Built on Wethersfield Avenue in Hartford for the brother of Sam Colt, the Italianate-style James Colt House was built in 1856. Like the other Italianate houses along the same block, including Sam Colt’s own Armsmear, with which it shares many design features, the James Colt House has been attributed to the architect Octavius J. Jordan. In 1976, the house was the first in Hartford to be restored with a grant from the National Park Service and Federal tax incentives.
Built around 1860, the Edmund Hurlburt House is a great example of Italianate architecture, featuring an elaborate portico, with paired arched windows above, and a cupola. Hurlbut and his partner, James Ashmead, were in the goldbeating business. The house is located on Congress Street, which Hurlburt and Ashmead helped develop and which is now a historic district with many Greek Revival and Italianate houses. Francis Pratt and Amos Whitney, the founders of Pratt and Whitney, also lived on Congress Street.
George A. Fairfield was a prominent leader in Hartford’s industrial growth after the Civil War. He was president of the Weed Sewing Machine Company and the Hartford Machine Screw Company. Fairfield Avenue was named for him and in 1866 he built an imposing Second Empire style mansion there. The house features many extravagant elements, including an medieval-style octagonal tower to the rear. The house is now subdivided into condominiums. The Oliver H. Easton House, another striking Second Empire home, is located across the street.
Congregation Beth Israel, Connecticut’s oldest Jewish congregation, was established in 1843. It is now one of the largest Reform congregations in the northeast. The first synagogue was built in Hartford in 1876 and is today the Charter Oak Cultural Center. In 1936, the congregation moved to a new building, on Farmington Avenue in West Hartford. Designed by Charles R. Greco, Temple Beth Israel was built in the Neo-Byzantine style and features a prominent Byzantine dome. The congregation received a West Hartford Historic Preservation Award in 2006 for the meticulous restoration of the synagogue.
The J.C. Brown House was originally built, on Maple Street in Bristol, for the clockmaker Lawson Ives in 1833. Lawson and his uncle Chauncey Ives began the clock-making firm of C. and L.C. Ives in 1830. The company eventually failed in the wake of the 1837 Panic and ensuing depression. The house was sold in 1844 to J.C. Brown, another clockmaker, who often had the image of his house painted tablet of his ogee shelf clocks. After his bankruptcy in 1856, Brown’s clock company was bought by the E.N. Welch Manufacturing Company (later to become the Sessions Clock Company). The Greek Revival style Brown House has two entrances with columned porticos: the one facing Maple Street (west elevation) has Ionic columns and the one facing Woodland Street (south elevation) has Doric columns. The house has been converted for use as offices.
At the intersection of Moulton Road and the Old Turnpike in Mansfield is a one-and-a-half story house with overhanging gable ends, probably built in the middle of the eighteenth century. Around 1770, it was purchased by Seth Pierce, Sr. and Jr., who sold it to Dr. Roger Waldo in 1798. Waldo, who died in 1816, was a prominent physician and representative at the Connecticut General Assembly. There is evidence of a blacksmith shop possibly having been on the property, which would have served the Mansfield Four Corners community.
One of the mansions of the Cheney family of silk manufacturers, the Clifford D. Cheney House, on Forest Street in Manchester, faces Hartford Road across the “Great Lawn,” around which the mansions are situated. The house, like a number of the other Cheney mansions, was designed by Charles Adams Platt, an architect, artist and landscape designer, whose mother was Mary Elizabeth Cheney. The house is distinctive with its pink stuccoed exterior.
