On Boston Street in Guilford is a 1764 gambrel-roofed house built by Ebenezer Hopson. In 1789, Rev. Jesse Lee preached the the first Methodist sermon in Guilford in the Hopson House. The home’s Greek Revival doorway was added around 1841.
Historic Buildings of Connecticut’s 850th building is the Charles Ives Birthplace in Danbury. Ives, born in 1874, was an unconventional composer who combined traditional and revolutionary elements. The original timber frame of his childhood home was built in 1780 by Thomas Tucker, but this building burned in the 1820s. The remains of the structure were purchased by Isaac Ives and rebuilt as a Federal-style house. Charles Edward Ives‘ father George Edward Ives, the youngest band master in the Union Army during the Civil War, was a music teacher who taught his son to embrace unusual combinations of sounds. In 1894, the younger Ives left Danbury to attend Yale. He would go on to form a very successful insurance company, while also composing modernist musical works which would not be fully appreciated by the public until later in the twentieth century. Ives married Harmony Twitchell, the daughter of Mark Twain’s friend, Rev. Joseph Twitchell. The house where Charles Ives had been born was moved from its first location, on Main Street, to Chapel Place in 1923 and again to Mountainville Avenue in 1966. It was later restored by the Danbury Museum and opened to the public in 1992.
The Riley-Gridley House was probably built around 1780 by Julius Riley, in Cromwell, at a time when it was a part of Middletown known as “Upper Houses.” Riley sold his house in 1784 to Isaac Gridley, with the stipulation that his two unmarried sisters could live in the house until they married; they never did and remained in the house, both living to be over 100 years old. Isaac Gridley was a graduate of the Yale Class of 1773 and had been a roommate there of Nathan Hale. He bought the house in Cromwell the same year he married Elizabeth, the daughter of Capt. John Smith. From 1855 to 1880, the house was owned by Elizabeth Crocker, the widow of Zebulon Crocker, the former minister at the First Congregational Church of Cromwell. (more…)
The earliest structure built on the original site of Whitehall Mansion, located in the section of Mystic which is in the town of Stonington, was constructed around 1680 by Lt. William Gallup. A tavern and stagecoach stop stood on the site in the 1750s. Whitehall Mansion, named after an ancestor’s home, Whight House, in Essex, England, was built in 1771-1775 by Dr. Dudley Woodbridge (who, in his youth, had made an interesting sketch of buildings in Deerfield, Massachusetts). A secret room in the attic may have housed runaway slaves. Dr, Woodbridge died in 1790 and the house was later owned by the Rodman and Wheeler families. The Mansion‘s last resident, Florence Grace Keach, donated the house to the Stonington Historical Society in 1962 in order to save it from demolition when Interstate-95 was being constructed. The house was moved approximately one hundred yards north and restored. For a time, it was open for tours, but was purchased by the Waterford Hotel Group in 1996 and is now the Whitehall Mansion Inn.
The Richard Douglass House, on Green Street in New London, is a gambrel-roofed house built in 1801. Richard Douglass was a cooper and served in the Revolutionary War. He was a member of the Society of the Cincinnati. The house has a MySpace page.
The oldest house in Meriden is the Solomon Goffe House on North Colony Street. As explained in A Century of Meriden (1906):
We know nothing about Mr. Goffe except that he lived here ten years, married a Wallingford girl. Mary Doolitlle, and the birth of one child is recorded. In 1721 he sold the place to Thomas Andrews, of Wallingford, who, apparently, lived there until 1729, when he sold it to Jonathan Collins, of Middletown. The old house was enlarged, perhaps soon after Mr. Collins bought it, for the addition looks as old as the rest, but that there has been an addition is plain to be seen. The dormer windows in the old gambrel roof are probably a later addition, and there have been apparently some changes in the interior. That the house is the one built by Solomon Goffe will be apparent to any one who will examine the old rafters and the huge floor beams. The chimneys in the cellar are enormous and the stones were cemented with clay mixed with straw as were the foundation walls, a sure sign of an early house; another indication of age is the split laths, used in very early houses. The Collins family continued to own the house until 1796 when a son, Jonathan, Jr., sold it to Samuel Taylor of Chatham. Mr. Taylor doubtless lived in it until 1806 when he sold it to his son-in-law, Partrick Clark.
Now owned by the City of Meriden, the house is a museum, open by appointment.
After teaching at the schoolhouse in East Haddam, Nathan Hale went on to become the schoolmaster at the Union School in New London, teaching there from 1774 until the Revolutionary War began in 1775. Built in 1773, the gambrel-roofed school building was originally located on State Street, was moved to Union and Golden streets in 1830 to serve as a private home and was purchased in 1890 by the Connecticut Society of the Sons of the American Revolution. Under their guardianship, the building has been moved several additional times: first to the burial ground on Huntington Street, then, in 1966, to to Crystal Avenue and in 1975 to a spot next to City Hall. In 1988, the town paid to move the school to the Parade, at the foot of State Street. For some time, it has been used as a Visitor Center and museum. The schoolhouse has just been moved a sixth time, to a new plaza adjacent to the Water Street parking garage.
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