Captain Charles Bulkeley was a Wethersfield ship captain and a privateer during the Revolutionary War, who died in the West Indies. He married Mary Griswold and had three sons who followed him to sea, including Captain Charles Bulkeley, Jr. The Bulkeley House, on Broad Street Green in Wethersfield, is a typical single-chimney, gambrel-roofed eighteenth-century ship captain’s home.
The 1760 Appleton Robbins House is a center chimney colonial home on Warner Place in Wethersfield. The house is built into a hill behind it. Recently (October, 2024) I received some information about the blacksmith shop on the property from someone who grew up in the house:
My father and crew of carpenters moved it from my grandmother’s family farm in Watertown, CT. I have newspaper clippings of the “barn raising” when they reconstructed it in Wethersfield in the 1960s. My father, Ted Tolman, actually used the forge and make some iron tools, hinges, etc.
The Henry Barnard House was built on Main Street in Hartford in 1807. Henry Barnard, who became the first United States Commissioner of Education in 1867, was born in the house in 1811 and died in 1900. He added the Greek Revival-style portico in 1843. The house also once had four brick chimneys, which were later removed. Overlooking Barnard Park, in the South Green neighborhood of Hartford, the house now serves as transitional housing.
The Daniel Hosmer House is a 1774 center-chimney colonial house on North Main Street in West Hartford. It was later owned by the Hatheway family.
The Barney Library in Farmington, adjacent to First Church, was built in 1919. Originally called the Village Library, it was donated to the town by D. Newton Barney, in honor of his mother, Sarah Brandegee Barney. A children’s wing was added in 1959. The Village Library was the town’s main library until 1983, when it became a branch library. It was renamed the Barney Library in 1999.
Begun in 1926, the Hartford County Courthouse Building, on Washington Street in Hartford, opened in 1929. The architects were Paul P. Cret, of Philadelphia, working with the Hartford architectural firm of Smith & Bassette (Roy Bassette had been Cret’s student at the University of Pennsylvania). Designed in Cret‘s severe variation of the Beaux-Arts style, featuring striped-down classical details, it replaced an earlier 1885 structure, located at the corner of Trumbull and Allyn Streets, that was later torn down. The Hartford County Building now serves as the Hartford Judicial District Courthouse.
Built in 1685 by John Grave, Sr. for his son, John Grave, Jr. on the Boston Post Road in Madison, down the road from the Allis-Bushnell House, which was built 100 years later. The Deacon John Grave House originally consisted of just two rooms, until around 1710, when it was expanded into a center-chimney house to accommodate Grave’s growing family. Sometime during the Revolutionary War, the house was expanded again with the addition of a shed in the rear, making it into a saltbox. Seven generations of the same family lived in the house in the following centuries. In 1983, when it was in danger of destruction, the Deacon John Grave Foundation was created to save and restore the home, and it is currently maintained by the Foundation as a house museum.
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