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

Sterling Opera House (1889)

The industrial village of Birmingham, initially developed by such entrepreneurs as John I. Howe, Anson Greene Phelps and Sheldon Smith, continued to industrialize and was incorporated as the City of Derby in 1893. With growth came labor unrest. In 1901, after seventy woman in the underwear room of the Paugussett Mills had been on strike for 54 days, Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, arrived in Derby at the invitation of Stephen Charters, head of the local carpenters union. In one day, Gompers negotiated a settlement and the next night announced the results to a packed audience at the Sterling Opera House, on Elizabeth Street, facing Derby Green. The Italianate-style Opera House, named for Charles Sterling of the Sterling Piano Company, was completed in 1889 and was in use until 1945. Many famous individuals, from Harry Houdini to Amelia Earhart, appeared at the Sterling during its time as a vaudeville palace. The two lower floors were used as the Derby city hall and police station until 1965. The building was designed by H.E. Ficken (who was also involved in creating Carnegie Hall). He modeled the Hall’s triangular seating plan on the ideas of German composer Richard Wagner as realized in the famous Bayreuth Festspielhaus in Bavaria. The Sterling became known for its excellent acoustics. Planning for the restoration of the building, begun several years ago. Work began and then stalled for some time, but continued renovations of the exterior are now underway.

The homestead of James Stokes is on Elm Street in Ansonia. The current house, completed around 1830, either replaced or incorporated an earlier one on the site, built in 1778. Stokes married Caroline Phelps, the daughter of Anson Greene Phelps, who founded Ansonia. Born in Simsbury, Phelps had become a successful businessman and manufacturer in New York. In the 1830s, Phelps joined with Sheldon Smith to found a manufacturing village in Derby called Birmingham (now the City of Derby). Facing obstacles in his attempts to expand Birmingham to the north in the 1840s, Phelps founded a new manufacturing settlement on the east bank of the Naugatuck River, in the older part of Derby which was named “Ansonia” after its founder. Phelps established a copper wire mill in 1845, which merged with Birmingham Copper Mills in 1854 and later became Ansonia Copper & Brass. Ansonia separated from Derby in 1889, later incorporating as a city in 1893. Anson G. Phelps was active in the Congregational Church and contributed to many philanthropic causes. His daughter, Caroline Phelps Stokes, and son-in-law, James Stokes, used their Ansonia house as a summer home and Anson Phelps often visited. Stokes’s son, Anson Phelps Stokes I, was a merchant, banker and multimillionaire; his grandson, Anson Phelps Stokes II, was a philanthropist; his great-grandson, Anson Phelps Stokes III, was an Episcopal Bishop. Another son of James Phelps was William Earl Dodge Stokes, a multimillionaire who developed much of New York’s Upper West Side and built a famous hotel called the Ansonia on Broadway. James Phelps’s daughter, Caroline Phelps Stokes, a philanthropist whose will established the Phelps-Stokes Fund, donated a library to the City of Ansonia.

John I. Howe House (1845)

As resident physician in the New York City Almshouse, Dr. John Ireland Howe observed how English residents laboriously made pins by hand. In 1831, Dr. Howe invented a pin-making machine and founded the Howe Manufacturing company in New York in 1835 to produce pins. In 1838, he moved the company to Birmingham, a section of Derby which would later become the City of Derby. The Howe Pin Company grew as Howe perfected his methods with additional patented inventions. In 1910, Howe‘s son donated his original Pin Machine to the Smithsonian. Howe’s stone house, constructed in 1845 on Caroline Street in Derby, was perhaps built by Lucius Hubbell, who constructed other stone houses in Derby and Shelton. The house, now owned by the Derby Historical Society, will eventually house the Lower Naugatuck Valley Industrial Heritage Center.

General David Humphreys House (1698)

Located across from the Old Episcopal Burying Ground, on Elm Street in Ansonia, is the house where General David Humphreys was born in 1752. The house was built in 1698 to be the home of the new Congregational Minister of the Town of Derby (Ansonia was then part of Derby). It was first occupied by the Reverend John James, who sold the house in 1706 to the Reverend Joseph Moss. In 1735, the Reverend Daniel Humphreys bought the house from Joseph Moss’s widow, Abigail Moss. At some point in the 1730s, the house was enlarged to roughly its current size. Humphreys was a Congregational minister, but lived across the street from Derby’s Episcopal church, with its cemetery. Later, when Derby’s second Episcopal Church was built down the street to replace the original smaller building, the old church building was moved across Elm Street and attached to the Humphreys House for use as a summer kitchen. Rev. Humphreys died in 1787. His son, David Humphreys, never owned the house, but visited it as his family’s ancestral homestead. During the Revolutionary War, David Humphreys served as an aide-de-camp and close adviser to George Washington and, after the Battle of Yorktown, he was honored by receiving the surrendered British standards and presenting them to Congress. After the War, Humphreys served as a diplomat in Europe and General Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the Polish Revolutionary hero, visited him at the house on Elm Street. Returning from Spain, Humphreys brought back with him America’s first Merino sheep, going on to found the Humphreysville (now Seymour), where wool textiles were manufactured. David Humphreys was also a poet and a member of the literary group known as the “Hartford Wits.” His writings were collected in The Miscellaneous Works of David Humphreys (1804).

