Museum - Historic Buildings of Connecticut

Nathaniel Foote House (1702)

The oldest house in Colchester is the Nathaniel Foote House, which has been moved several times, but is now located on Norwich Avenue. The house was begun in 1699 by Nathaniel Foote of Wethersfield, who was involved in the development of Colchester as a new community. Foote intended to settle in town, but ill health prevented him from completing the new house, which was finished in 1702 by his son, Nathaniel, shortly before his father’s death. It was soon occupied by the elder Nathaniel’s widow and four youngest children. In the early nineteenth century, the house stood on the Hartford Turnpike and was used as a post office. In 1896, the then neglected house was on Broadway and was bought by Mrs. Frederick G. Bock, who repaired it and gave it to the Colonel Henry Champion Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. The D.A.R. moved the house to its present site in 1925 and restored it for use as a historical museum and chapter house.

Bates-Scofield Homestead (1736)

The Bates-Scofield Homestead is a colonial saltbox-style house, built around 1736 in Darien for John Bates, who lived there until 1774. The house was later deeded to John Bates, Jr. Before Darien’s first meetinghouse was built, services were held in the Bates House. After the Bates family, the house was owned by the Scofield family for almost a century, starting with Ezra Scofield in 1822. By 1964 the house faced demolition, until it was given to the Darien Historical Society and moved to a new site to become a museum. In 2005, the 1827 Scofield Barn was also donated to the Society and dismantled. In 2008, the barn was reunited with the house and joined to it by a new connector building.

Makens Bemont House (1761)

The Historical Society of East Hartford has a complex of three historic buildings in Martin Park. The oldest is the Makens Bemont House, commonly called the Huguenot House. It was built by Edmund Bemont in 1761 and was purchased, four years later, by his son, Makens Bemont, a saddle maker. The house’s last owner donated it to the Historical Society in 1968 and in 1971 it was moved to the park from its original location at the intersection of Tolland Street and Burnside Avenue. Since its relocation and restoration, the Huguenot House has acquired a reputation as a haunted house.

The William Jillson House (1826)

In 1826, Asa Jillson and his brother, Seth, from Rhode Island, arrived in the Borough of Willimantic in the Town of Windham, where they became industrial pioneers, setting up mills and building a stone house, built of gneiss granite quarried from the Willimantic River. Asa’s son, “Colonel” William Lawrence Jillson, had arrived with his father and eventually became the agent for his father and uncle’s textile manufacturing firm, the A. & S. Jillson Company. William L. Jillson worked with the machinist Ames Burr Palmer to invent the Jillson and Palmer cotton opener, which came to be used throughout the country. Jillson founded other textile factories and, when he died in 1861, control of his companies passed to his son, William Curtis Jillson, who became one of Willimantic’s most prominent citizens. By the 1970s, the stone Jillson House had fallen into disrepair. It was restored and became the home of the Windham Historical Society.

William Hart House (1767)

Located next to the First Congregational Church in Old Saybrook is the 1767 house of General William Hart, which is now the headquarters of the Old Saybrook Historical Society. Hart was a merchant engaged in the West Indies trade with his brother, Joseph. During the Revolutionary War, he outfitted privateers and led the First Regiment of Connecticut Light Horse Militia to Danbury, when that town was raided by the Brittish under Brig. Gen. William Tryon in 1777.

Charles Ives Birthplace (1780)

Historic Buildings of Connecticut’s 850th building is the Charles Ives Birthplace in Danbury. Ives, born in 1874, was an unconventional composer who combined traditional and revolutionary elements. The original timber frame of his childhood home was built in 1780 by Thomas Tucker, but this building burned in the 1820s. The remains of the structure were purchased by Isaac Ives and rebuilt as a Federal-style house. Charles Edward Ives‘ father George Edward Ives, the youngest band master in the Union Army during the Civil War, was a music teacher who taught his son to embrace unusual combinations of sounds. In 1894, the younger Ives left Danbury to attend Yale. He would go on to form a very successful insurance company, while also composing modernist musical works which would not be fully appreciated by the public until later in the twentieth century. Ives married Harmony Twitchell, the daughter of Mark Twain’s friend, Rev. Joseph Twitchell. The house where Charles Ives had been born was moved from its first location, on Main Street, to Chapel Place in 1923 and again to Mountainville Avenue in 1966. It was later restored by the Danbury Museum and opened to the public in 1992.

Adam Stanton House (1789)

Adam Stanton moved from Rhode Island to Clinton during the Revolutionary War and operated a general store and salt distillery on his property. This land had earlier been the site of Reverend Abraham Pierson‘s house, built in 1694. It was there, from 1701 to 1707, that Rev. Pierson taught the first classes of the Collegiate School, which was later moved to Saybrook and then to New Haven, where it eventually became Yale University. Adam Stanton took down the Pierson House when he built his own house on the site in 1789-1791, using parts of the earlier structure in the construction of the new one. Today, the Stanton House is a museum of American antiques with almost all of the furnishings being original to the house.