Revolutionary War - Historic Buildings of Connecticut

Oldgate (1790)

In 1786, the wealthy Farmington merchant Zenas Cowles bought a house on Main Street, at Meadow Lane, that had been lived in by blacksmith Isaac Bidwell (and earlier by the town’s first two ministers). Zenas’s brother, Solomon Cowles, lived in a house just across Meadow Road. In 1790, Zenas employed the British architect William Sprats to build a newer and grander house around the older one. Sprats had been a British officer during the Revolutionary War, but was captured and remained in America after the war. He may have employed former Hessian soldiers, who had also been prisoners, as carpenters in the construction of the house. Designed in an elaborately detailed Georgian-style, the house is known as Oldgate because of the property’s front gate, which features a broken scroll pediment and an Asian design signifying “peace and prosperity.” In the nineteenth century, the house was home to Thomas Cowles, a prominent Farmington resident, politician and abolitionist. A later owner of the house was Rear Admiral William Sheffield Cowles, whose wife, Anna Roosevelt Cowles, was the sister of President Theodore Roosevelt, who visited Farmington in October of 1901.

The Lewis Walpole Library (1784)

Maj. Solomon Cowles of Farmington, a wealthy merchant and Revolutionary War General, built a Georgian-style house on Main Street in 1784, recognizable today for its long columned porch. The home remained in the Cowles family until it was purchased by Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis in 1926. Lewis was a 1918 Yale graduate, collector, author, and the editor of The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence. He remodeled the house in 1928 to house the Walpole Collection he had gathered, consisting of rare books and manuscripts, relating to Horace Walpole and his times, and “the largest and finest collection of eighteenth-century British graphic art outside the British Museum.” Lewis and his wife, Annie Burr Auchincloss Lewis (sister of Hugh Auchincloss of Newport’s Hammersmith Farm), lived in a house next door. Lewis died in 1979 and the library, with its collection and grounds, was given to Yale University and is now a department of the university’s library. Known as the Lewis Walpole Library, the site includes the Cowles House, the adjacent Root House (where visiting scholars can stay) and the Day-Lewis Museum of Indian Artifacts. The property recently underwent a major renovation project.

For those interested in Horace Walpole, nineteenth century editions of his works can be found through Google Books, including his well-known Castle of Otranto, as well as collections of his letters and memoirs. He also wrote Anecdotes of Painting in England and A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England.

Phelps Tavern (1776)

Located on Hopmeadow Street in Simsbury, the Capt. Elisha Phelps House served as a tavern run by successive generations of the Phelps family. According to Wikipedia, it was built by Capt. Phelps in 1776, although the Simsbury Historical Society site indicates it was built sometime earlier, purchased by Phelps and raised by him, adding a new first floor, around 1771. Phelps and his brother, Noah Phelps, were involved in gathering intelligence during the Revolutionary War campaign to capture Fort Ticonderoga. In 1962, the house was purchased by the Simsbury Historical Society from the last of the Phelps family members to live there. It can now be visited as the Phelps Tavern Museum, part of a campus of historical buildings moved to the site by the Historical Society.

Hale-Newson House (1725)

Located just south of the Buttolph-Williams House, on Broad Street in Wethersfield, is a house of similar age, built in stages between the 1720s and 1750s. The first owner, Benezer Hale, began the construction of the house around 1725 by building what is now the section to the south (the left side). The section to the north (right side) was added later. Capt. Thomas Newson, a privateer during the Revolutionary War, added the lean-to on the rear, which gives the house a traditional saltbox form. Capt. Newson had a reputation for violence towards his slaves and was believed to have murdered a 42-year-old slave woman named Doll, who was found dead on the highway in 1802 from wounds inflicted with an ax. An inquest panel, on which Isaac Stevens sat, determined that the murder was committed by “some person or persons unknown to the jury.”

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Oliver Ellsworth Homestead (1781)

The house of Oliver Ellsworth, on Palisado Avenue in Windsor, was originally at the heart of the Ellsworth estate, called Elmwood. It was built in 1781 by Samuel Denslow, to Ellsworth’s specifications. Oliver Ellsworth had been born on the property in 1745 and went on to become a member of the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War, an envoy to France, a framer of the U.S. Constitution, the chairman of the Senate Committee that framed the bill organizing the federal judiciary system, and the third Chief Justice of the United States. Ellsworth married Abigail Wolcott Ellsworth in 1772 and the couple lived in the house until his death in 1807. Two sitting presidents visited the house, George Washington in 1789 and John Adams in 1799.

In 1788, Ellsworth commissioned Thomas Hayden, a notable Windsor architect-builder, to construct a two-story addition to the house on the south elevation. The addition’s first floor was a drawing room, in which Ellsworth’s daughter Abigail married Ezekiel Williams, son of the merchant and Hartford County Sheriff, Ezekiel Williams of Wethersfield in 1794. Ezekiel Williams Sr had served with Ellsworth on the Committe of the Pay Table during the Revolutionary War. The Greek Revival-style colonnaded porch was added by Martin Ellsworth in 1836. Members of the Ellsworth family continued to live in the house until 1903. It was then deeded to the Connecticut Daughters of the American Revolution by Oliver Ellsworth’s descendants. Restored in the 1980s and 1990s, the house is open to the public as the Oliver Ellsworth Homestead.

Ezekiel Williams House (1759)

Built around 1759 for the merchant, Ezekiel Williams, on Broad Street in Wethersfield. Williams was the sheriff of Hartford County from 1767 to 1789 and, during the Revolutionary War, he served as a member of the Committee of the Pay Table and Deputy Commissary General of Prisoners in Connecticut. Ezekiel Williams‘ son, Ezekiel, married a daughter of Oliver Ellsworth.

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John Chester Tavern (North Half) (1735)

Originally attached to the southern half of the John Chester Tavern, the northern half was moved by his grandchildren to its present location on Garden Street in Wethersfield.