The house was not owned by David Humphreys, but by his brother Elijah, who had married Anna Mansfield, the daughter of the Episcopal minister, Richard Mansfield. Elijah, who died at sea, willed the house to his son, Elijah, Jr., who sold it to his sister, Betsey, and her husband, Thomas Vose, a sea captain and business partner of David Humphreys. The house had other owners over the years, eventually being converted into three apartments. Preserved by the Humphreys House Association, in 1961 the house was turned over to the Derby Historical Society. Restored beginning in 1976, it was first opened to the public as a museum in 1980.

Holbrook-Blakeslee House (1712)

The 1712 Holbrook-Blakeslee House is on Elm Street in Ansonia (which was then part of Derby). In 1738, it was occupied by Captain John Holbrook. He joined with seven other Anglican families to establish a church in Derby, which was constructed on Elm Street on land he donated. A larger church was later built elsewhere, but the land is still the Old Episcopal Burying Ground. Rev. Richard Mansfield was the church’s first clergyman and, in 1791, Edward Blakeslee became one of his assistants. Blakeslee, who moved in to the former home of John Holbrook in 1792, was ordained priest by Bishop Seabury in 1793 and married Rev. Mansfield’s daughter, Sarah. According to The Records of Convocation, 1790-1848 (1904), “Mr. Blakeslee died on July 15, 1797, in the thirty-first year of his age. His death was felt as a personal loss by many both in Derby and wherever he was known. His clerical brethren mourned for him and grieved that his earthly ministry had so soon ended, as they had anticipated for him a brilliant future.” Rev. Blakeslee is buried in the Old Episcopal Cemetery in Ansonia. Update: here’s a recent blog post about the house.

Rev. Richard Mansfield House (1700)

This week we’ll be looking at some historic buildings in the Lower Naugatuck River Valley towns of Derby and Ansonia. Reverend Richard Mansfield was the first clergyman of the Church of England to reside in Derby. Although his father was a deacon in the Congregational Church, Mansfield had converted to Anglicanism after studying at Yale and was ordained by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself in England. Assigned to Derby in 1748, Rev. Mansfield would serve for 72 years, the longest recorded rectorship in the United States. In Derby, Rev. Mansfield lived in a saltbox house on what is today Jewett Street in Ansonia (which later separated from Derby). The house had been built around 1700 and was purchased the the Episcopal Church in 1748 as a home for its rector, thus becoming an Episcopal Glebe House Rectory. His tenure was not without serious difficulties, however, because during the Revolutionary War, the loyalist Rev. Mansfield was forced to flee to Long Island. Although he returned to his old rectorship after the war, his wife Anna and infant daughter had died during his absence. During Rev. Mansfield’s tenure in Derby, the Episcopal Church had two successive buildings. The first church was erected on Elm Street (in what is now Ansonia) in 1737. Itinerant Anglican priests had preached there until Rev. Mansfield arrived in 1748. A new church was completed on Derby Avenue in 1799, where Rev. Mansfield served until his death in 1820. He is buried in the Episcopal cemetery on Elm Street, his monument marking where the first Episcopal church’s alter had been when it stood at that location. In 1926, the Mansfield House was moved across Jewett Street to make way for St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church and School. Preserved by the Mansfield House Association, the building was given to the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society. Later, in 1960, the A&L gave the house to the Derby Historical Society.

Update: Last year the house acquired a new owner, who has posted about the house on his blog. Here’s a great article about the restoration of the house. Another post is about the south garret, while others discuss the history of the house, a Bible once owned by Rev. Richard Mansfield and thermal imaging,

First & Summerfield United Methodist Church (1849)

Designed by Henry Austin, the First Methodist Church, on College Street in New Haven, was built in 1849 in the late Federal style in a stylistic link with the nearby Center Church of 1814. In the ensuing years, the church was significantly altered, with many of the Federal features being removed. In 1904, after a fire, the church was repaired with a new portico and steeple, in a Federal Revival mode, designed by Charles C. Haight of New York, who also designed the Keney Memorial Clock Tower in Hartford. In 1981, First Methodist Church merged with Summerfield United Methodist Church, located in the Newhallville neighborhood of New Haven, to form the First & Summerfield United Methodist Church.