Asahel Nettleton House (1810)

In 1810, cigar-maker Nathaniel Rockwell, Jr. built a center-chimney house on Main Street in East Windsor Hill. Later facing debt, he sold the house in 1835 to Asahel Nettleton, who updated the house in the Greek Revival style. Nettleton, a minister and evangelist was a prominent figure of the Second Great Awakening. He participated in the New Lebanon Conference of 1827, where he and fellow Yale-graduate Lyman Beecher opposed the teachings of Charles Finney. In East Windsor Hill, he helped to found the Theological Institute of Connecticut and contributed proceeds from his volume of Village Hymns for Social Worship to help endow a professorship. Nettleton died in 1844, having willed his estate to the seminary, which later moved to Hartford. Nettleton’s colleague and East Windsor Hill neighbor, seminary professor and president Bennett Tyler, compiled a collection of Nettleton’s works and wrote a Memoir of the Life and Character of Rev. Asahel Nettleton, D.D.