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OVERVIEW

CONNECTICUT AND ITS PLACES

LOOKING AT ARCHITECTURE

Through Connecticut’s long history its people have shaped the place in which they lived in rich and varied ways. They have worked and transformed the land, erected high-style and utilitarian buildings, grouped them into towns and cities, and engineered bridges and dams and roads. These works reflect and reveal the evolving history of the people of Connecticut, and they make the state a place that is distinct from any other.

All this activity can be grouped under the term “architecture,” which might be defined as “the art and science of making places.” In this definition, “science” refers to the practical or technical aspects of architecture. First and foremost, architecture has to accommodate the activities of human life, such as dwelling or working, worshipping or playing. It may do this in artistic ways, but its primary task is functional. “Science” also means that architecture has to be structurally sound. Walls and bridges shouldn’t collapse, roofs shouldn’t leak (some architects famously ignore or fail at this), landscapes shouldn’t flood, roads shouldn’t sink under the weight of vehicles.

“Art” includes the aesthetic or expressive aspects of architecture. This refers to people’s efforts to make what they build beautiful, in addition to practical and sound (for instance, the Mark Twain House, place 17). For some, the search for beauty is the defining characteristic that separates architecture from what they consider mere building. But art involves more than aesthetic appeal. It may also include the expression of some emotion or meaning that goes beyond mere usefulness or prettiness. As art, architecture may comment on function, or on the nature or state of society in a broader sense. It may reflect social conditions, or express hopes for changing them. It may seek to articulate something about its users or builders or to evoke an emotional response in its viewers.

For example, the Church of the Good Shepherd in Hartford (1867–1869, Edward Tuckerman Potter) was commissioned by Elizabeth Colt as a memorial to her husband, pistol manufacturer Samuel Colt, and three of their children who all predeceased her. Elizabeth chose many of the church’s decorative motifs herself, notably images and scriptural passages related to the theme of God’s comfort amid sorrow. The church’s south entry presents a different message. Known as “the Armorers’ Door,” it faces the Colt company housing (figure 1). Around the door, carvings of pistols and pistol parts intertwine with more conventional flowers and crosses in an unparalleled marriage of Gothic and industrial imagery, while a carved motto proclaims, “Whatsoever thou doest, do all to the Glory of God.” Clearly addressed to Colt employees, it is an injunction to hard work and a warning that they are answerable not merely to the boss but to God.¹

FIGURE 1. Edward Tuckerman Potter, Church of the Good Shepherd, Hartford, 1867–1869. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

Almost never is a work of architecture either purely science or purely art. Instead, function and structure and beauty and expressiveness intertwine to form a whole. Function may determine a structural system, for instance, in factories such as Hockanum Mill (place 33), which had to be strong to support heavy machinery. Structure, in turn, may determine aesthetics, as at Lover’s Leap Bridge in New Milford (place 12), or the Temple Street Parking Garage in New Haven (1961; figure 2), where architect Paul Rudolph chose arched forms to express the plastic nature of concrete. Art may enhance function, as the decoration of the Church of the Good Shepherd does. Expressiveness may be a function, as at the Groton Battle Monument (place 60), built to commemorate traumatic losses in war.

This leads to the heart of the definition of architecture: “making places.” What is a “place”? And what does it mean to “make” a place? As used here, a “place” is not merely some location on earth, but rather one that has some significance. It means something. This meaning can reside in the mind of the creator or in the mind of the beholder. For instance, the straightforward design of barns and factories can be meaningful to their owners and users for their functionality and perhaps as expressions of the importance of the work that they house. They also can have an aesthetic appeal that was not consciously intended by their builders, but that present-day viewers readily acknowledge (figure 3).

As a rule, “making” places involves human alteration: shaping, smoothing, digging, assembling, or organizing materials to create something new. But one of the places discussed in this book—Mohegan Hill (place 1)—points to a different approach, arising from a very different, non-European culture. For Native Americans, making a place could entail discovering the meaning inherent in the hill’s natural features rather than altering them.

