The Queen Anne style house at 96 Main Street in Farmington was built in 1875 as the Parsonage of the First Congregational Church. The stone store, built by Maj. Timothy Cowles, originally occupied the site, but was destroyed by fire on July 21, 1864. William Gay, a merchant who owned several parcels of real estate in Farmington, bought the lot in 1871 and sold it to the First Ecclesiastical Society.
George Wells (1780-1861) built the house at 480 Wells Road in Wethersfield c. 1830 on the site where the house of his father, Elijah Wells, once stood. Elijah Wells (1751-1796) was a veteran of the Revolutionary War.
The Sloper-Wesoly House, on Grove Hill in New Britain, is a Queen Anne-style residence, built in 1887. Designed by George Dutton Rand, the house was built for Andrew Jackson Sloper, an industrialist and third president of the New Britain National Bank. His son, William Thomson Sloper, who grew up in the house and was a survivor of the Titanic, wrote a biography of his father, The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson Sloper, 1849-1933 (1949), which contains many anecdotes of nineteenth-century New Britain. The house was later owned by Dr. Andrew Wesoly, who served as an army captain in the Second World War and who, as a physician and Polish speaker, treated many of New Britain’s Polish residents. After his death, his daughters donated the house to the Polish American Foundation of Connecticut. The building is now the Sloper-Wesoly Immigrant Heritage and Cultural Center.
Chapin Park, which is today a bed and breakfast, is an 1871 Gothic Revival house on Church Street in Pine Meadow in New Hartford. It was the second house on the site built for Edward M. Chapin (the earlier one was moved to make way for the new one). The house has a similar arrangement of interior rooms to that of Edward’s brother, Philip Chapin, nearby. Chapin Park was designed by Robert W. Hill, a Waterbury-based architect who designed buildings throughout Connecticut.
Abner Reed was a printmaker, engraver, publisher and author and Deacon of the Congregational Church in East Windsor Hill (now in South Windsor). John Warner Barber, a well-known artist and author, studied with Reed at his engraving shop in East Windsor before moving to New Haven. Abner Reed’s house, built in 1750, is on Main Street in South Windsor.
Richard A. Wheeler writes, in the History of the Town of Stonington (1900), that the Mystic Congregational Church
was organized by thirty-seven seceding members from the First Congregational Church of Stonington, with five persons from other churches, on the 30th day of January, 1852, under the approval of a committee of the Consociation of Congregational Ministers and Churches of New London County[…..] The cornerstone of their present church edifice was laid with appropriate ceremonies Nov. 24th, 1859, and went on to completion and dedication. It was enlarged in 1869 by the addition of fourteen feet to its length.
A school was established by the town of Norfolk as early as 1768. Initially, students were taught in the church parsonage, until the the School Society built a small structure, used as a school and church conference room, in 1819. According to an 1899 speech by librarian Henry H. Eddy (quoted in the 1900 History of Norfolk): When John F. Norton was the teacher at the school, it
was so successful that by 1838 there were upwards of seventy pupils under his charge. The next year, the need of still greater accommodations being felt, an Academy Corporation was formed for the purpose of building an academy, and in 1840 such a building was erected on the east side of the Green, for the sum of $2,000. As the career of Mr. Norton had been so successful he was appointed first principal, and continued as such until duties outside of the town took him away.
As Frederic S. Dennis relates, in his 1917 book, The Norfolk Village Green:
The Town Hall, originally the academy, was built in 1840 and from that time on was used as the place for the transactions of town business, including voting. In 1846 a committee was appointed to confer with the proprietors of the academy with a view to the use of this building for town meetings. The lower floor is used for town meetings; the upper floor is the property of Mr. and Mrs. Carl Stoeckel; it was not unusual in early days to have one building owned by two or more parties. In addition to the school room above and the town hall below, there was constructed in the basement a lock-up, which has been built on the first floor by partitioning off a room.
Today, the building serves a different purpose, as the Norfolk Historical Society Museum.
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