Today is the twelfth anniversary of Historic Buildings of Connecticut. Thanks to everyone who follows my posts about beautiful & interesting building throughout the state. As of today there are 4,184 individual building posts on this site! My first post was the Joseph Webb House in Wethersfield, back when it was still painted red!
In addition to new posts about different buildings, I am also working on completing an index of buildings for each town. So stay tuned! And dont’s forget to follow me on Twitter & Facebook. Thanks!
The former Locust Avenue School, at 26 Locust Avenue in Danbury, was built in 1896 as an elementary school to serve students in the eastern part of the city. The Romanesque Revival structure was designed by architect Warren R. Briggs of Bridgeport, who featured an illustration and floorplan of the school in his book, Modern American School Buildings (1899), where its referred to as “Center School.” His advanced ideas of school construction involved a ventilation system and high ceilings to keep the classrooms airy and bright with abundant natural light. Briggs had earlier designed a sister school, erected on Morris Street in 1893, that served students in the western part of the city.
Peck has been taken into partnership with his father, since Sexennial, and their insurance agency is now run under the firm name of M. L. Peck & Son. He has been and still is a clerk in the Bristol Savings Bank, besides. “Took a trip to New York last fall,” he writes. “Was there three days. Stayed with one Dwight Rockwell. Did not see much of him. He was too busy making money. Took in a championship ball game between New York and the Athletics, also the Vanderbilt cup race. Dropped in the Yale Club and found Publius. He was sober. So was I.”
This concise staccato pervades Howard’s answers throughout. “Have you held political office?” “Close second.” “Have you done any teaching?” “One dog. Failure.” . . . “Please give your daughter’s date of birth.” “June 30, 1904. She is a peach.”
It is not clear whether Peck absents himself from class functions from a sense of caution or a wish to hoard. Or may it be, perhaps, a compassionate determination on his part no longer to invite a possibly fatal competition with his prowess?
Today, Olmsted Street, near the central business district of East Hartford, is in a very built-up area, but over a century ago tobacco was still grown in the immediate vicinity. According to An Architectural History of East Hartford, Connecticut (1989), edited by Doris Darling Sherrow, page 195, when James Mulligan (1848-1920), a railroad engineer from Waterbury, purchased the land where the house at 107 Olmsted Street stands today in 1893 from Henry G. Beaumont, the latter (who is listed in the 1885 Hartford County Directory as a farmer) reserved the right to continue growing his tobacco crop on the property until September 15 of that year or until it was harvested, whichever came first. The house that Mulligan, an immigrant from Glasgow, Scotland, erected and occupied until his death features a spindle rail porch with a starburst design at the front entryway.
At the corner of West Morris Road and Bantam Road (4 West Morris Road), in the Bantam section of Litchfield, is a house that was once operated as a tavern. Leaming Bradley had acquired the property where the house stands in 1782. It is uncertain if the building was already standing at that time, or was erected sometime after. Leaming’s son Aaron inherited the property in 1787 and by 1797 he running a tavern and store in partnership with his son-in-law, Capt. Henry Wadsworth. Bradley & Wadsworth also had other business interests, including a forge, blacksmith’s shop, paper mill, grist mill, sawmill and distillery. In the 1820s, they also owned the house at 1062 Bantam Road. For several decades the area around the tavern was known as Bradleyville. An incident at their tavern in 1810 is said to have in part inspired Litchfield’s Congregational minister, Rev. Lyman Beecher, to write his influential “Six Sermons on Intemperance.” As described in The History of the Town of Litchfield, Connecticut 1720-1920 (1920)
A temperate man himself, Lyman Beecher had never been an advocate of total abstinence. “Two leading members of his own church”, says Miss Esther H. Thompson, Waterbury American, February 22, 1906, “Capt. Wadsworth and Deacon Bradley, kept a tavern and a grocery store in Bantam, where fermented and distilled liquors flowed freely as was then the universal custom in such places. Unseemly carousals were common, in one of which there was a battle wherein salted codflsh figured as weapon, adding thereby no dignity to the church, and deeply grieving the wife of Capt. Wadsworth, who was the sister of Deacon Bradley. She was a woman of superior intellect, deep piety, and early became a believer in total abstinence. It is said that her influence was potent in arousing Dr. Beecher to see and to preach against the evil of intemperance.
Aaron Bradley was a veteran of the Revolutionary War, a deacon of the Congregational Church and served terms as town selectman and in the state assembly. In 1830, he sold the property to another son-in-law, William Coe, who expanded the mercantile business in partnership with his brother-in-law under the name Kilborn & Coe (the company continued until 1883). In the 1850s, the tavern was known as William Coe’s Hotel.
The house at 66 Greenwood Avenue in Bethel is transitional between the architectural styles of the Greek Revival (note the columns on the front porch) and the Italianate (note the rooftop cupola with curved windows). The house was erected c. 1845 (before 1851) by Horace Hickok, a hat manufacturer and descendant of Capt. Ebenezer Hickok, who had given land for the Bethel Congregational Church‘s meetinghouse and burial ground in the eighteenth century.
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