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

The Aaron Chapin House (1779)

Aaron Chapin became a notable maker of furniture in the late eighteenth century. He was a second cousin of the famous East Windsor cabinetmaker, Eliphalet Chapin and worked in his cousin’s shop between 1774 and 1783. Chapin built his house in East Windsor Hill (now in South Windsor) in 1779, just south of his cousin’s home. Aaron Chapin later established a large shop in Hartford, which was the area’s leading cabinetmaking establishment in the first decade of the nineteenth century, being particularly dominant in the production of Federal-style sideboards.

The Everard Benjamin House (1838)

Originally built on Orange Street in New Haven in 1838, the Everard Benjamin House was moved to the corner of Bradley and Lincoln Streets in the late 1860s. This classical Greek Revival building, designed by Ithiel Town, was set off from the street with a large front lawn in its original location, but the house now right off the sidewalk. Everard Benjamin was a silversmith, jeweler, and watchmaker, who succeeded his father, the silversmith Barzillai Benjamin. The house was later owned by Hobart B. Bigelow, who started by learning the machinist’s trade, becoming a leading manufacturer of boilers and heavy machinery. Bigelow later became mayor of New Haven in 1879 and served as governor of Connecticut from 1881 to 1883.

Beacon Mill Village (1853)

Beacon Mill Village in Beacon Falls is an example of a nineteenth century mill village adapted to new use as an apartment complex (in this it is similar to the mill village established by the Cheney Brothers in Manchester). The eight surviving buildings of the Beacon Mill Village complex were built between 1853 and 1916. The Town of Beacon Falls, incorporated in 1871, grew up alongside the factories. The Village was originally home to the American Hard Rubber Company in the 1850s. By the time of the Civil War, the complex housed the factories of the Home Woolen Company, which produced shawls for Union soldiers. This company went out of business in 1880, but the Beacon Falls Rubber Shoe Company, founded in 1898 by George Lewis, later moved into the complex. His son, Tracy Lewis, later served as the company‘s president until his death in 1921. The company, which grew to have offices in Boston, San Francisco and New York, incorporated in Massachusetts in 1915, while production remained in Beacon Falls. That same year, the company hired the Olmstead Brothers, sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, to design a mill town for plant workers. The mill buildings were restored and transformed into an apartment complex in 1986.

Gurdon Whiting House (1786)

The land in West Hartford, where Gurdon Whiting would build a house around 1786, was originally part of a grant to Rev. Joseph Haynes, minister of First Church in Hartford and the son of John Haynes, first Governor of the Colony of Connecticut. Haynes’ daughter, Mary, inherited the property. She married Roswell Saltonstall, the son of Connecticut governor Gurdon Saltonstall. She later married Thomas Clap, President of Yale. Mary, who died in New Haven in 1769, left her land in the West Division of Hartford to her daughter, Mary Whiting, who deeded the land to her son, Gurdon Saltonstall Whiting in 1778. He built the Whiting House in the 1780s, at the time of his marriage. It remained in his family into the 1920s, when it was purchased by Philip Lawler, who had been mayor of West Hartford in 1915. The house, which has survived nearly intact, was in the Lawler family into the 1980s.

Capt. George Latimer House (1770)

The house of Capt. George Latimer is on Main Street in Wethersfield. It was built around 1770 by Samuel Talcott. Capt. Latimer owned the house in the nineteenth century and died by drowning in 1863. He was racing another ship on the Connecticut River back to Wethersfield at the time and had decided to take the shallower west channel of Wright’s Island. His boat ran aground and he was “walking” or kedging it (a method of hauling a ship in shallow water by laying a lighter kedge anchor attached to the ship by a rope and pulling the ship up to the anchor; the process is repeated until the ship is free from shallow water). Capt. Latimer was in a smaller boat, attempting to cast anchor and pull his ship, when an anchor chain caught his leg and pulled him under. At his funeral, his lifelike appearance made many believe he wasn’t really dead (and interestingly, it was said that no water had been found in his lungs).

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The Gardner Carpenter House (1793)

In 1793, Gardner Carpenter, Norwich postmaster, purchased a house in Norwichtown which had been built around 1740 by André Richard, a wig-maker. Carpenter removed the earlier house and replaced it with the current brick one. Carpenter was a merchant and ship-owner who died in 1815, having lost most of his property to disasters at sea. The house was then sold to Joseph Carew Huntington in 1816. Soon after, he added a wood third story and a gambrel roof to the home. Joseph Huntington moved to New York in 1834 and the house was sold in 1841. Over the years, various one-story additions have been made to the rear of the house.

First Congregational Church of Cromwell (1840)

Middletown’s Second or North Ecclesiastical Society was incorporated in 1703 in the community known as “Middletown Upper Houses,” now the Town of Cromwell. A minister was settled in 1715 and the congregation had their first meeting house on Pleasant Street. This was succeeded by a larger second meeting house, built in 1735-1736 on the town green. When Rev. Zebulon Crocker was pastor, the congregation undertook several ambitious building projects, constructing an Academy (1834), Parsonage (1835) and the third meeting house (1840), all designed in the Greek Revival style. The foundation stones of the church were dragged by volunteers across the ice on the Connecticut River from the Portland brownstone quarries. The architecture of the church was influenced by the Greek Revival of the old Middletown Court House, designed by Town and Davis. The upper tier of the steeple was lost in the 1938 hurricane and replaced in 1976. (more…)