Museum - Historic Buildings of Connecticut

Osborne Homestead Museum (1840)

The Osborne Homestead Museum is adjacent to the Kellogg Environmental Center and the Osbornedale State Park in Derby. It was originally a farm house built in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1867, Wilbur Fisk Osborne married Ellen Lucy Davis and the couple moved into the house. Osborne’s father, John White Osborne, had founded a brass manufacturing company in Derby which came to dominate the eyelet manufacturing business. Wilbur F. Osborne served as president of various companies and also founded the Derby Neck Library, persuading Andrew Carnegie to assist in funding the library building’s construction. The Osbornes‘ only surviving child was Frances Eliza Osborne, who became a businesswoman, taking over her father’s responsibilities after his sudden death in 1907. In 1919, she married Waldo Stewart Kellogg, a New York architect. Starting in 1910, a Colonial Revival remodeling project began on the house, with additional detailing work done by Waldo Kellogg. The homestead now resembles a Federal-style house. Frances Osborne Kellogg continued to live in the house until her death in 1956. She had deeded her property to the State of Connecticut in 1951 and it became the Osbornedale State Park. The land was once home to the Osbornedale Dairy, which was run by Waldo Kellogg, who improved the herd after the acquisition of a prize bull. The house is open to the public as the Osborne Homestead Museum.

John I. Howe House (1845)

As resident physician in the New York City Almshouse, Dr. John Ireland Howe observed how English residents laboriously made pins by hand. In 1831, Dr. Howe invented a pin-making machine and founded the Howe Manufacturing company in New York in 1835 to produce pins. In 1838, he moved the company to Birmingham, a section of Derby which would later become the City of Derby. The Howe Pin Company grew as Howe perfected his methods with additional patented inventions. In 1910, Howe‘s son donated his original Pin Machine to the Smithsonian. Howe’s stone house, constructed in 1845 on Caroline Street in Derby, was perhaps built by Lucius Hubbell, who constructed other stone houses in Derby and Shelton. The house, now owned by the Derby Historical Society, will eventually house the Lower Naugatuck Valley Industrial Heritage Center.

General David Humphreys House (1698)

Located across from the Old Episcopal Burying Ground, on Elm Street in Ansonia, is the house where General David Humphreys was born in 1752. The house was built in 1698 to be the home of the new Congregational Minister of the Town of Derby (Ansonia was then part of Derby). It was first occupied by the Reverend John James, who sold the house in 1706 to the Reverend Joseph Moss. In 1735, the Reverend Daniel Humphreys bought the house from Joseph Moss’s widow, Abigail Moss. At some point in the 1730s, the house was enlarged to roughly its current size. Humphreys was a Congregational minister, but lived across the street from Derby’s Episcopal church, with its cemetery. Later, when Derby’s second Episcopal Church was built down the street to replace the original smaller building, the old church building was moved across Elm Street and attached to the Humphreys House for use as a summer kitchen. Rev. Humphreys died in 1787. His son, David Humphreys, never owned the house, but visited it as his family’s ancestral homestead. During the Revolutionary War, David Humphreys served as an aide-de-camp and close adviser to George Washington and, after the Battle of Yorktown, he was honored by receiving the surrendered British standards and presenting them to Congress. After the War, Humphreys served as a diplomat in Europe and General Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the Polish Revolutionary hero, visited him at the house on Elm Street. Returning from Spain, Humphreys brought back with him America’s first Merino sheep, going on to found the Humphreysville (now Seymour), where wool textiles were manufactured. David Humphreys was also a poet and a member of the literary group known as the “Hartford Wits.” His writings were collected in The Miscellaneous Works of David Humphreys (1804).

The house was not owned by David Humphreys, but by his brother Elijah, who had married Anna Mansfield, the daughter of the Episcopal minister, Richard Mansfield. Elijah, who died at sea, willed the house to his son, Elijah, Jr., who sold it to his sister, Betsey, and her husband, Thomas Vose, a sea captain and business partner of David Humphreys. The house had other owners over the years, eventually being converted into three apartments. Preserved by the Humphreys House Association, in 1961 the house was turned over to the Derby Historical Society. Restored beginning in 1976, it was first opened to the public as a museum in 1980.

