Temperance House (1761)

Israel H. Wilson moved from Danbury to Bethel in 1836 and operated an undertaking business until 1851. He then opened the town’s first hotel, which was located in the house at 4 Chestnut Street. The house was built about 1761 and and at one time was a tavern, operated by P. T. Barnum‘s grandfather, Phineas Taylor, and then by his parents, Philo and Irena Barnum. Wilson was a advocate of the temperance cause: he named the hotel Temperance House and he also erected a temperance hall (no longer standing) just south of the hotel. By the late 1870s the hotel was known as the Bethel House or Bethel Hotel. Wilson retired from the hotel business in 1885. For some years the house was home to the Mead family and it is now a duplex. The house was much altered in the Italianate style in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.