The Central National Bank Building, at 363 Main Street in Middletown, was built in 1915. The bank was in business from 1865 to 1955. Considered to be the first modern office building in Middletown, it later housed Hartford National Bank and Trust and now Webster Bank.
The former home of the Savings Bank of New London, now used as a branch of Citizens Bank, is located at 63 Eugene O’Neill Drive in New London. The Savings Bank of New London was incorporated in 1827. Offices were located in the Union Bank & Trust Company’s building on State Street until the Savings Bank built its own building on Main Street (now Eugene O’Neil Drive) in 1852. This building was expanded with two wings in 1890. The current facade dates to the period of 1903 to 1905, when the earlier building was completely enclosed by a new structure, designed by Dudley Saint Clair Donnelly, an important New London architect. The bank has an elaborately ornamented exterior of “Milford Pink” granite from Milford, Mass. The facade is slightly curved to conform with the curve in the street.
The house at 800 Clinton Avenue in Bridgeport was built in 1915 for George T. Hatheway, a real estate and insurance agent. As related in Vol. II of The History of Bridgeport and Vicinity (1917), George Thomas Hatheway “was born in Pequonnock, town of Windsor, Hartford county, August 5, 1865.”
George T. Hatheway was but a young lad at the time of his father’s death. He acquired his early education in the public schools, pursuing a course in the New Britain high school and also in the normal school there. The necessity of providing for his own support forced him at the age of sixteen years to become a wage earner and he secured a clerkship in a drug store at Unionville, Hartford county. In that store the village postoffice «»s conducted and in addition to selling drugs and sundries his duty included handling the mail. After two or three years there spent he removed to Winsted, Connecticut, but in the meantime, while still in the drug store at Unionville, he had taken up the study of telegraphy, there being a telegraph office also in the store. He thus picked up a knowledge of telegraphy and at Winsted was appointed to the position of Western Union operator. When about nineteen or twenty years of age he came to Bridgeport and accepted the position of operator in the Bankers & Merchants telegraph office. In a short time he went to New York city as operator in the main office of the Western Union Telegraph Company. He remained there for about two years after which he returned to Bridgeport with the Western Union Company and devoted eight or ten years to telegraphy in this city and also taught telegraph; in a local business college, his teaching paying his tuition for a course of study in the same institution, from which he in due time received a diploma. He then devoted five or six years to bookkeeping in a wholesale and retail hardware store and in August, 1901, he embarked in his present business of insurance and real estate. In this connection he soon forged to the front and for many years he has been one of the city’s leading fire insurance and real estate men, his business having now assumed extensive and gratifying proportions, he has never had a partner, always conducting his interests under his own name, which has become a synonym for progressiveness, enterprise and reliability in insurance and real estate circles. He is now president of the Bridgeport Fire Underwriters Association. He is thoroughly familiar with property upon the market, is correct in his valuation and has negotiated many important realty transfers satisfactory alike to seller and purchaser.
Hatheway married Clara Trulock Davis of Arkansas in 1893. They had two children.
The house at 814 Laurel Avenue in the Statfield section of Bridgeport was built in 1914. It was the residence of Morris I. Rome, a wholesale tea and coffee dealer.
The Colonial Revival house at 720 Clinton Avenue in Bridgeport was built in 1915. It was the residence of Clifford Brittin Wilson (1879-1943), a lawyer who served as Mayor of Bridgeport from 1911 to 1921 and simultaneously as the 56th Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut from 1915 to 1921, the same period of time that Marcus H. Holcomb was serving as Governor. According to the History of Bridgeport and Vicinity, Volume II (1917), “there are few interests of public concern in recent years with which he has not been associated, his influence always being given on the side of progress, reform and improvement.”
The Jewett City Savings Bank was founded in 1873. It began business in an old building, previously occupied by the Jewett City National Bank, which had closed around 1870. The bank moved into a new Romanesque Revival-style building in 1890. According to an article in the Hartford Courant of August 23, 1890 (“Jewett City: Impressions Made on One by the Village After an Absence From It”), the building was “a fine brick structure, and more conveniently arranged banking rooms than it contains cannot be found in the the state outside of the large cities.” Now gone, it was located next to the Slater Library. According to the Jewett City Souvenir (1896), It’s upper floor was “rented for a town clerk’s office and the general business of the town of Griswold.” The bank’s current Neoclassical building at 111 Main Street was built in 1929. A later expansion seems to have more than doubled its size. (more…)
This is my 100th post for Bridgeport! The William Leigh House at 450 Beachwood Avenue in Bridgeport (not to be confused with Waldemere Hall, the 1913 home of William and Frances Leigh at 409 Waldemere Avenue) was built in 1892. William Leigh was a piano dealer. He got a patent for a design he made to decorate a piano-front.
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