Pioneers from Norwalk first settled Danbury in 1684 and the town’s Congregational Church was first organized in 1696. A meeting house had already been erected on what is now Main Street, a little north of the present Court House. The church currently occupies its fifth meetinghouse, located at 164 Deer Hill Avenue. The building, designed by the architectural firm of Howells & Stokes, was dedicated in 1909. (more…)
The Reynolds-Beers House is a Dutch gambrel-roofed historic home, owned by the Town of North Branford since 1997 and operated as a museum by the Totoket Historical Society. Located at 1740 Foxon Road, the house was erected in 1786 by Hezekiah Reynolds (1756-1833), who later moved to Wallingford. A painter, he was the author of Directions for House and Ship Painting (1812). By the 1930s, the house was owned by Earle Beers. There are two ells on the rear, or east, side of the house, added at different times in the nineteenth century. The south ell is in the Greek Revival style.
Andrew C. Colegrove, who operated an electrical appliance business in Mystic, was killed in a plane crash in California on August 24, 1951. The Colegrove Building at Mystic Seaport was built in 1952 as a memorial in his memory. Since 1962, the half of the building that faces the Mystic River has housed a printing exhibit, called the Mystic Press Printing Office. The original Mystic Press newspaper, started in 1873, had an office at West Main and Pearl Streets. The other half of the Colegrove Building contains a Ship Carver exhibit.
Timothy Dwight (1752-1817) was a Congregational minister, author and educator. Before becoming president of Yale University in 1795, Dwight served as minister of the Greenfield Hill Congregational Church in Fairfield from 1783 to 1795. He also started a well-respected academy in Greenfield Hill in 1783-1784. His 1794 poem, Greenfield Hill, references “Fair Verna,” the name he gave to his house and farm in Greenfield Hill. Isaac Bronson purchased Verna Farm in 1796 and it was later inherited by his son, Frederic Bronson. Dwight’s eighteenth-century house was eventually torn down in 1891 by Frederic’s son, Frederic Bronson, Jr., a wealthy New York City lawyer, who commissioned architect Richard Morris Hunt to design a grand new house on the site. Bronson also had a windmill built on his property in 1893-1894. After his death, Verna was the home of his daughter, Elizabeth Duer Bronson (1877–1914), and her husband, Lloyd Carpenter Griscom (1872-1959), an influential lawyer and diplomat: during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, he served successively as ambassador to Iran, Japan, Brazil and Italy. In 1933, the Bronson estate was acquired by W. A. Morschhauser, who had the house remodeled and made smaller in 1900: the third story was removed and the number of rooms was reduced from 42 to 13. Since 1949, the house, located at 2970 Bronson Road, has been occupied by the Fairfield Country Day School.
The David Mallett Jr. House is an exceptionally well-preserved center-chimney colonial farmhouse, located at 420 Tashua Road in Trumbull, directly across from Christ Episcopal Church and Tashua Burial Ground. The Mallett family were prominent citizens in Trumbull in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, building many houses in the Tashua District: by 1867, 13 of the 36 homes in Tashua were owned by members of the family. David Mallett, Jr. (1735-1822) built his house in 1760, the year of his marriage to Rhoda French (1740-1777). He was a farmer and innkeeper. It was a difficult time for farmers in Connecticut and Mallett economized where he could. The house was built with little decorative ornamentation and Mallett displayed Yankee thrift by later reusing a former Sabbath Day House to provide an addition on the west side. This was done to accommodate his youngest son Aaron at the time of his marriage in 1805. The original entrance to the house may have been on the west side and was moved to its current placement when the addition was made. A larger addition on the east side of the house may also be a reused earlier building. Aaron Mallett (1771-1855) inherited the house after his father’s death.
Universal Food Stores was an early grocery chain that had branches throughout southeastern Connecticut. Most of the stores had individual owners who joined a cooperative agreement to sell goods wholesaled by Yantic Grain and Products Co. of Norwich under the Universal banner. A surviving Universal Food Store in Noank closed in 2011. Another Universal Food Store, located at 15 Palmer Street in Pawcatuck, had closed many years before. It was housed in a 1935 building that still has its peaked gables, a feature used on many of the stores. The building is now the Whistle Stop Pizza Restaurant.
The house at 90 Central Avenue in East Hartford was built c. 1890. Patrick Garvan had acquired the land in 1871 from Edward Hayden. (It was one of four lots Garvan purchased at the time–the house at 86 Central Avenue would be built c. 1899 on another of the four lots). Joseph E. Carroll, a carpenter and builder, acquired the land and built the house, most likely as a speculation. About 1894, the house was acquired by the Burney sisters, who became its first residents. The house has an L-shaped plan with a tower nestled between the two wings.
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