Charles E. Shepard House (1900)

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Charles E. Shepard was a general agent for Aetna Life Insurance. The architect Edward T. Hapgood designed Shepard’s 1900 Craftsman style house, located on the West Hartford side of Prospect Avenue. The house also has elements of a Swiss Chalet, most notably in the third-floor balcony. An adjacent carriage house was built in 1914, designed by West Hartford resident Cortlandt F. Luce. The house was acquired by the Oxford School, now the Kingswood-Oxford School, in 1924 and was used for a middle school. Additional facilities were attached to the original house over the years, but these were removed and the house’s exterior was restored when the entire property was converted for use by the town of West Hartford for a new middle School. The house was converted to office, library and classroom space and attached to the new Bristow Middle School building, off Highland Street, which opened in 2005. This example of adaptive reuse and restoration earned the architectural firm of Tai Soo Kim Partners a 2006 Historic Preservation Award from the Town of West Hartford.

Dr. Micheal Gill House (1901)

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The Queen Anne-style house of Dr. Michael Gill, who was a prominent Hartford physician, is on the the West Hartford side of Prospect Avenue. It also features aspects of the shingle and Colonial revival styles. The house was the childhood home of the doctor’s son, Brendan Gill, who attended the Kingswood School nearby and became a well-known writer and contributor to New Yorker magazine. He was also a noted preservationist.

Henry Dwight Bradburn House (1900)

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A Queen Anne style home, which also features elements of the Gothic Revival, Shingle and Colonial Revival styles, the Henry Dwight Bradburn House, on Prospect Avenue in Hartford, is an eclectic mix. The house dates to 1900, the year Bradburn retired as manager of the Nonotuck Paper Company of Holyoke, Mass. The house bears a strong resemblance to the W. F. Clark House in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Burdett Loomis House (1885)

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This week we look at houses on Prospect Avenue, the border between Hartford and West Hartford. An eclectic mix of large houses were constructed here in the later nineteenth century. One of the earliest is that of Burdett Loomis, an inventor and manufacturer of gas plant machinery. A civic leader in Hartford, in 1873 he also opened a trotting horse park on New Park Avenue. This would later evolve into Charter Oak Park, which early in the twentieth century would feature Luna Park, a popular amusement park. In the late nineteenth century, Prospect Avenue was considered to be in the countryside, and around 1885, Loomis bought a c. 1845 Greek Revival farmhouse and transformed it into his country estate by adding a new Queen Anne-style section on the front.

First Congregational Church of Old Lyme (1910)

First Congregational Church of Old Lyme

Lyme’s First Ecclesiastical Society‘s first Meeting House was constructed in 1665-6 and the first minister was Moses Noyes. A second was built in 1689 and in 1738, both earlier structures were dismantled to build the even larger third Meeting House. All three were located on Johnny Cake Hill. When the third church was destroyed after being hit by lightning in 1815, the fourth Meeting House was built in 1816-17 on Lyme Street in Old Lyme. Its architect was Samuel Belcher, who also designed the John Sill and William Noyes houses on Lyme Street. The fourth Meeting House burned on July 3, 1907–the 92nd anniversary of the burning of the third meetinghouse. It was replaced in 1910 by the current Meeting House of the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme, a replica of its predecessor. The American impressionist artists who frequented Lyme in the early twentieth century often painted the church, most notably Childe Hassam.