Buck-Foreman Community Center, Portland (1852)

The Buck-Foreman Community Center in Portland houses the town’s police, parks and recreation, and youth services departments. The central section of the brownstone building dates to 1852 and was built in the Italianate style as the home of Jonathan Fuller, part-owner of the Shaler and Hall brownstone quarry. When he died in 1876, his daughter Jane inherited the house. At that time, the Town of Portland was looking for a new and more solid building to use as a town hall, as their current building, a former Episcopal church at the corner of Bartlet and High Streets, was a wooden structure built in 1790 and considered to be unsafe (part of the floor even caved in during a Republican Party caucus in 1894!). When Jane Fuller died in 1894, the town acquired the Fuller House and hired architect David Russell Brown of New Haven to remodel it in the Richardsonian Romanesque style. The wing on the south side of the building was added in 1896 as the Buck Library, donated by Horace Buck, who was originally from Portland and whose three children had died and were buried in town. A matching addition on the north side of the Town Hall was built in 1941. The building continued in use as a Town Hall until 1999.

90 Bank Street, New London (1860)

The stone Romanesque Revival block of connected buildings at 90-94 Bank Street in New London were built around 1860 (a sidewalk plaque indicates 1876). The commercial building was used by A.B. Currier, an auctioneer, around 1873 and was later home to Darrow & Comstock, ship chandlers. The New London Day newspaper began publishing on the building’s second floor in 1881. More recently, the building has housed Roberts Audio Video store, with the upper floors being used as a residence.

American Brass Company Headquarters (1913)

For much of its existence, the American Brass Company was the largest brass manufacturer in the country. The company was founded in 1893, with the consolidation of five existing brass mills in the Waterbury area. Purchased by the Anaconda Copper Company in 1922, it lost its individual name and identity in 1960. The American Brass Company’s Headquarters building in Waterbury, built in 1913, has a brass-clad entryway. The structure rounds the curved corner of Grand and Meadow Streets. Today, the building is part of the Waterbury Superior Court House complex, with the main entrance now located in a large addition, built in 1998.

Church of Christ Congregational of Norfolk (1813)

Rev. Joseph Eldridge describes the erection of the first meeting house in Norfolk in the History of Norfolk (1900):

In dimensions it was fifty feet by forty, and of suitable height for galleries, without a steeple. In 1759, two years previous to the settlement of Mr. [Ammi Ruhamah] Robbins, [Norfolk’s first minister, who also served as an army chaplain during the Revolutionary War] the house was raised and covered. In 1761, the year of his ordination, it was underpinned and the lower floor laid. Such was its condition when he was ordained in it. In 1767 the gallery floor was laid; 1769 the lower part of the house and the pulpit were finished. January 2, 1770, it was, in the words of the time, dignified and seated; that is, the places to be occupied by those of various ages determined, and individuals located in them, as is done now. The next year the galleries were completed, and a cushion for the pulpit procured. The outside was painted the color of a peach blossom.

This meeting house, which was painted white in 1793, was taken down in 1813 and a new meeting house, designed by David Hoadley, was constructed. As Frederic S. Dennis explains, in The Norfolk Village Green (1917):

in 1814 the second Meeting House was finished, 60 by 45 feet in dimensions, and with a steeple and bell. This was built near the site of the original and was erected under the supervision of Michael F. Mills, who was appointed as agent by the society to build the best house he could for $6,000. It is still in existence; but after the death of Rev. Joseph Eldridge [in 1875] the interior was beautifully decorated and painted, a new platform and pulpit erected, electric lights installed, a new organ donated, Munich stained glass windows placed behind the pulpit, all through the great generosity of the Eldridge and Battell families.

As Dennis further writes:

The Meeting House as it now stands is a model of colonial church architecture. Its symmetry, its proportions, its graceful steeple, its artistic Sir Christopher Wren spire, its site on the knoll overlooking the Green, its beautiful interior decoration, its magnificent organ, make it one of the most attractive and beautiful in New England. One feature is most unusual to find in a Congregational church, a cross at the apex of the spire. It is “the only Puritan Meeting House whose spire from the first was surmounted by a cross and the same cross still points skyward.” This cross was evidently placed on the steeple in [1814] according to dates found in Rev. Thomas Robbins‘s diary.

Nineteenth-century Italianate alterations to the front facade of the Church of Christ Congregational of Norfolk were removed in 1926 and replaced with the current two-story pillared front porch, the gift of Alice Eldridge Bridgman, completed in 1927.