Located at the corner of Main and High Streets in Willimantic is a building which was constructed from 1909 to 1912 and then served as a United States Post Office from 1912 to December of 1966, when a new building opened just up Main Street. Left empty for almost thirty years, the old Post Office was renovated and is now a restaurant and microbrewery called the Willimantic Brewing Company.
Castle Largo is an unusual edifice, located at the intersection of Center and Main Streets in the Federal Hill area of Bristol. A miniature castle featuring elements of the Gothic Revival, Italianate and Second Empire styles, it was constructed in three stages in 1880 and is one of a number of interesting houses in Bristol designed by the local inventor Joel T. Case. After living in it for a few months, Case sold it to Charles Henry Wightman, a 24-year-old businessman.
Built between 1833 and 1849 on Mountain Spring Road in Farmington, the Greek Revival-style home of Henry Mygatt and his wife, Sarah Woodruff was later owned (from 1936 to 1954) by James Thrall Soby, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, who commissioned the architect Henry-Russell Hitchcock to design a new rear wing to the house to serve as an art gallery. An owner in the late 1970s was Alexander Haig, Jr., when he was Director of United Technologies.
In 1802, Solomon Cowles presented a new brick house, on Main Street in Farmington, to his son, George Cowles, as a wedding gift. The George Cowles House was where the first meeting to plan the Farmington Canal was held in 1822. The house was purchased by Theodate Pope in 1907.
On High Street in Farmington is an 1811 Federal-style house built for Edward Hooker, a descendant of Thomas Hooker (Hartford’s first minister) and Samuel Hooker (Farmington’s second minister). Edward Hooker was a farmer and operated a small preparatory school for boys, called the “Old Red College,” in his parents old farmhouse in Farmington. He closed the school in 1816, when the town was planning to open its own academy in the village center. Deacon Edward Hooker’s daughter, Elizabeth, married Francis Gillette, a future senator. The house was inherited, after Edward Hooker’s death in 1846, by his son, John Hooker, a lawyer, who in 1841 had married Isabella Beecher Hooker, the younger half-sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe. The couple lived in Farmington until they moved to Hartford in the early 1850s, establishing the neighborhood of Nook Farm together with the Gillettes. The Farmington house remained in the Hooker family until it was sold in 1864.
John Hooker was an abolitionist. On Mill Lane in Farmington is Deming’s Store, where Hooker rented an office, next to a room used by the Africans from the Amistad during their stay in Farmington. John Hooker also helped the Rev. James Pennington, a former slave in Maryland who had escaped to Connecticut, attended Yale and become a Congregational minister. After the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1850, African-Americans living in the North who were still regarded as slaves in the southern states were in great danger. In 1851, Hooker legally purchased Pennington’s freedom from slavery from the estate of his former owner. Pennington wrote a book about his experiences, called The Fugitive Blacksmith, published in 1849. Later, influenced by his wife Isabella, Hooker became involved in the Women’s Suffrage Movement, presenting a bill in the state legislature making husbands and wives equal in property rights, which finally passed in 1877.
Designed by Stanley S. Covert, the 1898 Queen Anne-style house of J. R. Holley, who was a vice president of the Bristol Brass and Clock Company, is located on Bellevue Avenue in Bristol.
The first Congregational community in Tolland County was organized in Mansfield in 1710. The first minister was Rev. Eleazer Williams, who was succeeded by Richard Salter. The original meetinghouse was replaced by a new church in 1754 (which can be seen in an 1836 sketch of Mansfield by John Warner Barber). When that second meetinghouse was destroyed in a fire, the current church building was constructed in 1866. The First Church of Christ in Mansfield is located on Storrs Road in Mansfield Center. It was designed in the Italianate style, with its facade featuring arched windows influenced by Italian Romanesque churches. The steeple is a replacement of the original, which was destroyed in the 1938 hurricane.
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