The William Meggat House, built in 1886 on Hartford Avenue in Wethersfield, is now the rectory of Sacred Heart Parish. Meggat was a partner in the seed company Wolcott & Meggat. The house originally had a porch, which has since been removed.
Capt. Caleb Griswold was a Wethersfield sea captain. Griswold‘s house, on Main Street, not far from Wethersfield Cove, was built in 1734: one of the house‘s chimney bricks is inscribed with that date.
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The Queen Anne style house of Frank S. Brown, on Hartford Avenue in Wethersfield, was built sometime in the 1880s. Brown was a Hartford merchant who, in 1866, joined with James M. Thomson and William McWhirter to form the dry goods firm of Brown, Thomson & Co., which became a major New England department store. Brown retired from the company in 1890 and in 1893 the house was sold out of the Brown family. Ellsworth S. Grant, the Connecticut historian, former mayor of West Hartford and brother-in-law of Katharine Hepburn, was later born in the house. In 1920, Minnie Pricone and Mary Rometta, with their husbands and families, moved into the house. They owned the Marie Phillips Dress Company and tailoring work was done in the basement area of the house.
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On Greene’s Alley in New London is the home of Reverend Samuel Seabury, which was built around 1792. Rev. Seabury was an Episcopal minister and a loyalist during the Revolutionary War, who was selected at a 1783 meeting in the Glebe House in Woodbury to become the first American Episcopal Bishop. Rev. Seabury also lived in an earlier house, built in 1743 (unless it’s the same house?). After his death, in 1796, he was succeeded as rector of St James Church in New London by his son, Rev. Charles Seabury.
Acors Barns was a New London whaling agent. He was also president of the National Bank of Commerce of New London. His 1837 Greek Revival house is on Federal Street.
The Baptist Church in Essex was founded in 1811. The congregation’s first church was a brick building, built in 1817, which stood across Prospect Street from Hill’s Academy. In 1845, a new church was built, adjacent to the Academy on Baptist Hill. Constructed by master builder Jeremish Gladding, the Baptist Church was designed in the Egyptian Revival style, modeled on an 1844 Presbyterian church, the Old Whaler’s Church in Sag Harbor, Long Island, designed by Minard Lafever. Both of these buildings are interesting examples of a style not often used for churches in America. The church’s original steeple was destroyed after being struck by lightning in 1925. It was replaced by the current steeple, a Colonial Revival structure which features a gold dome and a variation on a ‘Widow’s Walk” below.
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.
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