Epaphras Bissell House (1816)

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Built for Epaphras Bissell on Old Main Street in South Windsor, this was the third brick Federal style house to be constructed in the East Windsor Hill neighborhood for a member of the Bissell family. It was modeled on the two earlier homes built by Epaphras’ brother, Aaron Bissell, and by Aaron’s son-in-law, Eli Haskell. The house was later owned by Elihu Wolcott, a book merchant who added the piazza on the south elevation, and by Erastus Ellsworth, a nephew of Oliver Ellsworth and brother-in-law of Epaphras Bissell and Elihu Wolcott. Ellsworth was the main patron of the Theological Institute in East Windsor hill, which later moved to Hartford. His son, Erastus Wolcott Ellsworth, was a poet who wrote such works as “What Is the Use” and “The Mayflower.”

Today is Connecticut Open House Day!

Henry P. Kent House (1872)

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Built on South Main Street in Suffield for Henry Phelps Kent, a tobacco merchant, in 1872. It was designed in the Second Empire style by local architect John Mead. Later, for almost sixty years, it the home of Samuel Reid Spencer, the prominent merchant and philanthrophist who had bought and restored the King House Museum next door. Today the house has been restored as a bed-and-breakfast called Spencer on Main.

Charles Boardman Smith House (1875)

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One of the few surviving homes built in the nineteenth century in Hartford’s Nook Farm neighborhood. It was built on Forest Street in 1875 for Charles Boardman Smith, of the Smith Worthington Saddlery Company, and was designed by Richard M. Upjohn in the High Victorian Gothic style. It shares similarities with Upjohn’s Connecticut State Capitol building and the (now demolished) West Middle School of 1873.

Edward Robbins House (1861)

Built in 1861, on Main Street in Wethersfield, for Edward Robbins, who owned the Johnson & Robbins seed company. Charles C. Hart was connected to this company for fourteen years before he began his own business in the 1892. As the Chas. C. Hart Seed Co. grew, it eventually moved into the old offices and warehouses of the Johnson & Hart Company, and remains in the same location today, currently in a 1955 brick complex just south of the Robbins House.

As a plaque in front of the house indicates, it stands at the former site of Nathaniel Stillman’s Tavern. When Washington had his famous conference with the Comte de Rochambeau, just down the street in the Webb House, in May of 1781, the Stillman Tavern housed the French staff.

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Cheney Building (1876)

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Built in 1876 on Main Street in Hartford for two brothers from the family that owned the Cheney Silk Mills in Manchester. The R. and F. Cheney Building was designed by the famous architect, Henry Hobson Richardson, and represents an early work in his distinctive Richardsonian Romanesque style, later exemplified in the (now gone) Marshall Field’s Wholesale Store, built in Chicago in 1885-1887. The Cheney Block is considered one of Richardson’s greatest buildings and considered by some to be Hartford’s most architecturally significant building. Originally used for retail space on the ground floor, with offices and apartment space above, it later housed Brown Thomson‘s and then G. Fox and Co.‘s Department stores. Today it is known as the Richardson Building and is again used for a mix of office and retail space, including a Residence Inn and the City Steam Brewery Cafe.