The two identical houses at 22-24 and 26-28 Addison Road in Glastonbury were built c. 1920 as mill worker tenements by the Glastenbury Knitting Company. The company, which manufactured underwear, used an older spelling of the town’s name. These tenement houses were built in the then-popular Dutch Colonial style, featuring gambrel roofs. The mill eventually sold off the houses in the 1930s.
According to the Genealogical and Family History of the State of Maine, Volume 1 (1909):
Caleb, son of Young and Jerusha (Beebe) Fuller, was born in Colchester, Connecticut, in 1735. He removed to Ellington in 1747. He graduated from Yale College in 1758, and received the degree of A. M. in 1762. He is called Deacon in some records, and Reverend in others. He married, October 28. 1762, Hannah Weld, daughter of Rev. Habijah Weld, the famous minister who preached at Attleboro, Massachusetts, for fifty-five years. [….] Caleb Fuller removed in 1771 to Middletown, Connecticut, and in 1790 to Hanover, New Hampshire, where he died August 20, 1815.
The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record (Vol. 35, 1904) states that, “Caleb Fuller seems never to have been a settled pastor, though doubtless he often preached as a supply, since manuscript sermons of his are now in possession of his descendants.” He moved to Hanover, NH, “perhaps because he desired to educate his son at Dartmouth College,” where he became “Deacon of the College Church.” Caleb Fuller‘s gambrel-roofed house in Middletown, built in 1771, originally stood at the corner of Main and William Street. It was moved west on William Street in 1842 when the First Baptist Church was constructed on that corner. In 1975 the house was scheduled for demolition as part of a redevelopment plan, but it was saved as part of an adaptive reuse plan. Moved to its current address at 49 Main Street, the house had its exterior restored and it was converted to office use.
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The Borough of Fenwick (pdf) in Old Saybrook has long had its own house of worship, St. Mary’s-by-the-Sea. Religious services for the Fenwick summer community were initially led by Rev. Francis Goodwin in his own home. A leader of both Hartford and Fenwick society and an amateur architect, Rev. Francis Goodwin (1839-1923) championed the development of more parks in Hartford as the city’s first commissioner of parks. In 1883, Rev. Goodwin designed and built a small chapel on his property for Sunday worship. By 1886, the chapel was too small to accommodate the number of worshipers, so it was moved to its current location (30 Agawam Avenue) and enlarged with additional pews and a bell tower. St. Mary’s-by-the-Sea is a Shingle style structure, as are so many of the Fenwick summer cottages. You can read more about St. Mary’s-by-the-Sea in Marion Hepburn Grant’s The Fenwick Story (Connecticut Historical Society, 1974), pages 37-49.
At 960 Main Street in South Windsor is a gambrel-roofed house built in 1785. It was the home of John Newberry, who may be the John Newberry who was born in 1756 and died in 1825.
Built circa 1695-1700, the Samuel Smith House (pdf), at 82 Plants Dam Road in East Lyme, is notable as an example of a mostly unaltered early colonial-era house. Additions were made in 1735 (when the end-chimney structure became a center-chimney structure with an expansion on the west side and the house was re-framed with a gambrel roof) and 1812 (when a rear ell was added), after which the house remained essentially unaltered. The house still has an eighteenth-century shed (with a lean-to added in the twentieth century), the original well and a c. 1810 outhouse. Also known as the Hurlbut House, the Smith House was built on land owned by Nehemiah Smith, Jr. In 1698, Smith transferred the property to his son, Samuel, who was probably already living on the property (his father lived elsewhere). Recently acquired by the town of East Lyme, the house is being restored by the Friends of the Samuel Smith House to become a museum.
There is some uncertainty about the date and exact address of the Walter Gwatkin House on Worthington Ridge in Berlin. The nomination form for the Worthington Ridge Historic District lists it as no. 1008 and gives the date as c. 1905. A walking tour booklet (doc) for the District gives the address as 1006 and the date as c. 1861, noting that the porch dates to the early 1900s. Walter Gwatkin (1856-1921) was a prosperous butcher, farmer and landowner. Catharine M. North, in her History of Berlin (1915), makes note of the house that existed before the current one:
In 1817 Horace Steele, Elishama Brandegee’s next door neighbor on the south, was engaged in the business of bookbinding. Afterwards he made bandboxes, which he carried to Hartford to sell to the milliners.
Mr. Steele’s children were Eliza (mother of the Rev. Andrew T. Pratt, missionary in Turkey), Caroline (Mrs. Joseph Booth), Mary, Jane, Lucy Ann (Mrs. Lorenzo Lamb), and William.
Their home, a large colonial house set well back from the street, was, in its day, socially a center of attraction, filled as it was with bright, merry young people. The old house was torn down by William Steele and the house which he built on its site is now owned by Walter Gwatkin.
William Miller III (born in 1659 in Northampton, Mass.), a farmer, settled in Glastonbury on land his father had purchased in 1660. Miller married Mary Bushnell of Old Saybrook in 1693. He built the house at 1855 Main Street in 1704 (the date and his initials were carved on the kitchen door latch) and died a year later.
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