Built in 1857-1858, the current Christ Episcopal Church in Stratford was preceded by two earlier church buildings. The first was built in 1724 and was replaced by the second, built in 1743, which stood just to the north of the current church, which was designed by architect Henry Dudley. Christ Church is the oldest parish of the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut, tracing its origins to 1707. In 1972, the interior of the church was reconfigured to its present arrangement.
Frederick Henry Cossitt was born in Granby in 1811, but later settled for a time in Memphis, Tennessee, where he ran a wholesale dry goods business. In 1859, he moved to New York, where he was involved in real estate, insurance, and banking. Before he died in 1887, Cossitt had expressed a desire to build libraries in both Granby and Memphis and his heirs carried out his wishes. The Cossitt Library in Memphis was built in 1893. The other Cossitt Library, at 388 North Granby Road in Granby, was built in 1891, across the street from the house where Cossitt had been born eighty years before. The library has recently been renovated to reinforce the main floor and reconstruct the ground floor entrance. Cossitt’s daughter Helen married Augustus D. Juilliard and on their deaths, the couple left $12 million to found what would become the Julliard School.
Durham‘s Greek-Revival Town Hall was built in 1847 to 1849 as the town’s South Congregational Church. When the town’s second meeting house burned in 1836, a split develeoped over where to build the new church. A new meeting house was eventually built again on the Green, but controversy recommenced when this third meeting house burned in 1844. One building, North Church, now Durham’s present United Church, was built north of Allyn’s Brook in 1847, while another meeting house, South Church, was built on the old site on the Green. The town’s two churches reunited in 1886 and South Church was later sold to the town for use as offices. With its steeple removed, the building now serves as Town Hall.
In 1705, Thomas Brooks, from Cheshire, England, settled in the area that would later become the town of Cheshire in Connecticut. In 1732-1733, his son Enos Brooks, built a saltbox house on what is now South Brooksvale Road. The house has remained in the same family ever since, with significant additions being made over the years. According to Old Historic Homes of Cheshire, Connecticut (1895), by Edwin R. Brown, Enos’s son, David Brooks, who resided in the house,
was a graduate of Yale College in the year 1765, was ordained to the work of the ministry, occasionally preached, but never was a settled pastor. He was a delegate to the State Convention held in Hartford in January, 1788, to ratify and adopt the Constitution of the United States. He was a soldier in the war of the Revolution. He entered first as a private and was afterwards promoted to the position of quartermaster of his regiment. He prepared and delivered, in Derby, Conn., in the year 1774, a discourse on the religion of the Revolution. This discourse was highly commended, and strongly influenced public opinion in favor of the cause of the struggling colonies.
Rev. Brooks’s son, also named David, enlarged the house in 1841 and his son, Samuel Hull Brooks, added an attic and gables. In 1925, John Van Buren Thayer built a two-story addition to the house. Through the efforts Brooks descendants and the Cheshire Land Trust, 48 acres of the farm land that once belonged to Thomas Brooks has been placed under a conservation restriction to preserve the rural and scenic character of the farm. It is known as the Brooksvale Farm Preserve.
A house in Windham Center was built in 1790 for Samuel Grey, one of the town’s most influential citizens. The house, also known as the Perkins House, was rebuilt around 1835 in the Greek Revival style.
The Isaac Tucker House is one of only a few to have survived the burning of Fairfield by British forces on July 7, 1779. The house was built in 1766, two years after Tucker married Mary Wakeman in 1764. Tradition holds that a servant, hiding upstairs, put out the flames and saved the house from destruction. There are still burn marks inside from the attempted torching. The house was later owned by Edmund Hobart, who served as postmaster in Fairfield in the mid-nineteenth century.
The origins of the Hartford Seminary go back to the opening of the Theological Institute of Connecticut in 1834 in East Windsor Hill. Some houses in that neighborhood, where professors at the institute once lived, have survived, but the original seminary buildings have not. In 1865, the Institute moved to Hartford and in 1885 changed its name to the Hartford Theological Seminary. After occupying several old houses on Prospect Street, in the 1880s the Sminary moved to a campus on Broad Street, across from Hartford High School. In the 1920s, the Seminary moved to a new Gothic campus (now the UCONN Law School). In 1972, the Seminary changed from being a traditional residential divinity school and became an interdenominational theological center. It was decided to sell the old campus and construct a single building, designed by Richard Meier, a post-modern architect known for his use of the color white. The new structure was built between 1978 and 1981 and in the latter year the institution’s name was changed to Hartford Seminary. (more…)
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