An excellent example of the Second Empire style, the 1869 Hartford home of Oliver H. Easton, an architect and builder, features a colorful mansard roof and a tower, both with elaborate dormers. The house is located on Fairfield Avenue, where many affluent families built homes in the years after the Civil War.
The 1876, Second Empire-style Frances E. Hale House, on Main Street in Glastonbury, looks like an appropriate house to post on Halloween!
This is also an appropriate day to announce the start of a new companion blog to Historic Buildings of Connecticut called Historic Gravestones of Souther New England! It will not be updated quite as frequently as this blog is, but please check it out!
Also, this blog is now six months old! To celebrate, I have added a poll. Please vote! (Poll now closed).
Edit (5/27/08): The house replaced the earlier home of Timothy Hale, later occupied by his son, Atwater Hale. After Atwater’s death in 1874, his widow Frances had this house built and invited her daughter, Deborah and son-in-law, John Q. Goodrich, to move in and help run the family tobacco farm.
Built in 1864, on Charter Oak Place in Hartford, the Robinson-Smith house was occupied simultaneously by the families of two flour merchants, who were business partners of Charles Northam, Charles Robinson and James Smith. The house is quite extravagant for a double house and features aspects of different revival styles, including an Italianate cupola and a Second Empire mansard roof. The house’s original symmetricality has been altered by the additions on the left side (south elevation).
Silas Webster Robbins, a partner in the seed business, Johnson, Robbins and Co., built an impressive Second Empire style mansion on Broad Street Green in Wethersfield in 1873. Damaged by fire in 1996, the home was purchased in 2001 by new owners, who have restored it. The Silas W. Robbins House will open as a bed-and-breakfast on November 1, and a number of gala events are planned for this month, including daily house tours, Oct. 6-Oct. 14, to benefit the Keane Foundation.
Built in 1803, possibly by James Francis, on Main Street in Wethersfield, for Capt. Daniel Francis. This Federal style house was later updated to the Second Empire style in the 1870s with the addition of a Mansard roof.
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The Moses Wells House, also known as the Nathan day house, was built around 1780 on Main Street in East Windsor Hill (South Windsor) by Moses Wells, a hatter from Colchester. His son Noah was married in 1781 and Moses sold him the house that same year. It is unusual for being a colonial era house with a mansard roof.
Built on South Main Street in Suffield for Henry Phelps Kent, a tobacco merchant, in 1872. It was designed in the Second Empire style by local architect John Mead. Later, for almost sixty years, it the home of Samuel Reid Spencer, the prominent merchant and philanthrophist who had bought and restored the King House Museum next door. Today the house has been restored as a bed-and-breakfast called Spencer on Main.
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