The modernistic brick building at 129 Main Street in Danbury has glass block windows on the second floor. Designed by William E. Lehman, it was originally built in 1929 as a Sears, Roebuck and Co. store and is now a Salvation Army Family Store and Donation Center.
Rev. James Smyth, pastor of St. Mary’s Church in Windsor Locks, celebrated the first Catholic Mass to take place in the Broad Brook section of East Windsor in 1856. Later, a mission church dedicated to St Patrick was built on land donated by Broad Brook Catholics and it remained in use until 1880. Originally under the jurisdiction of St. Bernard’s, Rockville, the mission was transferred in 1863 to the new parish of St. Patrick’s in Thompsonville. The cornerstone for a new mission church, located at the intersection of Rye Street, Main Street and Windsorville Road in Broad Brook, was laid by Bishop Lawrence S. McMahon of Hartford in early fall of 1880 and the church was completed late the following year. The church again became a mission of Rockville in 1882 and four years later, in 1886, became a separate parish, dedicated to St. Catherine of Siena. The church has stained glass windows depicting scenes from the life of St. Catherine designed by the artist Emil Frei. The adjoining rectory was completed in 1887. The church has been updated over the years, with a new wing being added in 1957. Now, together with St. Philip Church in East Windsor, St. Catherine’s is part of St. Marianne Cope Parish.
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The house at 598 Main Street in Portland was built circa 1840. It was originally the home of ship carpenter Luther Savage, who married Mary Jane Buck in 1850. In 1927, the house was still occupied by Savage’s descendants, who estimated the house had been built 81 years earlier (1846).
At the corner of Burrows Hill Road and Schoolhouse Road in Hebron is the Burrows Hill School. Thought to have been erected between 1725 and 1735, it is the oldest of nine former one-room school houses that remain standing in town. After opening, the school remained in operation until a period circa 1834-1860, when the number of children in the Burrows Hill area declined and the school in the Hope Valley area was growing instead. The Burrows Hill School was again flourishing in 1870 but experienced a decline by the early 1900s, closing for good in about 1911. In 1969, the Hebron Historical Society acquired the building and its furnishings from the Town of Hebron and it is now used it as a museum. In 1993, to protect the old school house from oncoming traffic, the structure was moved to a new foundation, forty feet from its original corner location.
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The house at 529 Cherry Brook Road in Canton was erected circa 1848 by Neri Case (1803-1890). In the 1869 Atlas of Hartford and Tolland Counties the house is labeled as the property of L. Case. This was Lucius Case (1819-1894), Neri’s son-in-law. From 1937 until 1958, the house served as the North Canton post office. At the time it was the residence of Mrs. Ruth Vining Gracy, who was the postmaster. She continued in that role after the current North Canton Post Office building at 531 Cherry Brook Road was opened in 1958, retiring in 1967. The post office had previously been located in the Adams House at 4 West Simsbury Road, the previous postmaster being Gracy’s aunt, Mary Vining Adams. Gracy was active in the Cherry Brook Grange and the North Canton Methodist Church. She wrote a poem about the wedding of Dorothy Bahre and Richard Wright on Christmas Eve, 1939 when the church caught fire! She also wrote historical articles in the magazine The Lure of the Litchfield Hills about the church and the North Canton schools. Her son Forrest Gracy served as a U.S. Marine in the South Pacific during World War II.
According to the Sesquicentennial History of the Town of Canton, published in 1956, the house at 516 Cherry Brook Road was known as Fool’s Paradise. It was built in about 1745 by John Moses. The Sesquicentennial History claims that the North Canton Burying Ground was located on his premises and that his two-year-old daughter Eunice was the first to be buried there in 1754. Other sources note that the cemetery was a gift of Peter Curtiss of West Simsbury (which then included Canton) in 1744 and that the first burial there was in 1756. The house has a modern addition erected in 1983.
On 20 Charter Oak Place in Hartford is a three-story mansard-roofed Second Empire-style brick house erected in 1870. The entrance to the house is on the south side while the street-facing side has a two-story bay window above which is a pyramidal roof. The house was the residence of Asa S. Cook (1823-1916), a manufacturer who invented several machines for making wood screws. Born in Sandwich, New Hampshire, Cook learned the machinist’s trade while working in the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts. He came to Hartford in 1850 and worked for a time in the Colt Armory before establishing his own business in 1858. It was incorporated as the Asa S. Cook Company in 1896. In addition to wood screw and bolt machines and various wooden machine parts, the company‘s plant also for a time manufactured Stephen’s patent Parallel Vice.
In the early twentieth century the house was divided into apartments. Although it was later restored to be a single-family dwelling again, by the early 2000s it had fallen into disrepair. After 2013 the house was lovingly restored and modernized by the Lotstein family.
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