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

Capt. Henry S. Stark House (1852)

The 1852 Italianate home of Capt. Henry S. Stark and his wife, Mary Rathbun Stark, is on West Mystic Avenue in Mystic. Mary Stark supervised the construction because her husband, a ship captain, was in command of a bark voyaging to Italy. The avenue was called Skipper Lane because many ship captains built homes there. Capt. Stark also made voyages to Mexico and Hawaii. His wife accompanied him on his voyage to Honolulu from 1854 to 1856 on the clipper ship B.F. Hoxie. Mary Stark wrote a series of letters during the voyage, many to her daughter, Lizzie Stark, describing her experiences.

Mystic Seaport Lighthouse (1966)

Mystic Seaport is a living history maritime museum, which recreates a nineteenth century seaport. One of the museum buildings is an exact replica of the current lighthouse at Brant Point on Nantucket. The first lighthouse at Brant Point was built in 1746 and has been followed by many successive structures over the years. The present light, which is the lowest above sea level in New England, was built in 1901. The Mystic Seaport replica lighthouse was built in 1966. Inside, it currently displays a multimedia exhibition about lighthouses, called Sentinels of the Sea (video). (more…)

Amos C. Tift House (1851)

Amos C. Tift, who died at Mystic. Connecticut, at the age of seventy-six in 1883, was a merchant by occupation and had exceptional business capacity. He was quite well known in the South, especially at Key West, Florida.

So writes Lucian Lamar Knight in A Standard History of Georgia and Georgians, Vol. 6 (1917). Amos Chapman Tift of Mystic is mentioned in a book about Georgia because his son, Henry Harding Tift, was the founder of Tifton, in Tift County, Georgia. The county, created in 1905, was named for Nelson Tift, a brother of Amos, who had settled in Georgia, become a successful entrepreneur and politician, and founded the city of Albany in 1835. Henry H. Tift joined his uncle‘s company and later founded Tifton when he opened a sawmill there in 1872. He was involved in many business ventures and was a philanthropist dedicated to promoting education. As the book quoted above explains:

He was a man who, realizing the great wealth of natural resources not only in timber but in agricultural lines, established sawmills, built railroads, caused the establishment of agricultural experiment stations, colonized the country with sturdy and thrifty farmers, and lent his personal agency and his material resources to the steady development of this portion of the state.

The Amos C. Tift House, which was the childhod home of Henry Harding Tift, was built around 1851 on High Street in Mystic. Henry H. Tift’s later house in Tifton, built in 1887, is part of the Georgia Agrirama, an agricultural and historical museum village.

The Orrin Shailer II House (1856)

The Orrin Shailer II House, on Saybrook Road in the Shailerville section of Haddam, is a clapboarded Greek Revival house, which interestingly has a front door that is not placed in one of the outer bays of the facade. The house was built in 1856 by Orrin Shailer II on land sold to him by his father, Joseph Shailer. The gable window was added later in the nineteenth century.

Charles Merritt House (1855)

The unusual granite Greek Revival home of Charles Merritt is on Monument Street in Groton Bank. It was most likely built by the same Charles Merritt who was a stonecutter in Groton and was in business with John Salter and Robert A. Gray, the latter of whom won the Medal of Honor in the Civil War. They had a quarry on Thames Street.

Moses Bradley House (1875)

Around 1875, Moses Bradley built a house near the Congregational Church facing Cheshire Green. It replaced an earlier Colonial-era house on the site, which had been built by the silversmith Eliakim Hitchcock, father of Rufus Hitchcock. The Bradley House has been altered over the years, but still has distinctive Gothic Revival decorated bargeboards.

Deep River Congregational Church (1834)

The Saybrook Colony, later the town of Saybrook, eventually divided into several towns. Lyme broke off as early as 1655, with Chester, Westbrook, Essex and Old Saybrook (the earliest settled area of Saybrook) following in the nineteenth century. The second Congregational Church to be founded in what had been the Saybrook Colony (and the earliest in what is now the town of the Essex) was established in Centerbrook in the 1720s. The residents of the area of Saybrook called Deep River attended this church until 1833 (Centerbrook remained part of the town of Saybrook until it was added to Essex in 1859). Deep River’s own Congregational Church was built in 1833. Worship was held in the church as soon as it was completed, although it was not officially dedicated until it was entirely paid for the following year. The town of Saybrook was renamed Deep River in 1947. Earlier this year, the Church celebrated its 175th anniversary.