The Reverend Stephen Jewett House, on Wooster Place in New Haven, was originally built in 1833 for the merchant Theron Towner, who then sold it to Rev. Jewett, an Episcopal minister. The house was designed and constructed by the builder James English, who later became a successful manufacturer and politician. After the Civil War, when the Second Empire style became fashionable, the house was updated with a Mansard roof and a new porch.
Linked to the Cheney family of silk manufacturers in Manchester, the Willard House is considered one of the Cheney Mansions–it was built for John Davenport Cheney. Located on Hartford Road in Manchester, the house was designed by Charles Adams Platt (himself a member of the Cheney family) and was constructed in 1905. It is currently utilized as the Alison Gill Lodge of the Shelter for Women.
In 1842, a group gathered primarily from Norwich’s Second Congregational Church formed a new congregation which met in the town hall until their own church building was constructed on Main Street in 1845. Known as the Main Street Congregational Church, they eventually built a new building on Broadway after the Main Street structure was destroyed by fire in 1854. The Broadway Congregational Church, a much larger building than the first, was built in the Romanesque Revival style between 1855 and 1857. Broadway Congregational later merged with the Second Church congregation and has since been known as the United Congregational Church. The building originally had a spire that was 200 feet high, but it was struck by lightning and removed in 1898.
The house at 180 Farmington Avenue in Hartford which now serves as the Ahern Funeral Home, was built around 1855. It represents the transition from the Greek Revival style (with its cubical shape and three bay front) to the Italianate style (with its overhanging roof and elaborately detailed portico). The one story addition was added in the later nineteenth century. The Ahern Funeral Home, Inc. was founded in 1886 and acquired the house in 1934.
Adjacent to Yale’s Lewis-Walpole Library, on Main Street in Farmington, is the Timothy Root House. It was constructed for Root, an army captain, in 1784 by the builder Judah Woodruff, who built 21 homes in the town, as well as First Church. Woodruff is buried in Farmington’s Memento Mori Cemetery. The house was renovated in 2001 to house scholars who are working with the library’s collections.
Samuel Smith, a Bristol clockmaker, built his house on Maple Street, in Bristol’s Federal Hill neighborhood, in 1833 or 1834. The house is in the Greek Revival style, but also features excessively ornate elements of the earlier Federal style in the pediment. Smith made clocks for his business partner, Chauncey Boardman, who sold them in an adjacent house (the home that is now in between was moved there in 1914). The Boardman House, originally built for the clockmaker Benjamin Ray, is also Greek Revival in style.
The High Victorian Gothic-style George H. Seyms House, on Collins Street in Hartford, is attributed to the architect George Keller. George H. Seyms (1849-1915) was Chemist of the Hartford Steam Boiler Insurance and Inspection Company. The house was damaged by fire in December of 2002.
