The William F. Baldwin House, at 150 South Street in Litchfield, was built in 1850. In 1886, the house was acquired by Philadelphian F. Ratchford Starr, who ran Echo Farm, a commercial dairy he had begun in Litchfield. Around 1910, when the Colonial Revival influence had come to dominate in Litchfield, the house was altered, probably quite significantly, in that style, most likely by Starr’s daughter, who had inherited the property in 1889.
The Elijah Barber House, built in 1790, is at 227 Windsor Avenue in Windsor. Elijah Barber was a farmer who, like others at the time on Windsor Avenue, also made bricks. In 1798, John Warner Barber, the second of six children of Elijah and Mary Warner Barber, was born. He would take on additional farm work after his father’s death, in 1812, but was soon working as an apprentice to Abner Reed, an engraver in East Windsor Hill. Barber would become an artist and historian, writing Connecticut Historical Collections (1837), A History of the Amistad Captives (1840), Massachusetts Historical Collections (1848) and History and Antiquities of New Haven, Conn. (1856). The Barber House was later owned by the Wilson family for over a century. The house was converted into the Second French Empire style in 1878, with the addition of a new porch and mansard roof.
At the corner of Albany Avenue and Center Street in Hartford is a Second Empire-style house, built around 1875. The earliest documented owner was Terence McGovern. At the time of the First World War, he both lived and operated a saloon in the building, at a time when the surrounding Clay Hill neighborhood was heavily Irish. The house’s upper floors retain original decorative features, while the ground floor has been converted to commercial use. (more…)
A French Second Empire-style house, built for Henry P. Strong around 1883, can be found at 33 Court Street in New Britain. Strong, who was in the lumber and coal business, was also president of the Railroad Block Company, of which his neighbor, Frederick G. Platt, was secretary-treasurer. The house has been altered by the removal of the original front porch.
New Haven has a number of examples (pdf) of row houses. The connected row of Second Empire houses at 545-551 Orange Street are far more lavishly ornamented than the Middletown row houses I posted yesterday. These Orange Street houses were built in 1869-1871 by the builder Nelson Newgeon.
Urban-style row houses are not so common in Connecticut, but a notable example can be found at 71-83 Crescent Street in Middletown. These Mansard-roofed houses were built in 1866-1867 by Julius Hotchkiss, an entrepreneur and politician, who had been mayor of Waterbury and began serving in the United States House of Representatives the year the original houses were completed. The house at #71 was built in 1895 by his daughter, M. Amelia Vinal, who had married the lawyer, Charles Green Rich Vinal.
The date for the Hall Elton Building in Wallingford is 1847. The structure must have been updated in the Second Empire style, with a Mansard roof, later in the nineteenth century, as the Second Empire style did yet exist in 1847. A number of silver companies occupied the building and in 1988 it was restored to house offices. Hall, Elton & Co. was a silver company founded in 1838 through an association of Deacon Almer Hall, William Elton and others to produce German silver and britannia wares.
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