A building that was first erected c. 1842 as a barn on the property of Thomas Greenman, youngest of the three brothers who founded the George Greenman & Co. Shipyard in Mystic, now houses the cooperage exhibit at Mystic Seaport. Coopers manufactured round wooden containers called barrels or casks, used both at sea and ashore.
The house at 50 Ledge Hill Road in North Guilford was built circa 1870 by St. John’s Episcopal Church to serve as a parsonage. It replaced an earlier parsonage, built in the 1830s, that had burned down. Part of the building served as a town primary school sometime during the first decade of the twentieth century. The house has been a private residence since the church sold it in 1940-1941.
James D. Latham (1813-1899) was a shipbuilder in Noank. In the 1840s he entered into a partnership to build vessels with his brother, James A. Latham (1808-1902), whose previous partner, John Palmer (1787-1859), had retired. In 1868, James left the business to John, who continued to build ships into the 1880s. John D. Latham’s house at 31 Front Street in Noank was built in 1843, the same year he married John Palmer’s daughter, Lydia.
The original owner of the house at 61 Waterside Lane in Clinton, built in 1800, was Captain Nathaniel Farnham. It is said that people living in the house were the first to see the Hartford and New Haven train passing by c. 1852 by climbing to the top of a barn on the property. Caroline A. Kelsey Oakes (born 1851) lived in the house for many years. She was the widow of Captain Lester R. Oakes, who commanded a schooner, the Marian, owned by the Eliot brothers.
The house at 35 Tolland Green in Tolland was built circa 1820 by Calvin Willey as a store. Willey was a lawyer who served as Judge of Probate, representative in the state General Assembly and United States Senator. In 1940, the former store was purchased as a summer home by New York Times columnist Zoe Beckley, who called it “Cubbyhouse.”
As downtown Danbury expanded in the late nineteenth century, commercial buildings were constructed on side streets. One is example is Library Place, formerly a cow path, which was opened after the construction of the Old Danbury Library in 1878. Here, Alexander Wildman built a post office, followed by other commercial buildings, including the Seifert Armory in 1891. Located at 5-15 Library Place, the large armory and commercial building, designed by architect Joel Foster, has storefronts on the ground floor, while the three upper floors contained apartments and the armory hall, itself later converted to apartments. In the 1920s, the Danbury Times began printing in the building and a plate-glass window was installed to show the press at work. The building has lost its original tower that projected above the main entrance. The farthest store on the left now has a Carrara glass (a type of pigmented structural glass) storefront.
Although vastly altered from its original appearance, the house at 32 Phelps Street in East Hartford is a survivor from c. 1700 and would have once looked like the Buttolph-Williams House in Wethersfield with a large center chimney. It now has a brick foundation, which indicates it was moved to its current location in the nineteenth century. The house’s history is described in Joseph O. Goodwin’s East Hartford: Its History and Traditions (1879):
The house once occupied by Capt. Joseph Goodwin, and now standing on the lane east of the post-office, is one of the oldest remaining in town. It once stood south of Mr. A. A. Waterhouse’s, and was occupied by Caleb Goodwin [(1713-1769)], who was a hypochondriacal bachelor, and died in 1769. It was moved to the site of the present house of Mr. S. O. Goodwin about the year 1800, and repaired. Afterwards it was moved to its present site. Joseph Goodwin, Sr., lived in the old brown house, which, in 1876, gave place to the house of the writer.
Goodwin’s store on Main street, for many years our post-office [no longer extant], dates from the time of the Revolution or thereabout. Its rear door came from the old Caleb Goodwin house.
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