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

Gurdon Trumbull House (1837)

Gurdon Trumbull, a Stonington merchant, was of the volunteers who defended the town during the British bombardment of 1814. He was also involved in developing the sealing and whaling industries in town and became a prominent citizen. His Greek Revival house on Main Street was built after the fire of 1837. Trumbull eventually moved to Hartford in 1852. He had several notable children, including the author Annie Trumbull Slosson, author of such books as Seven Dreamers (1890), Aunt Abby’s Neighbors (1902), Story-tell Lib (1911) and A Local Colorist (1912). His son, J. Hammond Trumbull, was a Connecticut Secretary of State and a scholar, who wrote The True-blue Laws Of Connecticut And New Haven And The False Blue-laws Invented By The Rev. Samuel Peters (1876). Another son, Henry Clay Trumbull, was a Congregational minister, chaplain of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment in the Civil War and author of such works as The Captured Scout of the Army of the James (1869), The Blood Covenant (1885), Studies in Oriental Social Life and Gleams from the East on the Sacred Page (1894) and The Salt Covenant (1899).

Also today, check out the latest entries at Historic Buildings of Massachusetts, the Francis Parkman House in Boston and the Ashley House in Deerfield.

Dr. William Beaumont Homestead (1750)

Dr. William Beaumont (1785-1853) was a U.S. Army surgeon who became famous as the “Father of Gastric Physiology.” His pioneering investigations of human digestion were published in his 1838 work, Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion. Dr. Beaumont was born in a small c. 1750 farm house, built by his father, Samuel Beaumont, in the Village Hill section of Lebanon. In 1973, the house was acquired by the Beaumont Homestead Preservation Trust and moved to a new site on Lebanon Green, behind the Gov. Jonathan Trumbull House. The house is now a museum, owned and maintained by the Lebanon Historical Society.

Also today, check out the latest entries at Historic Buildings of Massachusetts, the Nims House and Wilson Printing Office in Deerfield.

Built around 1815, the Harvey Bissell House, on North Main Street in Suffield, is an elaborate example of the Federal style. Harvey Bissell, who married Arabella Leavitt in 1816, originally came from Windsor and became a successful shop keeper in Suffield. In 1846, he is listed as the town’s only retailer of wine and liquor.

Also today, check out the latest entries at Historic Buildings of Massachusetts, the Porter-Phelps-Huntington House in Hadley and Sycamores in South Hadley.

Old Farm School (1796)

Constructed in Bloomfield in 1796, at the intersection of Park and School Streets, the brick Old Farm School served one of the seven school districts in what was then Windsor’s Wintonbury Parish. Before then, an earlier log building on the site from the 1730s had been used as a school house (it was eventually sold in 1815). Although originally built with two floors, the new brick building’s second floor classroom was only completed in 1829-30. The school closed in 1922, but the building continued to be used by the public, serving as a meeting place for the American Legion and Auxiliary Legion from 1931 to 1971. When the state planned to widen School Street, the Wintonbury Historical Society raised money and supervised the moving of the building to a new location across the street in 1976. In 1987 the first floor was restored and opened to the public as a museum, with the second floor following it in 1989.

Francis Gillette House (1834)

Francis Gillette was a politician, lecturer and abolitionist. He pursued agriculture in Bloomfield and lived in an unusual 1834 Greek Revival style stone house on Bloomfield Avenue. In 1852, Gillette moved to Hartford, founding the Nook Farm neighborhood with his brother-in-law, John Hooker. Francis Gillette served as a senator and was the father of actor William Gillette. The house, which was used as an overnight stop for fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad during the Civil War, was moved to a new location on Bloomfield Avenue in 1990, after being vacant for 17 years.

Albert J. Briggs House (1891)

D. Luther Briggs and Albert J. Briggs were brothers from Sackville, New Brunswick, who came to Cromwell in 1871 and set up D. L. Briggs & Company, a wholesale meat-packing firm which imported western beef by railroad. The company is described, in The Leading Business Men of Middeltown, Portland, Durham and Middlefield (1890), as “dealers in Chicago Dressed Beef, Lamb, Mutton, Pork, Lard. Hams, etc.” D. L. Briggs moved to Middletown (to a house on Washington Street), eventually becoming the mayor (1890-94). Albert Briggs remained in Cromwell, living on Main Street in an 1891 Queen Anne style house, with Stick elements, until his death in 1901. His widow, Eugenia C. Briggs, was in Europe when the First World War started in 1914. 400 American “refugees,” who had gathered in Genoa, found passage home on the steamship Principe Di Udine.

Dr. Smith’s Apothecary Shop (1781)

The oldest surviving commercial structure in Litchfield is the Apothecary Shop of Dr. Reuben Smith. Built in 1781, the Apothecary Shop was formerly located next to his house on North Street, but in 1812 was moved to its current location north of the Green, to become Luke Lewis‘s grocery shop. It has served various commercial purposes over the years.