Built on Main Street in Hartford for Dr. Daniel Butler in 1782. Butler had a medical practice and managed mills that his wife, Sarah Sheldon Ledyard, had inherited from her first husband. Their son, John, and his wife, Eliza Lydia Royce Sheldon, added the Greek Revival Portico. In 1865, John and Eliza’s daughter, Eliza Sheldon Butler, hired landscape architect Jacob Weidenmann to design the garden behind the house. The next year, she married John James McCook, one of the famous Civil War Fighting McCooks. For 60 years, Rev. McCook was volunteer rector of Saint John’s Episcopal Church in East Hartford and he later taught at Trinity College. He also did important sociological work in his studies of homeless people.
Rather than abandon a changing Main Street, as so many of the other long-established families were doing in the later nineteenth century, the McCooks remained, instead accommodating their growing family by expanding their attic into a third floor of bedrooms. In 1897, their son John, a doctor, added an office to the house for his medical practice. His sister, Frances A. McCook, was the last of the family to live in the house. When she died in 1971, she left it to the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society, and the house is open to the public as the Butler-McCook House & Garden and Main Street History Center.
Informative articles on the house and its residents have appeared in Antiques and the Hog River Journal.
My grandfather decended from the oldest of the McCook brothers, George. He left Lisbon, Ohio in 1850. He was a doctor and went to Johns Hopkins frequently so he opted to live in Pittsburgh because it was closer. His son, George Latimer McCook was a doctor also but my grandfather was an attorney. He built a large stone house for his large family and it is being restored now and will become a high-end hotel.
Mary
Hi.
No I am not a cousin, However my Mother-in-Law is. Her name is Marianna McCook and her grandpa was the one who had the McCook Mansion on Fifth Street Built, So I guess that makes you and her cousins. Her Dad was John McCook. She had A brother name John and a sister named Helen. Anyway thought I would just say hey
My wife’s name is Marianna Patricia McCook Inks Nieman. and she is probably your 2nd Cousin.
We live in Odessa Texas and our Phone number is 432-368-7786 if you care to contact us .
Thanks a lot and God Bless.
Al Martinez
Exceptional design, at last discovered the source for unusual wallpapers