Clark-Stockade House (1780)

About 1659, Deacon George Clark began construction of the first house in Milford to be built outside the early settlement’s protective stockade. The building, known as the Stockade House, was expanded over time into a saltbox structure. It is also called the “Nathan Clark Stockade House,” named for a grandson of George Clark. This original house was dismantled in 1780 by Michael Peck, a builder, and David Camp, his assistant. They constructed a new house, using building materials salvaged from the one they took down. In the twentieth century, the house served as a rooming house, tea room and Milford’s first public hospital. In 1974, the Clark-Stockade House was moved from Bridgeport Avenue to become part of Wharf Lane, the Milford Historical Society’s complex of colonial houses.

Peter Parley House, Southbury (1777)

The house at 990 Main Street North in Southbury was built by Benjamin Hinman for his son Sherman in 1777. According to Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College with Annals of the College History, Vol. III (1903), by Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Sherman Hinman

married on February 9, 1777, his third cousin, Molly, youngest daughter of Captain Timothy and Emma (Preston) Hinman, of Southbury, and settled as a merchant and farmer in his native town. He built there an expensive brick house, and lived in dashing splendor for a few years, but was soon reduced to comparative poverty by his extravagance. His wife died on April 30, 1791, in her 34th year, and he married again shortly after. He died in Southbury on February 19, 1793, in his 41st year.

The house is known today as the Peter Parley House because Samuel Griswold Goodrich, who wrote many popular children’s books and textbooks under the name “Peter Parley,” lived in the house for a time, before his death in 1860. Goodrich was buried in Southbury. The house underwent extensive renovations in the 1890s and the History of New Haven County, Connecticut, Volume 2 (1892), edited by J. L. Rockey, states that it “was a pleasant country resort in 1890, kept by Egbert Warner.” In 1918, the house became a German Lutheran home for the aged (now the Lutheran Home of Southbury) and is connected to a modern complex of buildings.

Eli Lewis House (1764)

Josiah Lewis was a successful farmer who came from Southington and settled in Bristol. He had nine sons and, according to the 1907 history of Bristol,

Nine sons grew up and married, to each of whom he gave a farm of a hundred acres, a house, a barn, a cow, a hive of bees, and a Waterbury sweet apple tree. Five of these houses, including his own, were built on the Farmington road, three near the cemetery and two beyond the woods of Poker Hole. Four of the Lewis houses are still standing, built much after the same plan, all large, spacious houses, such as those early settlers used to build, when the heating of a house was not an important item in the yearly expenses. They were built before the Revolution and for years formed an uninterrupted row of Lewis possessions.

One of these houses, at 11-13 Lewis Street, was built by Josiah Lewis for his son Eli Lewis, who served in the Revolutionary War and crossed the Delaware under the leadership of George Washington.

Edward Waldo Homestead (1715)

The Edward Waldo Homestead is a vernacular saltbox house on Waldo Road in Scotland. It was built in 1715 by Edward Waldo, on land along the Shetucket River he had purchased in 1702. The house, which later had two wings added, remained in the Waldo family until 1971. Daniel Waldo, who was born in the house in 1762, served as Chaplain of the House of Representatives from 1856 until his death in 1864. Also born in the house was Samuel Lovett Waldo (1783-1861), portraitist, art critic and a founder member of the National Academy of Design. When its last owner, Ruth Waldo, died in 1975, she bequeathed the house to the Antiquarian & Landmarks Society and the surrounding fields to the Connecticut Forest and Park Association. The house is now a museum operated by the Scotland Historical Society. Each year, the surrounding fields host the Scotland Connecticut Highland Games.

Eells-Stow House (1700)

Samuel Eells settled in Milford in the later seventeenth century and owned property on Wharf Lane. He later settled in Hingham, Massachusetts and his son, Col. Samuel Eells, inherited the land in Milford, which later passed to his widowed third wife and then to Nathaniel Eells, his son by his second wife. Nathaniel, who lived in Middletown, sold the Milford property to Stephen Stow, the brother of his late wife. Stow, the captain of a coastal schooner, married Freelove Baldwin around 1751. He died in 1777 during the Revolutionary War while nursing 200 American prisoners of war suffering from smallpox, who had been cast off from a British prison ship. Four of Stow‘s sons also served in the war. The Eells-Stow House on Wharf Lane was once believed to date to the later seventeenth century, but is now thought to have been built c.1700-1720. The house was saved from destruction by the Freelove Baldwin Stow Chapter of the D.A.R. in 1930 and has since been preserved as a museum by the Milford Historical Society. The house underwent an extensive restoration in 1981-1982, which included the replacement of the later sash windows with the earlier type of diamond-pane casement windows.