Greenmanville Church (1851)

The Greenmanville Church at Mystic Seaport was built in 1851 during the area’s heyday as a shipbuilding center. As related in Seventh Day Baptists in Europe and America, Vol. II (1910):

In 1838 three brothers, George, Clarke and Thomas S. Greenman, members of the First Hopkinton church, settled in Mystic, Conn., and commenced the ship-building business. Thirteen years later, 1849, they built a mill for the manufacture of woolen goods. About these industries sprang up a village called Greenmanville. The most of those working in the ship-yard were Sabbath-keepers, and being several miles removed from any Seventh-day Baptist church, it was deemed wise to organize one. This was done in August, 1850, with about forty members. The constituent members were mostly from the First Hopkinton church, a few from the Waterford church, and one from the Newport church. The largest membership, fifty-six, was reached the first year and it held pretty well up to this for thirty years. Its present (1902) number is eighteen.

Though it never enrolled a large number of members, yet it exercised a wide influence in denominational and other circles. George Greenman, a member of this church, was president of the Seventh-day Baptist Missionary Society for thirty-one years. The leading men of the church took an active part in the anti-slavery struggle, and the temperance cause has been supported by these godly men. Clarke Greenman, Thomas S. Greenman and Benjamin F. Langworthy served the town in the state legislature at different times.

The congregation was depleted with the decline of the shipyard in the 1870s and 1880s and the selling of the woolen mill to owners of another denomination. The church closed in 1904 and the building then served as a private residence and an apartment building before it was acquired by Mystic Seaport in 1955. The Seaport moved the church from its original site (near the current Visitor Center) to its present location. For a time, the church was called the Aloha Meetinghouse and was a nondenominational church. Mystic Seaport added the current tower clock, built in 1857 by the Howard Clock Company of Massachusetts. The clock is on loan from Yale, where it was once located in the Old South Sheffield Hall of the Sheffield Scientific School. (more…)

Atwater Homestead (1774)

The house at 242 Christian Street in Wallingford was built in 1774 by Caleb Atwater (1741–1832), a wealthy merchant who supplied the patriot forces during the American Revolution. It was located on the Atwater property, which was in the family for many generations. There is a secret passage behind the chimney inside the house, which was possibly a station on the Underground Railroad. The Atwood family property, which became known as Rosemary Farm, was later the childhood home and summer residence of Caleb Atwater’s granddaughter, Mary Lyman Atwater. She married Judge William G. Choate. In 1890, Mary Choate founded a school for girls at Rosemary Farm called Rosemary Hall. The school initially utilized another Atwater family home, no longer extant, that was built in 1758. Soon other houses in the vicinity were rented for the growing school. William Choate also founded the Choate School for boys in 1896. The two schools were neighbors, but remained separate entities. Mary wold host dances for students of both schools at the 1774 homestead. Rosemary Hall moved to Greenwich in 1900, but would move back to Wallingford in 1971 and merge with Choate in 1974. Choate had acquired the Atwater Homestead from Hunt Atwater, a nephew of Mary Atwater Choate in 1933 and it has served as a dormitory since 1936. The school undertook a major restoration of the building, known as Homestead, in 2006.

North West Center School, Guilford (1848)

Guilford‘s North West Center School, a one-room school house, was built in 1848. It originally had a columned portico with three steps leading up to the entrance. It served as a school until a consolidation of schools in town in 1871. An agricultural class was taught here in 1922, but the building, located at 85 Fair Street, is now a private home. It once sat further back on its lot, but was then moved closer to the street. The bay windows are also a later addition.

Chrysler House (1825)

Built circa 1825-1830, the house at 15 Chaplin Street in Chaplin is known as the Chrysler House for the family that owned it for much of he twentieth century. The least ornate of the three brick houses in the Chaplin Historic District (the others are the Whitter House and the Goodell House), all built around the same time), the Chrysler House has been much altered over the years. A front porch, which covered part of the original fan light over the door, was later removed, but the fan light remains filled in. The interior has been altered, with the original central stairs replaced by a large parlor. A notable resident of the house was Sidney V. Chrysler, a puppeteer whose puppet theater was housed in an ell of the house. The theater is now part of the collections of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at UCONN.

Chilson-Bailey House (1750)

The house at 19 High Street in Middlefield is thought to have been built c. 1750 by Asaph Chilson adjacent to his parents’ house on land they then owned. Asaph acquired ownership of the property, including both houses, in 1756 (his parents had moved to another house the previous year). He sold the property in 1759 to John Lyman and Abraham Camp, whose half-shares were soon acquired by Samuel Russell. In 1770, Russell sold the property (now having only one dwelling house) to Richard Miller. It remained in Miller’s family until it was acquired by Oliver Bailey in 1813. Bailey was married to Anna Wetmore, whose mother had been Richard Miller’s first wife. The surrounding neighborhood would become known as Baileyville after Oliver and Anner’s grandson, Alfred M. Bailey, who contributed to the area’s industrial development, building a dam at Lake Beseck c. 1850.