South Church, Hartford (1827)

The organization of Hartford’s Second Congregational Church occurred in 1670, after years of doctrinal disputes in the Hartford Church following the death of Thomas Hooker in 1647. After the division, the new congregation built its first meeting house in 1673, later replaced by its second in 1754. The current South Congregational Church on Main Street has a similar Federal style design to that of Center Church, also displaying the influence of James Gibbs, but here the spire is less elaborate, reflecting the popularity of the simpler Greek Revival style at the time it was built. The church is also unusual in having just a single row of windows on its side elevations. An article in the Hartford Courant noted the congregation’s 335th anniversary in 2005. Update 3/8/2012: Added new picture above. The old is here: (more…)

Center Church, Hartford (1807)

Having focused on houses for the last two weeks, HBCT now begins a week-long chronological survey of some nineteenth century churches in Hartford. These churches display the religious history and changing architectural styles of the period.

First up is Center Church, on Main Street. Built in 1807, it is the fourth meetinghouse building of the First Congregational Society. The Socirty was founded in Cambridge, Mass. in 1632 and was led to the west bank of the Connecticut River by its first minister, Rev. Thomas Hooker, in 1636. The town they founded was named Hartford, after Hertford in England. There was no separation of church and state at that time under the Puritan founders, so the church and government met in one and the same building. The first small meetinghouse was located near the current site of the Old State House, and it was there, in 1638, that representatives from the three original river towns of Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfiled drew up the world’s first written constitution to create a government, the Fundamental Orders, adopted in 1639.

The second meeting house replaced the original log structure in 1641. For the third meeting house, in 1741, construction was moved down the street to the current location at Gold Street, on a corner of the Ancient Burying Ground. The fourth and final building was completed in 1807. By that time, church and government were using separate structures, hence the Old State House having been built at the site of the old meeting house in 1796.

Center, or First, Church, has a distinctive “wedding cake” style steeple, said to have been designed by Daniel Wadsworth, founder of the Wadsworth Atheneum. The steeple shows the elaborate ornamentation favored in America in the early decades of the nineteenth centry (called the Federal style). Wadsworth’s design, which is heavy with columns, displays this style to the extreme. Such steeples show the Baroque influence of architect James Gibbs, whose books influenced the designs of countless New England Churches. Wadsworth was said to be strongly inspired by Gibbs’s famous St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London.

Today, Hartford’s Center Church fetures such later additions as five stained glass windows by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The restoration and preservation of this historic structure has been a concern lately, as shown in a recent editorial in the Hartford Courant. Update 3/8/2012: Added new picture above. The old is here: (more…)

Dr. Jonathan Cogswell House (1834)

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Built in 1834-1835 for Dr. Jonathan Cogswell on Main Street in East Windsor Hill (now part of South Windsor). Cogswell became a professor at the Theological Institute of Connecticut in 1834. This school first opened its doors in that year and was located just across the street from the Cogswell’s Greek Revival house. In 1844, he sold the house to the Institute and it was used as a residence for its president and first professor of theology, Bennett Tyler. The Institute moved to Hartford in 1865 and is now known as the Hartford Theological Seminary. Cogswell’s daughter Elizabeth married James Dixon of Enfield, who later served as a notable anti-slavery senator. In Washington, the Dixons were personal friends of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln and Elizabeth spent the night of the President’s assassination with the first lady to comfort her. The house is currently for sale.

Captain James Francis House (1793)

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Captain James Francis, a master builder, constructed this house for himself on Hartford Avenue in Wethersfield in 1793. In 1815, he expanded the original 1 1/2-story building with a gambrel roof to two stories with a gable roof. Capt. Francis also built a number of other brick houses in Wethersfield during this period. The front and side porches were added by his granddaughter, Jane Francis, in the nineteenth century. The house is currently owned by the Wethersfield Historical Society.

Harriet Beecher Stowe House (1871)

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Built on Forest Street in Hartford’s Nook Farm neighborhood in 1871 for a lawyer named Franklin Chamberlin, this house was bought two years later by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She lived here with her husband, Calvin Stowe (a retired minister and professor) and two unmarried twin daughters, Hatty and Eliza. In 1878 she completed her last novel Poganuc People, based on her early years growing up in Litchfield. After Stowe died in 1896, the twins sold the house and it was later bought, in 1927, by Katharine Seymour Day (Stowe’s great-niece and the granddaughter of Isabella Beecher Hooker), who left it to become a museum. The house was restored in the 1960s and is open to the public as part of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center.