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.
The Buckingham-Hall House at Mystic Seaport was erected circa 1760 in what is now Old Saybrook by the Buckingham family. The house, which was located near the ferry crossing at the mouth of the Connecticut River, was purchased by William Hall, Jr., son of a New York import merchant, in 1833. When construction of a new highway bridge across the river threatened it with demolition in 1951, the house was presented to Mystic Seaport by the State Highway Department. It was shipped by barge to its present location, where it was reconstructed and refurnished to represent the lifestyle of the Buckingham family in the 1810s. In 1994, the house was re-restored and reinterpreted to represent the Hall family.
Now a private residence, the house at 145 Ledge Hill Road in Guilford was built in the early 1820s to serve as the parsonage of the North Guilford Congregational Church (an earlier parsonage was auctioned off in 1807). The Federal-era house shares a number of architectural similarities with the church, which was erected just a few years before. The first minister to occupy the parsonage was Rev. Zolva Whitmore (1792-1867), who was active in the Underground Railroad. Future landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) boarded with Rev. Whitmore when he was seven years old.
The Greek Revival-style double house at 93-97 Broad Street in Middletown was built c. 1840-1841 by William Hubbard Atkins, who owned the Hubbard Hardware Company. In 1853, Elijah Loveland, owner of a livery stable, bought the south half of the house. It remained in the Loveland family while the north half had a number of owners until 1904, when Dr. John E. Loveland acquired ownership of both halves. Dr. Loveland had his medical practice in the building. In 1960, the American Red Cross acquired the building from Dr. Loveland’s widow and occupied it for many years.
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