Salem School (1894)

Naugatuck’s Salem School has been in the news recently. Just this past week, the Naugatuck Board of Education, facing a budget shortfall, voted to close the historic school, resulting in the circulation of a petition to save it. Salem School has been open since 1894. Previously, the Union Center School, built in 1852 and located on Naugatuck Green, had served the community. By the 1890s, the Borough of Naugatuck required a new and larger school building. The result was Salem School, the gift of John Howard Whittemore, a wealthy industrialist who wanted to enrich his hometown. He hired the nation’s leading architectural firm, McKim, Mead and White, to design the school, as well as many other prominent buildings in the center of Naugatuck. The old school on the Green was taken down and Salem School was built across Meadow Street in 1893 and opened the following year. The school served all grades until a separate High School building, also designed by McKim, Mead and White, was built in 1905. The Middle School grades were moved out in the 1950s. Salem School, named for “Salem Bridge,” an early name for Naugatuck, has continued since then as an elementary school, but is now slated to close. The future use of the building has not yet been determined.

The Edward Wilson House (1910)

The Arts and Crafts or American Craftsman style of house was popular at the start of the twentieth century. The house at 168 Buckingham Street in Waterbury, built around 1910, displays a number of Arts and Crafts features, including wide bracketed eaves, a low pitched front gable roof, and the use of mixed materials, in this case represented by the different exterior siding seen on each floor. The house may have been built by the Tracy Brothers construction company of Waterbury, because it was built for Edward Ely Wilson, a vice-president at the firm. According to Volume III of History of Waterbury and the Naugatuck Valley (1918), Wilson came to Waterbury in 1888 and “and became foreman of the shop of the Tracy Brothers Company. His ability won him immediate advancement and led to his admission to a partnership. Upon the incorporation of the business he was chosen vice president and so continues. […] He is today an officer in one of the foremost contracting firms of the city with a patronage that makes its business one of large volume and importance.”

The George Grannis House (1864)

The house of George Grannis, a photographer, was built sometime around 1864 on Church Street in Waterbury. In the 1870s, the house came to be owned by the Burrall family, being occupied in the early twentieth century by the sisters, Mary and Lucy Burrall, and their lifelong friend, Miss Edith Morton Chase. The daughter of Henry Sabin Chase, first president of the Chase Brass and Copper Company, Edith Chase was a neighbor of the Burrall sisters, who became her companions when she later made the Grand Tour of Europe. In 1917, Chase’s father gave her land in Litchfield, now Topsmead State Forest, where she built a country house. Chase and the Burralls then lived together, dividing their time between summers in Litchfield and winters in Waterbury.

The Amasa Preston House (1828)

At 152 Cornwall Avenue in Cheshire is an 1828 house, built by Amasa Preston. A settler from Wallingford, Preston was on the building committee for the Methodist Church, constructed in 1834. The house had two rooms added to the rear in 1910. Owned by the Preston and Trithall family, the house was the childhood home of architect Alice Washburn. A former high school principal in the 1890s, in 1919 Washburn began designing Colonial Revival houses in Cheshire and surrounding communities. She continued until the Great Depression forced her retirement in 1933. Around 1920, she renovated the Preston House in the Colonial Revival style, creating a beautiful front entry featuring a semicircular fan above the door. Today, the Connecticut chapter of the American Institute of Architects sponsors the annual Alice Washburn Awards for excellence in traditional house design. (more…)

Jonathan Dickerman II House (1792)

In 1792, Jonathan Dickerman II built a farmhouse in Hamden, south of the Sleeping Giant, also known as Mount Carmel. Originally located on the north side of Mount Carmel Avenue, the house was acquired by the state in 1924, serving for a time as a ranger station when the Sleeping Giant State Park was being created. In 1961, when the Avenue was being straightened, the state gave the Dickerman House to the town and, the following year, it was moved across the street to its current location by the Hamden Historical Society. A historic cider mill barn was moved to the property in 1992 and an outhouse in 2002.

North Congregational Church, New Hartford (1828)

The first church building in New Hartford was the Town Hill Church, which took ten years to build, 1739 to 1749. By 1828, it was necessary to build a new church, but residents in North Village wanted the replacement to be relocated closer to their own homes. Forming the North Ecclesiastical Society of New Hartford, some residents in the northern part of town constructed their own Congregational Church. A new church was also built on Town Hill, but another split led to the establishment of Nepaug Congregational Church in 1848. The Town Hill Church was abandoned in 1854 and taken down in 1859. The interior of the North Congregational Church was renovated in the later nineteenth century.