As a definition of architecture, “making places” is very broad. It includes not only buildings (structures big enough for humans to move in), but also the interior design of those buildings, which may be independent of their actual construction and is more easily altered to suit changing tastes or needs. It includes landscapes, both those consciously designed, like parks and gardens and campuses, as well as those that emerge out of the function they serve, such as the Catlin Farm in Litchfield (place 24) or larger regional landscapes as in South Windsor (place 2). Places also can be structures that do not provide shelter, such as bridges or dams or roads (for instance, the Lover’s Leap Bridge, place 12). Finally, places include towns or neighborhoods or streets, or any other grouping where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts (for example, downtown Norwich, place 41).

FIGURE 2. Paul Rudolph, Temple Street Garage, New Haven, 1961. Tom Zetterstrom

FIGURE 3. Charles Sheeler, On a Connecticut Theme #2 (Bucolic Landscape #2), 1958. New Britain Museum of American Art; copyright estate of Charles Sheeler

In today’s world we divide the work of creating places into a number of separate disciplines—architecture, landscape architecture, engineering, planning, and interior design—but all these really are aspects of this single activity of making places. In practice, it is not always easy to draw firm dividing lines among these disciplines. Architects design landscape settings for their buildings. Landscape architects design habitable buildings or structures like dams or bridges. Engineers create buildings such as sports arenas or aircraft hangars. Interior design affects exteriors. Architects and landscape architects alike plan neighborhoods or large developments, and planners draw up architectural guidelines for buildings in their projects, if not the actual buildings.

Calling all this “architecture” might feel like co-opting the work of interior designers, planners, landscape architects, and engineers in favor of architects. What is needed is a single, straightforward term that encompasses all those fields. “Placemaking” might work, although it seems to have become the property of tourism marketing boards. For the moment, with apologies to the American Society of Landscape Architects, the American Planning Association, the American Society of Interior Designers, and the American Society of Civil Engineers, I’m sticking with “architecture.”²

Why is architecture important? I’ll focus on two brief points that grow out of my definition of architecture as making places: humans are place-based beings, and humans are beings that create.³

Humans have bodies, and those bodies occupy space. The nature of that space makes a difference to us: it can be comfortable or uncomfortable, it can further our activities or frustrate them, and it can ennoble us or debase us. How we design and build places, then, can affect the quality of our lives in them—sometimes in ways that are crucial to our well-being. See the description of the Connecticut Hospice (place 67), which was carefully designed to shelter people at a particularly difficult and traumatic time not only for patients but for their friends and families. Similarly, the urban renewal programs of the mid-twentieth century were grounded in the confidence that architecture could solve social ills, a belief that was tragically overstated, to the ongoing distress of cities like Hartford or New Haven (places 46, 99). Even that failure, though, demonstrates the power that places have to affect our lives. How we shape them matters.

Humans also have an innate need to create, to make things. Our reaction to place is not passive; we need to manipulate and alter the environment and materials we find about us. If a place is uncomfortable or hinders a desired activity, people try to make it more comfortable or more conducive to the activity. Or they may just try to make it more attractive.

Creating refers to more than artistic achievements like painting or sculpture. It might mean doing carpentry or setting up a classification system for a library or writing an instruction manual. Whether it involves physical or mental activity, it is still the remaking of one’s world. All humans do it, even the toddler who delightedly smears food on a wall and calls it “painting.” How we shape the physical world around us, how we create places, says much about what we want our world to be, how we want to live in it, and, in some cases, how we want others to think we live in it. Making places lies at the very heart of what it means to be human.

THE LAND

Connecticut architecture begins with the land, the given which its settlers first encountered, beginning with Native Americans who arrived more than ten thousand years ago and, later, the Europeans who started coming at the beginning of the seventeenth century.⁴ The land provided materials with which to build. Its topography influenced where people settled and how they communicated between settlements. As far as they were able, the people who lived here shaped the land. Where they have ceased to maintain the land in its altered state, the land has reasserted itself, undoing much of their attempts to dominate nature.

Thrust up by geological upheavals, scraped down by rain and rivers and glaciers, flooded and uncovered by sea waters, the land of Connecticut as we know it emerged from the ice ages about ten thousand years ago as a gently hilly territory, abundantly watered by rivers and streams draining southward to Long Island Sound, with fertile soil that supported thick forests (figure 4).

