Eugene Boss rose from being a bookkeeper for the Willimantic Linen Company (later the American Thread Company) to becoming the mill’s agent (or manager), a position he held from 1879 to 1916. He was, literally, boss at the mill. The company had a private rail network between its buildings and the train was pulled by an engine, the Helen B, named after Boss’ daughter. Boss’ house in Willimantic, on Windham Street, from which he could look down on the company’s mills, was built in the 1880s.
Historic Buildings of Connecticut’s 850th building is the Charles Ives Birthplace in Danbury. Ives, born in 1874, was an unconventional composer who combined traditional and revolutionary elements. The original timber frame of his childhood home was built in 1780 by Thomas Tucker, but this building burned in the 1820s. The remains of the structure were purchased by Isaac Ives and rebuilt as a Federal-style house. Charles Edward Ives‘ father George Edward Ives, the youngest band master in the Union Army during the Civil War, was a music teacher who taught his son to embrace unusual combinations of sounds. In 1894, the younger Ives left Danbury to attend Yale. He would go on to form a very successful insurance company, while also composing modernist musical works which would not be fully appreciated by the public until later in the twentieth century. Ives married Harmony Twitchell, the daughter of Mark Twain’s friend, Rev. Joseph Twitchell. The house where Charles Ives had been born was moved from its first location, on Main Street, to Chapel Place in 1923 and again to Mountainville Avenue in 1966. It was later restored by the Danbury Museum and opened to the public in 1992.
In 1800 [the sign on the house indicates c. 1815], Capt. Curtis Wilcox built a house on the Boston Post Road in Madison and lived there with his wife, Wealthy Hill, the daughter of Reuben Hill and Hannah Scranton. Wilcox became Madison’s first postmaster and his house was the first post office (see pdf file). In 1823, twelve prominent citizens of Madison (then called East Guilford) gathered at the Wilcox House where, under the leadership of Frederick Lee, they started to remedy the community’s lack of its own wharf by pledging a thousand dollars for the construction of West Wharf, completed in 1824. Curtis Wilcox was appointed the first wharfmaster (see pdf file) and many ships were constructed there.
When Sereno H. Scranton of Madison married Susan Roxanna Doud in 1833, his father, Jonathan Scranton, presented the couple with a new Greek Revival home on the Boston Post Road. Sereno Scranton was a prominent citizen of Madison, who owned many merchant ships and served as a state representative and senator. He was also president of the Shoreline Railroad. Today, the house is the Scranton Seahorse Inn.
The earliest section of what later on became the Elm Tree Inn in Farmington was the 1655 house of William Lewis, an original settler of the town. His son built a new and larger structure, around the old house, and the enlarged building became a tavern and inn. By the mid-eighteenth century, it was operated by Phineas Lewis. Washington dined at the tavern, while on his way to Hartford, in 1780 and again, while on his way to Wethersfield, in 1781. The French general Rochambeau may have also stayed there with his officers when he was passing through Connecticut with his army in 1781. The facade of the building was later updated in the Georgian style and the tavern came to be known as the Elm Tree Inn, after the elm trees on the property, planted in the 1760s. The Inn continued to be popular into the twentieth century as it was a stop on the trolley line to Hartford. Mark Twain frequently dined there while he lived in Hartford, as did the cast and crew filming Way Down East with Lillian Gish in 1919. The exterior of the Inn was once surrounded by a long verandah, which has since been removed. The building is now subdivided into condominiums.
James A. Norton, a prominent citizen in Guilford, who served on many town committees, built his house in the Italianate style on Fair Street in 1856. A later owner, for over six decades, was John Pitts, who lived to be a hundred. There is a modern addition to the rear which matches the style of the original part of the house. The house is currently for sale.
Haddam Neck, on the east bank of the Connecticut River, was originally settled around 1710. For thirty years, the residents made the trip each Sunday across the River to attend church services in Haddam. In 1740, residents of Haddam Neck joined with those of Middle Haddam (in East Hampton) to form a seperate ecclesiastical society, the First Congregational Church of Middle Haddam. The first meetinghouse was constructed in 1744 on Hog Hill, between the two communities, and this was replaced by a new building in 1813, located near Hurd Park. Middle Haddam residents withdrew to form their own church in 1855. The current Haddam Neck Congregational Church, a wooden Gothic Revival church in a woodland setting, was built at the foot of School House Hill in 1873-1874. In 1916, Haddam’s old 1822 schoolhouse was moved adjacent to the church to serve as a parish house.
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