parsonage

Rev. Daniel Welch, minister from 1751 to 1782 of Mansfield’s North Society Church (now the Storrs Congregational Church), constructed a house on the Old Turnpike in Mansfield, on land he had purchased in 1755. As this parsonage was his own property (not the church’s), it was passed to his children, eventually becoming the home of his son and successor as minister, Rev. Moses Cook Welch, who had earlier studied law and became known as a great ecclesiastical lawyer. When the original house burned in 1812, it was replaced by the current building. In 1825, when Moses Welch died, his son, the prominent physician Dr. Archibald Welch of Wethersfield, sold the house and farmland out of the family. The property has had a number of owners and was was bought, in 1906, by Martin Hibbard Parker, who had married Edna Mason, a daughter of Charles Mason. The house was restored in the 1990s.

Daniel Crocker built a house on Storrs Road in Mansfield Center in 1794, which he briefly operated as a tavern. After declaring bankruptcy, he sold the house in 1799 to Rev. John Sherman, minister of Mansfield’s First Congregational Church. In 1805, Sherman published One God in one person only: and Jesus Christ a Being distinct from God, dependent upon Him for his existence, and his various powers; maintained and defended, which has been described as “the first formal and elaborate defense of Unitarianism in New England.” Facing efforts by his Trinitarian congregation to dismiss him for his beliefs, Sherman left Mansfield in 1806, moving to New York state where he would become the founder of the Trenton Falls Resort. His house continued to serve as First Church’s parsonage until 1953.