Rose Hill (1852)

Rose Hill is a Gothic Revival house at 63 Prospect Street in Waterbury and was home to three of the city’s most prominent manufacturing families. Designed by Henry Austin of New Haven, it was built in 1852 in the “cottage style” popularized by A.J. Downing in such books as The Architecture of Country Houses. It was constructed near the base of a hill that would soon be developed as a neighborhood filled with many other Victorian-era houses. Rose Hill was built for Wlliam H. Scovill, who lived in the house for only six months before his death. The house was then vacant for a decade, until in 1863 it became home to the successful businessman Joseph Chauncey Welton and his wife, Jane Porter Welton. The couple loved to entertain and the house became a center of Waterbury society. Their daughter, Caroline Josephine Welton, was known for her fondness for her black stallion Knight, although the horse had kicked her father in the head and killed him. She never married and after her death in a blizzard on Longs Peak in Colorado in 1884 she left money for a bronze statue of Knight to be placed on a memorial fountain on Waterbury Green. Her relatives contested her will, which also gave $100,000 to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, on the grounds that she was insane, but they failed to stop the bequest. The statue was carved by Karl Gerhardt, whose trip to study in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1881 was financed by Mark Twain. The Rose Hill estate was next purchased by Augustus Sabin Chase. He added porches to the first and second floors. Today the mansion is home to Stepping Stone, the local program of the North American Family Institute (NAFI). It is currently a 22 bed secured residential facility with a treatment program serving delinquent girls committed to the Department of Children and Families. Plans to expand the facility a decade ago met with local resistance.