Elkanah Cobb House (1769)

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The Elkanah Cobb House, on Water Street in Stonington Borough, is one of the oldest in town. Built in 1760s, the Cobb House is a one-and-a-half story structure with a gambrel roof and unusual 9 over 6 sash windows. Cobb was the owner of the house at the time when Stonington was bombarded by British ships on August 19, 1814 during the War of 1812. According to The Homes of our Ancestors in Stonington, Conn., by Grace Denison Wheeler (1903), the house “stood in the thick of the fight near the [American] battery, and so has many scars received during the bombardment.” Benson J. Lossing visited Stonington in 1860 and mentions the house in his Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812 (1869).

Frank Sanford House (1884)

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For Halloween, we present a classic Victorian Stick Style house, the 1884 Frank Sanford House, on Lovely Street in Unionville. The Stick Style is viewed as a transitional style between the earlier Gothic and Italianate and the later Queen Anne styles. Some see the Stick style as an independent style, others as a part of the broader category of Queen Anne. Sanford, who owned a lumber and hardware business, married Marion Hawley and soon joined his brother-in-law, C. R. Hawley in founding the Sanford and Hawley lumber and building materials company, which is still in operation today.

Coventry Visitors’ Center (1876)

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Constructed in 1876, to celebrate the Nation’s centennial, the building which now serves as Coventry‘s Visitors’ Center was originally the Town Office. The bankruptcy of the Tracy-Elliot Mills in 1929 led to the town’s takeover of the company’s properties and the conversion of their office building to serve as the town’s offices. The 1876 building then served as a post office through the Second World War, but later fell into disrepair. The building was restored and used by the town’s Bicentennial Commission in 1976 and was again refurbished by the Coventry Historical Society to serve as a Visitors’ Center on Main Street. Since 2002, it has been operated by the Village Improvement Society.

Trinity College Long Walk (1883)

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The “Long Walk” at Trinity College in Hartford consists of the two long structures of Seabury Hall and Jarvis Hall (named for the first two Episcopal Bishops of Connecticut), on either side of the central block of Northam Towers, named for Col. Charles H. Northam. In the 1870s, with the new state capitol building being constructed at the location of Trinity’s former campus in downtown Hartford, Trinity moved to its new Gallows Hill campus to the southwest. William Burges, a prominent English architect, created a master plan for the new campus. Burges, based in England, never came to Hartford to view the site. His ambitious plan of interconnected quadrangles, designed in 1873-74, was brought back to Hartford by Francis H. Kimball, who would supervise the actual construction. With available resources being far less than required to realize Burges‘s plan, Kimball adapted elements from it in 1875 for a reduced scheme. That year, construction began on Seabury and Jarvis Halls, completed in 1878. Northam Tower was completed in 1883. These were the only structures from the Burges plan to be built. The Long Walk is a famous example of the High Victorian Collegiate Gothic style, with gothic arches and dormers and polychromatic masonry. Trinity College recently completed a restoration and updating of the Long Walk buildings. A current exhibit, at Trinity’s Watkinson Library, provides a more in-depth look at the original construction and features original plans for the buildings.