Skinner-Greene-Dickinson Cottage (1880)

The summer cottage at 16 Fenwick Avenue in the Borough of Fenwick in Old Saybrook was built in 1880 by Ebenezer Roberts of Hartford for his daughter Florence Clarissa and her new husband, Colonel William Converse Skinner. Ebenezer Roberts was a partner with the Keney Brothers of Hartford in in their wholesale grocery business. As described in American Biography: A New Cyclopedia, Volume 9 (1921), Roberts’ son-in-law, Col. William C. Skinner, was “A man of pleasing personality, kindly, considerate and courteous to all, a levelheaded, finely poised man of affairs, quick and decisive of action, conservative but determined.” As that book further describes,

Colonel William Converse Skinner, son of Dr. Calvin and Jane (Blodgett) Skinner, was born in Malone, New York, January 26, 1855, and there completed courses of grade and high school study, graduating with the high school class of 1872. He then entered Trinity College whence he was graduated A. B., class of 1876, later receiving from alma mater the degree M. A. During the next session of the New York Legislature he was appointed clerk to the Judiciary Committee of the House, and while in Albany attended lectures at Albany Law School. He was deterred from further progress in legal study by a serious throat trouble, and spent a year in Colorado to effect its cure. After his return he located in Hartford, Connecticut, there forming in 1882 a partnership with General Henry C. Dwight which continued for eighteen years, Dwight, Skinner & Company becoming one of the best known firms in the State in the wool trade. In May, 1899, Colonel Skinner withdrew from the firm and has since been connected with the Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company in official capacity. He was elected a director and vice-president of the company, July 2, 1901. and on January 5, 1909, was elected president of the company to fill the vacancy caused by the death of President Grover. President Skinner resigned the office of president, January 1. 1911, becoming chairman of the board of directors, holding that position until the death of President Charles L. F. Robinson, when he was again elected president of the company, July 13, 1916, whose position and importance in the industrial and business world is so well known.

Col. Skinner died in 1922, but around 1885 he had already sold his Fenwick home to Colonel Jacob Greene of Hartford, president of the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company. Jacob Lyman Greene grew up in Maine, but later went to the University of Michigan and became a lawyer. He later served in the Civil War, eventually becoming a Colonel and the Adjutant-General of General George Armstrong Custer. He and Custer became best friends and Greene was best man at Custer’s wedding in 1864 to Libbie Bacon, who was friends with Greene’s wife, Nettie Humphrey. After the War, Col. Greene went to work for the Berkshire Life Insurance Company. In 1870 he moved to Hartford to work for Connecticut Mutual, eventually becoming the company’s president. When President Theodore Roosevelt visited Hartford in 1902 and became the first president to ride in an automobile in public, it was Col. Greene was sat next to him as chairman of Hartford Citizen’s Committee.

The cottage in Fenwick later passed through other owners. You can read more about the cottage in Marion Hepburn Grant’s The Fenwick Story (Connecticut Historical Society, 1974), pages 64-67. By the time that book was published the cottage was owned by the Dickinson family and is referred to as the Dickinson Cottage. The illustration of the cottage on page 64 of the book reveals that it has been much altered in the last forty years. A number of dormer windows, a balcony, a front porch and sun room have been added and the house house has been given shingled siding to match the many other shingle style houses in Fenwick. I do not know if these are restorations to an earlier appearance the house may have had or new innovations.