John Havens Sawyer was a Mystic ship captain engaged in fishing and coastal trading. In 1835 he built the Greek Revival-style house at 5 Stanton Place in Mystic. Sawyer and his wife, Elsey, only lived in the house a short time. In 1838 he sold it to Charles Mallory and moved to Key West, Florida.
The Masonic Lodge in Cheshire, Temple Lodge #16, was established in 1790. The Lodge has had various meeting places over the years. The current Masonic Temple in Cheshire is located at 9 Country Club Road. According to the Town of Cheshire’s Property Record Card for the building, it was built in 1900.
Pictured above is a colonial revival style house in Guilford built c. 1920. Located at 2733 Long Hill Road, the house’s historic owner was Josephine Norton.
The house at 21 Gravel Street in Mystic was built in 1840 by Capt. Elisha W. Denison. In 1854, It was acquired by Capt. Martin Smith, a sea captain who commanded the ships Niagara, Simoon and Selma. The house’s grand front porch was added around 1900.
At 40 Main Street in Bethel is a building known as the Second Meeting House. It was built in 1842 and was indeed the second meeting house to be erected by the First Congregational Church of Bethel. The first meeting house, built in 1760, had burned down. In 1865, a strong wind blew down the second meeting house’s steeple, which fell through the roof of the building. As related in James Montgomery Bailey’s History of Danbury (1896): “In the spring of 1865, during a gale, the house was injured by the falling of the spire, and having been repaired, was sold to the town and moved ten rods west of its former site.” In 1866, the church erected its third and current meeting house, located at 46 Main Street, where the first meeting house had once stood. After being sold to the town, the Second Meeting House served as Town Hall until 1939. Today, the building is the headquarters of the Bethel Historical Society, which rents out the hall. It is also the meeting place of Bethel VFW Post 935.
According to Portrait of a River Town: The History and Architecture of Haddam, Connecticut (1984), by Janice P. Cunningham and Elizabeth Ann Warner, the house at 366 Saybrook Road in the Higganum section of Haddam was erected by Heman Brainerd (1754-1803) on land deeded to him in 1784 by his father, Phineas Brainerd (1720-1803), one of the original settlers of Higganum. It was described as a “new Dwelling House” in a 1794 deed, although town acessor’s records date the house to 1729. After the death of Heman’s widow, the house was purchased by James Gladwin and remained in his family for the rest of the nineteenth century. Dr. William H. Tremaine (1815-1883), a noted physician, lived in the house from 1850 to 1857, before he moved to Hartford. The house’s original stairway and chimney, destroyed by fire in the nineteenth century, were rebuilt by its later twentieth century owners.
In 1762, John Wetmore of Middlefield married his first cousin, Lois (a not uncommon practice among eighteenth-century farming families seeking to keep holdings within a larger family network). Circa 1780, the couple erected a house on land in Middlefield, owned by John’s father, Deacon Caleb Wetmore (1706-1788) who, unusually for the time, deeded the land to his niece and daughter-in-law Lois in 1786. The couple later deeded the property to their son, Captain John Wetmore, but during the 1790s, when Connecticut farmers were facing difficult times, he moved to Litchfield, where he died in 1847, and his brothers, Josiah, Azariah and James moved to Ohio. In eleven years the property had five different owners, but was them purchased by Jacob Miller and remained in his family until the early twentieth century. Located at 18 Maple Street, the Wetmore-Miller House has an early-twentieth century Colonial Revival entry portico.
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