Rev. Richard Mansfield House (1700)

This week we’ll be looking at some historic buildings in the Lower Naugatuck River Valley towns of Derby and Ansonia. Reverend Richard Mansfield was the first clergyman of the Church of England to reside in Derby. Although his father was a deacon in the Congregational Church, Mansfield had converted to Anglicanism after studying at Yale and was ordained by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself in England. Assigned to Derby in 1748, Rev. Mansfield would serve for 72 years, the longest recorded rectorship in the United States. In Derby, Rev. Mansfield lived in a saltbox house on what is today Jewett Street in Ansonia (which later separated from Derby). The house had been built around 1700 and was purchased the the Episcopal Church in 1748 as a home for its rector, thus becoming an Episcopal Glebe House Rectory. His tenure was not without serious difficulties, however, because during the Revolutionary War, the loyalist Rev. Mansfield was forced to flee to Long Island. Although he returned to his old rectorship after the war, his wife Anna and infant daughter had died during his absence. During Rev. Mansfield’s tenure in Derby, the Episcopal Church had two successive buildings. The first church was erected on Elm Street (in what is now Ansonia) in 1737. Itinerant Anglican priests had preached there until Rev. Mansfield arrived in 1748. A new church was completed on Derby Avenue in 1799, where Rev. Mansfield served until his death in 1820. He is buried in the Episcopal cemetery on Elm Street, his monument marking where the first Episcopal church’s alter had been when it stood at that location. In 1926, the Mansfield House was moved across Jewett Street to make way for St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church and School. Preserved by the Mansfield House Association, the building was given to the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society. Later, in 1960, the A&L gave the house to the Derby Historical Society.

Update: Last year the house acquired a new owner, who has posted about the house on his blog. Here’s a great article about the restoration of the house. Another post is about the south garret, while others discuss the history of the house, a Bible once owned by Rev. Richard Mansfield and thermal imaging,

Dr. William Beaumont Homestead (1750)

Dr. William Beaumont (1785-1853) was a U.S. Army surgeon who became famous as the “Father of Gastric Physiology.” His pioneering investigations of human digestion were published in his 1838 work, Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion. Dr. Beaumont was born in a small c. 1750 farm house, built by his father, Samuel Beaumont, in the Village Hill section of Lebanon. In 1973, the house was acquired by the Beaumont Homestead Preservation Trust and moved to a new site on Lebanon Green, behind the Gov. Jonathan Trumbull House. The house is now a museum, owned and maintained by the Lebanon Historical Society.

Also today, check out the latest entries at Historic Buildings of Massachusetts, the Nims House and Wilson Printing Office in Deerfield.

Old Farm School (1796)

Constructed in Bloomfield in 1796, at the intersection of Park and School Streets, the brick Old Farm School served one of the seven school districts in what was then Windsor’s Wintonbury Parish. Before then, an earlier log building on the site from the 1730s had been used as a school house (it was eventually sold in 1815). Although originally built with two floors, the new brick building’s second floor classroom was only completed in 1829-30. The school closed in 1922, but the building continued to be used by the public, serving as a meeting place for the American Legion and Auxiliary Legion from 1931 to 1971. When the state planned to widen School Street, the Wintonbury Historical Society raised money and supervised the moving of the building to a new location across the street in 1976. In 1987 the first floor was restored and opened to the public as a museum, with the second floor following it in 1989.

Southington Historical Center (1902)

In 1900, a small library opened in the Southington Town Hall, but money was soon raised to construct a library building on Main Street. Completed in 1902, this original library building is a neoclassical structure built of of glazed terra cotta brick and granite. In 1917, Emma Bradley Yeomans Newell, a wealthy philanthropist, donated money for the addition of a “historical wing” to the library. The wing, not actually built until 1930, was named the Sylvia Bradley Memorial, in honor of the wife of Amon Bradley and grandmother of the notable Southington citizen, Bradley Barnes. The Southington Historical Society, founded in the 1960s, housed its collections and met in the wing. A new library was constructed in 1974 and the old building then became a museum called the Southington Historical Center. It recently received a grant from the Community Foundation of Greater New Britain to complete renovations on the building.