The former High School in Meriden, which now serves as the Board of Education building, was built in 1885. The building is on Liberty Street, near the Town Hall, and is a good example of the Romanesque style, with a prominent Roman-style rounded arch entrance. The school had actually begun classes in 1881, as the New Central School, which rented the second floor of the German-American School on Liberty Street before the 1885 school building was completed.
Captain Joseph Riggs was an active citizen of Derby in the eighteenth century. He managed the area’s first lottery, which raised money for two bridges to cross the Naugatuck River and a highway from Derby to Woodbury. Riggs was also a patriot during the Revolutionary War. The Riggs House, on Elm Street in what is now Ansonia, was built in 1760.
The town of Granby began as a settlement called Salmon Brook, which eventually separated from Simsbury. The Abijah Rowe House, built around 1732, is the oldest surviving building from the original settlement. It was built by Nehemiah Lee, who sold it to his son-in-law, Peter Rowe, in 1750. Three years later it was acquired by Peter’s brother, Abijah Rowe. Both brothers were blacksmiths and may have produced some of the house’s hardware. Rowe died in 1812 and the following year his heirs sold the house to Elijah and Joseph Smith. In 1903, it was sold by the Smith family to Fred M. Colton, a tobacco grower, whose daughters, Mildred Colton Allison and Carolyn Colton Avery, gave the house to the Salmon Brook Historical Society in 1966. It is now part of a campus of four historic structures open to the public.
The Simsbury 1820 House is an inn which is housed in an elaborate gambrel roofed Federal mansion. The house was built by Elijah Phelps, the son of Maj. Gen. Noah Phelps, who was a hero of the Revolutionary War. Elijah Phelps’s son-in-law, Amos R. Eno, became wealthy by investing the profits of his dry goods business in real estate in New York. He used the 1820 House as a summer residence. His grandson, Gifford Pinchot, a conservationist and governor of Pennsylvania, was born in the house in 1865. In 1884, Amos Eno retreated to the Simsbury House after his son, John C. Eno, embezzled millions from his father’s bank and fled to Canada. In 1890, Amos Eno added a large rear extension to the house, which was later inherited by his daughter, Anoinette Eno Wood, who called the home “Eaglewood,” in reference to her family’s patriotism and her last name. She had the house renovated in the Colonial Revival style. The house remained in the family until 1948, afterwards becoming a restaurant called the Simsbury House. When a developer bought the house and started to auction off its fixtures in the 1960s, the Town of Simsbury decided to purchase it. Little was done to renovate it, however, until in 1985 it was bought and restored by Simsbury House Associates to become an elegant inn.
Eleazar Wheelock, who later founded Dartmouth College, was the Congregational minister in Columbia from 1735 to 1770. His house, built in 1735, is located on the Green, next to the Congregational Church. Wheelock, a prominent figure during the Great Awakening, also trained young men for college and in 1743 he began privately teaching a young Mohegan named Samson Occom, who became a missionary to other Indians. He soon started teaching and converting other Native Americans in his home, then founding a school, called Moor’s Charity School in 1754, named for Joshua Moor, who donated land for the school. Wheelock used a school building, which is now located behind the Congregational Church in Columbia. Later, he moved to New Hampshire to establish Dartmouth College.
Ebenezer King built an elaborate Federal-style mansion, with two porticoed doorways, on North Main Street in Suffield in 1795. In 1811, he sold the house to William Gay, the son of Ebenezer Gay and a prominent lawyer and postmaster of Suffield, who ran the post office from his house. The house came to be known as the Gay Mansion and remained the possession of descendants of the Gay family until 1916. The house is now the official residence of the headmaster of Suffield Academy. (more…)
In 1711, Reverend Samuel Welles became the second pastor of the Congregational Church in Lebanon. In 1712, he built a house on what is now route 87, across from where William A. Buckingham Birthplace House would be built in 1804. According to a biography of Jonathan Trumbull, the governor of Connecticut who as a boy had been tutored by Welles, “If there were any exceptions to the rule of social equality which existed in the town at this time, one exception might be found in the case of this same Reverend Samuel Welles, whose aristocratic Boston connections had enabled him to build the handsomest house in Lebanon.” In 1719, Rev. Welles had married Hannah Arnold, whose family owned extensive property in Boston. Her parents wanted the couple to move to Boston, so Welles left Lebanon in 1722, looking after his wife’s property after her parents’ deaths and, according to Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College (1885), in Boston, “he accumulated more wealth, becoming one of the richest men of the town, and highly respected.” On leaving Lebanon, Welles sold his house to his successor as pastor, the Rev. Solomon Williams, son of the Rev. William Williams of Hatfield. Rev. Solomon Williams’ son, William Williams, was born in the house in 1731 and later went on to become a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Another son of Rev. Williams was Ezekiel Williams, who moved to Wethersfield and was a merchant and sheriff of Hartford County during the Revolutionary War. Their former home came to be owned by David S. Woodworth. In 1857, Charles Lyman Pitcher began working for Woodworth, eventually gaining possession of the farm after Woodworth’s death. Pitcher served in the Civil War and later the farm was managed by his two sons after his retirement.
