Dr. Hezekiah Chaffee House (1765)

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Built for Dr. Hezekiah Chaffee on Palisado Green in Windsor around 1765. The Georgian style house is constructed of brick and features a gambrel roof. John Adams dined there in 1774. Dr. Chaffee’s daughter, Abigail, married Colonel James Loomis in 1805. In 1874, their children, including the state senator James Chaffee Loomis, founded the co-educational Loomis Institute. The Chaffee House would later be utilized by the girls’ division, which broke off in 1926 to form the Chaffee School. The two branches reunited in 1970 to form the Loomis-Chaffee School. Records survive relating to the slaves owned by Dr. Chaffee, including the documents for the emancipation of Elizabeth Stevenson. Another slave in the Chaffee household was Nancy Toney, who was later owned by Dr. Chaffee’s daughter, Abigail. When she died in 1857, she was the last surviving slave in Connecticut. The house is now owned by the town of Windsor and is currently open as a museum, maintained and operated by the Windsor Historical Society.

The John and Sarah Strong House (1758)

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The Strong House, on Palisado Avenue in Windsor, was long thought to have been built in 1640 and was known for many years as the Lt. Walter Fyler House. Fyler came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony from England in 1630, settling in Windsor in 1634. He received the land on which the house now stands in 1640 for his service in the Pequot War. Recent research has shown that Fyler’s house actually stood on a different part of his property than the house that was latter attributed to him. The area where this surviving house now stands was later owned by Henry Allyn, who sold it to John Strong, Jr. in 1758. When Strong later sold the property to Alexander Allin in 1762, it contained a dwelling which had not been there before. This is the house which is now called the John and Sarah Strong House.

The original, 1758 gambrel-roofed portion of the house was a half-house, a middle-class home intended to be added to later, as it was with more elaborate additions over the years. The house was saved from demolition in 1925 by the Windsor Historical Society. The house has served the Society as a headquarters, and even as a tea room for several years in the 1920s. Research into this historic structure continues and it is currently open for tours as a house museum.

Appleton Robbins House (1760)

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The 1760 Appleton Robbins House is a center chimney colonial home on Warner Place in Wethersfield. The house is built into a hill behind it. Recently (October, 2024) I received some information about the blacksmith shop on the property from someone who grew up in the house:

My father and crew of carpenters moved it from my grandmother’s family farm in Watertown, CT. I have newspaper clippings of the “barn raising” when they reconstructed it in Wethersfield in the 1960s. My father, Ted Tolman, actually used the forge and make some iron tools, hinges, etc. 

East Windsor Hill Post Office (1757)

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In 1757, David Bissell Jr. sold part of his land to Jeremiah Ballard, a barber, who built a shop on Main Street, in East Windsor Hill. The remainder of this shop is the present long ell of the East Windsor Hill Post Office. In 1759, Bissell gave the rest of his land to his son, David Bissell III, who later attached a shop/storehouse to Ballard’s shop. This is the gambrel-roofed warehouse with overhead doorway that now houses the Post Office. Different owners divided the structure for various businesses selling dry goods and groceries over the following years, well into the twentieth century. It also served as a post office, receiving its first government post rider in 1783. It is the oldest continuously operated post office in the country.

Simeon Belden House (1767)

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Built in 1767, on Main Street in Wethersfield, for Simeon Belden, who married Martha, daughter of the minister, James Lockwood. It has a gambrel roof, similar to that of the Webb House and other nearby houses in Wethersfield. The Simeon Belden House is one of very few remaining in the Connecticut River Valley to have its original broken scroll, or swan’s neck, doorway pediment. The house, adjacent to Comstock, Ferre & Co., is currently used as offices and also houses the Krown & Kringle Danish pasty shop.

Deming-Standish House (1787)

Built in 1787 for Henry Deming on Main Street in Wethersfield and later owned by the Standish family, the Deming-Standish House was given to the town of Wethersfield in 1928. It is very similar to the 1783 brick house built for Samuel Woodhouse, Jr., on nearby River Road. In 1800, James Francis and his cousin, Simeon, were contracted to do the woodworking of the front rooms and the windows, the facade thus being updated in the Federal style. Within a few years, the neighboring Hurlbut and Shepard Houses would be constructed in the Federal style. The house was leased to the Wethersfield Historical Society in 1983 and over the years has been rented to different proprietors as a restaurant, first as The Standish House, and more recently as The Village Tavern. It is currently between tenants.

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