Jared Shailer built a Greek Revival-style house on Bridge Road, in the Tylerville section of Haddam, in 1838, the year after he married his cousin, Florilla Shailer. Several other Shailer cousins lived nearby. The side hall house has a side wing addition–a common method of adding more space to a front-gabled Greek Revival home.
The Robert Pratt House, on Route 154 in Centerbrook consists of a main Georgian-style center-chimney house with a smaller wing on the west side. It is possible that the wing was built first, by Robert Pratt, Sr. around 1716. The main part of the house was built around the time Nathan Pratt sold the house to Rev. Stephen Holmes in 1758. Rev. Holmes was the second pastor of the Second Ecclessiastical Society of Saybrook, located in Potapoug, which is now the village of Centerbrook in the town of Essex. As explained in the History of Middlesex County (1884), the Reverend, who died in 1773, “practiced medicine in addition to preaching the gospel.”
The Welles-Chapman Tavern, on Main Street in Glastonbury, was moved from the west to the east side of the street in 1974, when the Glastonbury bank expanded. In the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the tavern was the stop-over for coaches traveling between Hartford and New London. The tavern (which was also the town’s first post office) was built in 1776 by Joseph Welles. It was purchased by Azel Chapman in 1808. Today, it is owned by the Historical Society of Glastonbury, who have rented it out to a number of tenants, currently the Glastonbury Chamber of Commerce.
Historic Buildings of Connecticut’s fiftieth entry for New Haven is the old Yale University Art Gallery building, designed by Egerton Swartwout a Yale graduate, in a Gothic style called “Tuscan Romanesque.” Built along Chapel Street in 1927, the Art Gallery is connected to the earlier Street Hall (1864), across High Street, by a distinctive bridge. Swatwout planned a further extension of the building, but this original plan was not completed; instead the museum was expanded in 1953 with the construction of the modern-style new Art Gallery building, designed by Louis I. Kahn. Until recently, the bridge over High Street contained faculty offices, but it will soon be renovated, in the continuation of a Gallery plan which has already resulted in the restoration of the Kahn building. This work will expand the Art Gallery across the bridge and into Street Hall. (more…)
Built in 1754 by Samuel Lay, the son of Robert Lay, Jr., the house at 17 North Main Street in Essex was altered the nineteenth century to conform to the popularity of the Greek Revival style. In 1924, the house was purchased and again altered by E.E. Dickinson, Jr.
A few doors down from the home of Dr. Ezra Mather, on Main Street in Essex, is a house he had built for his son, Mortimer Mather. The 1870 house (or more likely earlier) is a late example of the Greek Revival style.
The first ecclesiastical society of Plainville began in 1840, when the congregation split off from the church in Farmington to become the Second Congregational Church of Farmington. Plainville was incorporated as a seperate town in 1869. The current Gothic Revival style Congregational Church of Plainville was built in 1850 and was designed by the New Haven architect Henry Austin.