Historic Buildings of Connecticut - Exploring the Nutmeg State One Building at a Time

Royal Arcanum Building (1904)

The Royal Arcanum is an organization created in the nineteenth century to provide health insurance to its members. A group of businessmen, who were members in Norfolk, hired architect Alfredo Taylor to design an impressive multi-purpose building in the town center. The large structure was designed to have commercial businesses on the first floor and meeting spaces for the Royal Arcanum Council and the Masonic Lodge on the third floor. It also housed the town’s post office and fire department. The style of the brick building, constructed in 1904-1906, combines Romanesque and Chateauesque elements, with decorative terra cotta panels. Today, the building continues to contain offices, shops and apartments.

Ralph Emerson House (1806)

Across Maple Avenue from the Norfolk Library is the parsonage of Rev. Ralph Emerson, who was pastor of Norfolk’s Congregational Church from 1816 until 1829, when he left to become professor of Ecclesiastical History at Andover Theological Seminary. The house was originally built in 1806 by Michael F. Mills, a lawyer, Justice of the Peace and Representative in the General Assembly.

Brick Tavern, Bolton (1828)

What is known as the Brick Tavern is a Federal-style brick house, located in Bolton Center. It was built around 1828 by Samuel Williams and was a tavern and station on the Hartford-Norwich stagecoach line. An earlier house on the property, built around 1770, had become an ell to the 1828 house, but was later removed. The Brick Tavern was purchased by the Town of Bolton in 2007.

The Daniel Beadle Capron House (1850)

According to the 1867 history, by Alfred Andrews, of the First Congregational Church of New Britain, Daniel Beadle Capron was born in 1813 in Broadlebin, New York. Having moved to New Britain, “he has been a mechanic, but in 1862 was in merchandise on Washington st., and now, in 1867, in shoe and harness business on Main st.” Capron‘s Italianate-style house, built around 1850, originally stood on the corner of High and West Main Street, but was moved, in 1906, further down High Street to make way for the building of the First Baptist Church. The house later served as a funeral home, then the offices of an architectural firm and the city’s Health Department.

Hermon Chapin III House (1908)

Hermon Chapin III was the grandson of Hermon Edward Chapin, the successful Pine Meadow, New Hartford tool manufacturer. Hermon Chapin III’s Colonial Revival house, built in 1908, is on Main Street in New Hartford, across from Chapin Park (Pine Meadow Green). The house attracted much praise in town when it was built.

Rose Farm House, Bolton (1725)

In June of 1781, the army of the French general, the comte de Rochambeau, on its way to join George Washington and fight in the Battle of Yorktown, camped at what was later called Rose Farm in Bolton. Between June 21 and 25, 1781, four regiments of the French soldiers spent one night each at the camp, which was the fifth French army encampment of their journey from Newport, Rhode Island to Yorktown, Virginia. The farm was part of the land originally owned by the town’s first minister, Reverend Thomas White and at the time of the Revolutionary War, the property, called the Minister’s Farm, was owned by Reverend George Colton, who was Bolton’s minister from 1764 to 1817. The farm still has numerous stone walls, built by early settlers who initially cleared the land. Many of these walls were noted on a map made by Rochambeau’s engineer. The minister’s house, originally built in 1725 by Rev. White and where Rev. Colton entertained Rochambeau in 1781, has been significantly altered. Once believed to have been replaced by a new Greek Revival-style house, built around 1840 by Reverend James Ely, it is now thought that the core of the later house is the original colonial structure, much altered and added to in later years . The farm was owned by the Rose family in the twentieth century. It was saved from the building of an expressway in 1994 and in 2000, after a campaign to save the land from development, it was purchased by the town of Bolton and is now the Bolton Heritage Farm.

South United Methodist Church, Manchester (1925)

The Methodist Church in Manchester began with a sermon preached in the spring of 1790 by the Rev. George Roberts in the home of Thomas Spencer. Rev. Roberts was an assistant of the Rev. Jesse Lee, who had preached the first Methodist sermon in Connecticut in Norwalk on June 7th, 1789. A Methodist Society in Manchester was soon organized and the first church building was constructed in 1794. In 1822, a new building was built at the corner of Center and Main Streets, now the site of a Masonic Temple. In 1851, the expanding congregation decided to divide into two congregations. The North Methodist Episcopal Church was built in 1851 on North Main Street and, after receiving a hundred new members, a new South Church was built in 1854 at the corner of Main Street and Hartford Road. This church was enlarged in 1891 and replaced by the current church in 1925. It was designed in a Tudor Gothic style by architect Arthur Eaton Hill of Providence, Rhode Island, who died before it was completed. In 1958, the church acquired the estate of Frank Cheney, Jr., located across Hartford Road.