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

Oldgate (1782)

Watch my YouTube Short about this house. In the video I give the house’s year as 1790, but it was actually built in c. 1782.

By about 1780, the wealthy Farmington merchant Zenas Cowles bought a house (built in 1690) on Main Street, at Meadow Lane, that had been lived in by blacksmith Isaac Bidwell (and earlier by the town’s first two ministers). Zenas’s brother, Solomon Cowles, lived in a house just across Meadow Road. Circa 1782, Zenas employed the British architect William Sprats to build a newer and grander house around the older one. Sprats had been a British officer during the Revolutionary War, but was captured and remained in America after the war. He may have employed former Hessian soldiers, who had also been prisoners, as carpenters in the construction of the house. Designed in an elaborately detailed Georgian-style, the house is known as Oldgate because of the property’s front gate, which features a broken scroll pediment and an Asian design signifying “peace and prosperity.” In the nineteenth century, the house was home to Thomas Cowles, a prominent Farmington resident, politician and abolitionist. A later owner of the house was Rear Admiral William Sheffield Cowles, whose wife, Anna Roosevelt Cowles, was the sister of President Theodore Roosevelt, who visited Farmington in October of 1901.

The Byron Loomis House (1850)

Byron Loomis was the son of Neland Loomis, one of the six Loomis brothers who established themselves in Suffield as tobacco merchants (another brother was John Welles Loomis). Byron Loomis, who became one of the wealthiest tobacco barons in Suffield, may have built his Italianate house on South Main Street as early as 1850, or perhaps in the 1860s.

Winthrop W. Dunbar House (1890)

The Winthrop W. Dunbar House was built on South Street in Bristol around 1890. Winthrop Dunbar’s father, Col. Edward L. Dunbar, was a manufacturer of clock springs who was partners for a time (in the 1860s) with Wallace Barnes. After his father‘s death, Winthrop Dunbar, together with his brothers, Edward B. and William A. Dunbar, formed the Dunbar Brothers Company in 1872. This company was eventually taken over by the Wallace Barnes Company. The Italianate-style Dunbar House, which features a Second Empire tower, is now used for apartments.

Cowles Store (1813)

Originally built between 1813 and 1818 as a store and warehouse for Elijah and Gad Cowles, this three-story Federal-style structure on Main Street in Farmington was later a drugstore, when it was purchased by Miss Porter’s School in 1901. It later served the school’s Leila Dilworth Jones Memorial Library, until the construction of a new library in 2001.

The Lewis Walpole Library (1784)

Maj. Solomon Cowles of Farmington, a wealthy merchant and Revolutionary War General, built a Georgian-style house on Main Street in 1784, recognizable today for its long columned porch. The home remained in the Cowles family until it was purchased by Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis in 1926. Lewis was a 1918 Yale graduate, collector, author, and the editor of The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence. He remodeled the house in 1928 to house the Walpole Collection he had gathered, consisting of rare books and manuscripts, relating to Horace Walpole and his times, and “the largest and finest collection of eighteenth-century British graphic art outside the British Museum.” Lewis and his wife, Annie Burr Auchincloss Lewis (sister of Hugh Auchincloss of Newport’s Hammersmith Farm), lived in a house next door. Lewis died in 1979 and the library, with its collection and grounds, was given to Yale University and is now a department of the university’s library. Known as the Lewis Walpole Library, the site includes the Cowles House, the adjacent Root House (where visiting scholars can stay) and the Day-Lewis Museum of Indian Artifacts. The property recently underwent a major renovation project.

For those interested in Horace Walpole, nineteenth century editions of his works can be found through Google Books, including his well-known Castle of Otranto, as well as collections of his letters and memoirs. He also wrote Anecdotes of Painting in England and A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England.

Samuel Nye House (1875)

The Samuel Nye House, on Prospect Street in Willimantic, was built around 1875. It is a Gothic Revival house, notable for its two stone chimneys.

The Hiram A. Terry House (1788)

The Hiram A. Terry House, on King Street in Enfield, was built in 1788. The house is just northeast of Enfield’s King Street Cemetery and adjacent to a c. 1820 Federal-style house at 1684 King Street.