Mansard - Historic Buildings of Connecticut

William H. Taft Mansion (1870)

The Mansard-roofed house at 111 Whitney Avenue in New Haven (pdf) was built in 1870. It is known as the William H. Taft Mansion because the former President (1909-1913) (soon to be Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court) owned the house around the time of the First World War, although he never actually lived in it. He sold the house in 1921. Extensively remodeled in 2008, the house was recently used as the offices of Research Edge, an independent research firm, which later became Hedgeye Risk Management. More recently, the house has become home to the William F. Buckley Jr. Program, a Yale conservative group founded in 2010.

Boardman House (1875)

In 1842, Luther Boardman invented and patented an improved mold for creating britannia silverware. He established a factory in East Haddam where he produced britannia spoons. In 1864, Luther Boardman entered a partnership with his son Norman S. Boardman, under the name L. Boardman & Son. This successful business peaked in the 1860s and 1870s. Norman Boardman had already built the Italianate house at 8 Norwich Road when another grand residence was constructed next door circa 1875. A more eclectic house than its neighbor, it features an Italianate design and an octagonal rear tower on west side with a mansard roof and Eastlake-style iron cresting. There is some confusion over who built the house. The National Register of Historic Places nomination for the East Haddam Historic District lists the house as the Norman S. Boardman House, while an 1880 bird’s-eye-view of East Haddam lists it as the residence of his father, Luther Boardman. An online collection of images from the Boardman Collection at the East Haddam Historical Society has a photo of the house with the description “The Lawton House owned by the Boardman Family.”

David Brainerd House (1874)

The Mansard-roofed house at 127 Pearl Street in Thompsonville, Enfield, was built c. 1874-1880 for David Brainerd. As recorded in The Genealogy of the Brainerd-Brainard Family in America (1908), by Lucy Abigail Brainard, David Brainerd

was registrar of voters, notary public and justice of the peace, collector of taxes, and represented the town of Enfield in the state legislature in 1862. He was appointed assistant assessor of internal revenue in the first congressional district by Abraham Lincoln, in 1862, a position he held for nine successive years. He has always been active in politics and is a Republican and ready to aid in all advancement for improvements in town, school or church. He has been Elder in the First Presbyterian Church in Thompsonville, Conn., where he resided, and is honored for his sterling worth and noble character.

David Brainerd married Caroline King in 1844. After her death in 1859, he married his first wife’s sister, Henrietta King, who died in 1901. One of his sons, Horace, worked with his father in his agricultural warehouse business, then became purchasing agent for the Bigelow-Sanford Carpet Company, and later was manager of the Overbrook Carpet Company. In 1932, the house was acquired by the Masons, who converted for use by a Masonic Lodge and added a ballroom. In 2007, the house was purchased by Enfield Pearl Ballroom & Dance Studio. It was renovated to have four apartments and a ballroom studio, called the North American Dance Academy, which has two dance floors.

Daniel Goffe Phipps House (1873)

At 614 Chapel Street in New Haven is Second Empire mansard-roofed house built in 1873 for Daniel Goffe Phipps (1821-1903). He had had many adventures serving as a captain in the U.S Navy and spent two years in the California gold mines during the Gold Rush. In St. Louis in 1851, he married “Mary E. Hunt, daughter of Captain James Hunt, a prominent West India merchant of New Haven,” as recorded in the History of the City of New Haven to the Present Time (1887), by Edward E. Atwater. That book goes on to relate that

In the fall of 1864 he ceased going to sea, and became identified with the New Haven Water Company; beginning soon afterward the manufacture of hydraulic pipe and the profession of hydraulic enginering [sic] and building of waterworks, his present business.

There are patents in his name for hydraulic water pipes. Daniel Goffe Phipps was later president of the West Haven Water Company. He died in 1903.

Edward Manross House (1885)

The house at 34-36 Spring Street in Bristol was built in the mid-1880s by noted builder Joel Case. The mansard-roofed house was home to Edward Manross.

John C. Anderson Carriage House (1888)

John C. Anderson built his grand Second Empire house on Orange Street in New Haven in 1882. Six years later, a matching mansard-roofed carriage house was built on Lincoln Street, directly behind the main house. The building features ornately carved brownstone window trim.

Elisha Chapman Bishop House (1874)

The house at 122 Broad Street in Guilford was built in 1874 for Elisha Chapman Bishop (1824-1903). A native of Guilford, Bishop had become wealthy in the 1860s oil boom in Titusville, Pennsylvania. According to Vol. II of A Modern History of New Haven and Eastern New Haven County (1918), Bishop

was born April 10, 1824, in Guilford, remaining upon the home farm until he reached the age of twenty years. He then began learning the machinist’s trade, which he afterward followed in Guilford on his own account. In 1861 he began operations in the oil fields at Titusville, Pennsylvania, where he remained for ten years, meeting with substantial success. He returned to Guilford in 1870 and then took up the occupation of general farming. In 1874 he built one of the finest homes in Guilford and equipped it in a most modern manner. In politics he was originally a republican but afterward became a prohibitionist. He was an ardent supporter of the abolition party from the time that he reached his majority in 1845. In 1882 he represented his town in the state legislature and he held various local offices. His religious faith was that of the Congregational church. On the 5th of July, 1846, he married Charlotte G. Fowler and they became the parents of twelve children, six of whom are living: Robert Allen; Edward Fowler; Mary Cornelia, the wife of N. G. White, of Hartford, Connecticut; Eva B., the wife of Edward M. Leete, of Guilford; Ida, the wife of William J. Canfield, of New Haven; and Marilla Canfield, the wife of F. C. Spencer, of Guilford.

Bishop’s house in Guilford, built in the French Second Empire style on the northeast corner of Guilford Green, was designed by the noted architect Henry Austin of New Haven. The house was later inherited by Bishop’s granddaughter, Marilla, who was married to Frederick C. Spencer, president of the Spencer Foundry. After her death in 1962, the First Congregational Church purchased the house for use as a rectory.