by Philip Brown, who ran the Newington Junction Post Office until 1944. Today the house is subdivided into apartments.