At 116–118 Way Road in Middlefield is a Greek Revival-style house, originally erected circa 1846 as a two-family house by Watrous I. Miller (1822-1885) and William P. Abel (1811-1848), on land the former had acquired from his father Jeremiah the year before. In 1846 Watrous sold the property to his brother Isaac W. Miller (1819-1891), with Abel (who was Watrous and Isaac’s brother-in-law) retaining a half interest in the house. The western wing of the house may have functioned as a tin shop used by Isaac, who was a tinsmith.
The house at 25 Barton Hill Street in East Hampton was built circa 1765. The gambrel-roofed house has three dormer windows that were added in the nineteenth century. It is not known who built the house, but in 1807 the property was acquired by William Barton (1762-1849), who was the father of bell manufacturing in East Hampton (which became known as Belltown, U.S.A.). The Bevin Brothers, who were apprentices in Barton’s shop, later started their own bell factory in town, which is still in business today. The house remained in the Barton family until 1953. As related in Historic Towns of the Connecticut River Valley (1906), by George S. Roberts:
The prosperity and industrial spirit of East Hampton was very largely due to William Barton, who was born in Windsor in 1762. William Barton, the father, was a captain in Colonel Flower’s Regiment of Artillery Artificers, in the Revolution and his son William was with him as assistant. He learned his trade from his father, who was armorer in Springfield in the Revolutionary War. At the close of the war, William returned to Wintonbury, in Windsor, and made pistols and other arms. In 1790, he went to New York and started the manufacture of articles made of brass, especially andirons. He remained there for eighteen years and in 1808, went to East Hampton where he made hand bells and sleigh bells. William Barton was a man of broad mind, who loved his fellow man. He was never so happy as when benefiting others and improving the condition of the community in which he lived and worked. He taught his trade to others and it was not long before East Hampton became a thriving and prosperous community. In 1826, Mr. Barton went to Cicero, New York, where his happy influence was strongly felt. In 1846, he returned to his old home in East Hampton to spend the remaining years of his life, surrounded by his children and the friends and neighbors who honored and loved him. His death occurred, after a long life of usefulness, in 1849.
The Folk Victorian or Victorian Vernacular style refers to houses built during the Victorian era that are relatively plain and regular in their basic forms (without unusual floor plans or complex additions like turrets). Instead, they are often embellished with elaborate decorative trim that was often prefabricated by machine and could be shipped throughout the country in the later nineteenth century. A good example of this type of a house is the George W. Lawrence House, located at 18 Main Street in East Berlin. Erected about 1891, it was acquired in the early 1890s by Lawrence, a farmer who had extensive landholdings in the area inherited from his father, Alexander P. Lawrence. The house has a typical L-shaped floorplan and features a variety of ornamental woodwork.
John Denison (1716-1808) and his son Nathan (born 1759) were both hatters in Old Mystic. John bought land from Samuel Williams in 1783 and then sold it to Nathan in 1785, by which time the house that exists today at 52 Main Street had most likely been built, along with their hatters shop. In 1787, Nathan Denison sold the property to his brother-in-law John Baldwin (1752-1814). The property had two other owners in the next decade and was acquired by Nicholas Williams (1770-1802) in 1799. His widow, Lucretia Hempstead Williams (1776-1851) willed the property to ten people, with six people getting shares in the house. The house has had many owners over the years. In the 1930s, it was owned by the Williams family, who owned a general store across the street from 1875 to 1967. Charles Vincent bought the property in 1959 and ran the Old Mystic Book Shop in the house until 1986. Since 1987 the house has been a bed-and-breakfast called the Old Mystic Inn. In 1988 a carriage house was added to the property, doubling the number of guest rooms.
In the early eighteenth century, English colonists were encroaching on the land of the Wangunk tribe in the area of Indian Hill in Portland. In 1716 the Connecticut General Assembly permitted Giles Hall, a mariner and shipbuilder, to purchase Wangunk land at Indian Hill, which he and others soon developed as a shipbuilding center. When Hall sold the land in 1739, there was a house at what is now 643 Main Street, which he may have built c. 1717, the same year he built a road to the Connecticut River through the Wangunk reservation to transport shipbuilding materials. It is possible that the current front of the house was constructed when it was the home of shipbuilder John Abby in the 1820s, with the rear section from 1717 forming an ell that was destroyed by fire in the early twentieth century.
The Operations Center of the Salisbury Bank and Trust Company is located in a brick Colonial Revival building in the Village of Canaan in the Town of North Canaan. The building was erected in 1952 for the Canaan Savings Bank. It replaced an earlier building on the property, called the Cummings Building, that was destroyed by fire. A circa 1905-1910 postcard of that building shows that it then housed the Canaan Post Office, the F.R. Collin jewelry and watch store, and the Canaan Savings Bank.
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