Barnes-Waldo House (1789)

Jonathan Barnes, a lawyer, was born in Southington in 1763, graduated from Yale in 1784, studied at the Litchfield Law School, and was admitted to the bar in 1789. He soon settled in Tolland, which had become a county seat in 1785. He married Rachael Steele in 1789. Barnes, who served as a town selectman in Tolland from 1798 to 1802 and in the Connecticut Legislature for twenty-eight terms, died in 1829. His oldest son, also named Jonathan Barnes, later became a prominent lawyer in Middletown. The Barnes House, at 34 Tolland Green, was next owned by Obediah Waldo, also a lawyer, who served as selectman, postmaster, town clerk, and member of the state House of Representatives. The house’s side ell was once used as an office.

Peter Parley House, Southbury (1777)

The house at 990 Main Street North in Southbury was built by Benjamin Hinman for his son Sherman in 1777. According to Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College with Annals of the College History, Vol. III (1903), by Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Sherman Hinman

married on February 9, 1777, his third cousin, Molly, youngest daughter of Captain Timothy and Emma (Preston) Hinman, of Southbury, and settled as a merchant and farmer in his native town. He built there an expensive brick house, and lived in dashing splendor for a few years, but was soon reduced to comparative poverty by his extravagance. His wife died on April 30, 1791, in her 34th year, and he married again shortly after. He died in Southbury on February 19, 1793, in his 41st year.

The house is known today as the Peter Parley House because Samuel Griswold Goodrich, who wrote many popular children’s books and textbooks under the name “Peter Parley,” lived in the house for a time, before his death in 1860. Goodrich was buried in Southbury. The house underwent extensive renovations in the 1890s and the History of New Haven County, Connecticut, Volume 2 (1892), edited by J. L. Rockey, states that it “was a pleasant country resort in 1890, kept by Egbert Warner.” In 1918, the house became a German Lutheran home for the aged (now the Lutheran Home of Southbury) and is connected to a modern complex of buildings.

David Williams House (1766)

Built by David Williams, a ship builder, in 1766-1767 (and later expanded), the house at 27 West Avenue in Essex was acquired by Abel Pratt in 1798. According to the 1884 History of Middlesex County,

The manufacture of combs in this country was first begun by Phineas Pratt and his son Abel, about the close of the last century. They were the first inventors of machinery for cutting the teeth upon combs, by which they could be produced so as to compete with English manufacturers. The shop in which they worked stood a few yards west of the site of Pratt’s blacksmith shop, and the first machinery was driven by wind power. Abel Pratt carried on the business during the first years of this century [the nineteenth].

In the later nineteenth century, it was owned by members of the Pratt family connected to the nearby Pratt Smithy, established in 1678 and handed down through ten generations.

Ethan Allen Birthplace (1736)

Happy New Year!!! Our first building of 2011 is the birthplace of a hero of the American Revolution. Ethan Allen led the Green Mountain Boys in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga and then served in the American military expedition against Canada in 1775. Although famous as a champion of statehood for Vermont, with a Homestead that can be visited in Burlington VT, Allen was born on January 21, 1738 in Litchfield CT. In 1740, his parents Joseph and Mary Allen, moved the family from the Litchfield house, built in 1736, to a new farm in Cornwall. Ethan took over the farm after his father’s death in 1755 and later struck out on his own, establishing a charcoal blast furnace in Salisbury in 1761. He eventually settled in Vermont, having purchased land in the area then known as the New Hampshire Grants. Ethan Allen also wrote a book, Reason: the Only Oracle of Man, first published in 1784.