FIGURE 4. Geological regions of Connecticut. Map from Michael Bell, The Face of Connecticut, 1985. Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection

Running through the middle of Connecticut is a broad valley that begins in Massachusetts and meets Long Island Sound at New Haven. As far south as Middletown, the Connecticut River runs through this central valley (figure 5), but then the river breaks through the valley wall and turns eastward to finish its run to the Sound through a narrower passage. North of Rocky Hill, the valley was the bed of a prehistoric glacial lake, whose silted deposits of alluvial soil provide fertile farmland. This level land—rich, easily worked, nearly free of stone, and easily built upon—attracted the first Europeans, who built prosperous agricultural communities like South Windsor (place 2). Flourishing farms, along with easy transport, both on the level ground and along the Connecticut River, fostered the rise of cities: Hartford and Middletown on the Connecticut River, plus New Haven at the mouth of the Quinnipiac River on Long Island Sound.

FIGURE 5. Connecticut River, Cromwell. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

FIGURE 6. Highlands hills and valleys, Cornwall. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

To the east and west of the central valley lie uplands with long, streamlined hills, mostly running north and south, and fertile, if stony, soil (figure 6). The hilly topography influenced development, with early settlers preferring the hilltops for their good drainage and what they considered more healthful air. Transportation and communications follow similar lines; even a modern highway map shows more, and better, roads running north–south than east–west.

As upland forests were cleared, stones deposited by the glaciers worked their way to the surface and had to be removed from fields. In many cases farmers simply tossed stones into piles lining the edges of their fields. A more labor-intensive approach was to build stone walls, which took up less space and could serve as dividers between fields (figure 7). These walls have become a widely recognized feature of the New England landscape, and the varying types of stone and methods of construction highlight regional differences.⁵

Farming was more difficult in the uplands than in the central valley, but it could support families, and even be profitable (Cyrus Wilson Farm, place 25). With the opening of the American West and improvements in transportation that made it possible to import agricultural products from other places, general farming declined, and the land so laboriously cleared of its forests grew up in trees again. In addition to agriculture, the uplands offered stone for building, ores for mining, and timber for building or charcoal making.

The uplands contain two smaller river systems. In the east are the Quinebaug and Shetucket Rivers, which join at Norwich to form the Thames (pronounced with a soft th and a long a). To the west is the Housatonic, which is joined by the Naugatuck at Derby. Although navigable historically, these streams were narrower and faster than the Connecticut River. Easily and profitably dammed for waterpower, the uplands water systems fostered the industrial development that transformed Connecticut in the nineteenth century. Under the influence of Rhode Island and Massachusetts, the Quinebaug-Shetucket corridor, in the east, concentrated on textiles. In the west, the Housatonic-Naugatuck region became known for metals manufacturing, particularly brass (see the metals factories described in places 35, 36). Dependent on waterpower, new industrial communities grew up in the valleys, creating a layered landscape of older, agricultural hill towns and newer, lowland, mill towns.

FIGURE 7. Stone walls, Connecticut Route 165, Griswold. M. Scott

FIGURE 8. Marsh, Milford. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

FIGURE 9. Mystic River, Groton. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

Along the state’s southern border is Long Island Sound, sheltered from the open ocean by its namesake island. The shoreline’s extensive marshes proved valuable for Connecticut’s people as well, providing habitat for shellfish and fowl for food, and grasses for a variety of uses (figure 8).

The indented coastline offers many small harbors and river mouths, like Mystic’s, which fostered maritime industries including fishing, trade, and shipbuilding (figure 9). Larger harbors at Bridgeport, New Haven, and New London became ports, but these were overshadowed by New York and Boston. It is often forgotten that even inland towns such as Middletown, Hartford, Derby, and Norwich all were busy ports before they became industrial cities, and that steamship travel on the Connecticut River continued through the first third of the twentieth century, bringing traffic and commerce to river towns like Essex (place 52). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, evidence of this water-based economy has largely disappeared, as shipping has shrunk to a fraction of its earlier importance, railroad lines and highways have cut towns off from their waterfronts, and maritime traffic has been mostly reduced to private pleasure craft and oil tankers.

In sum, Connecticut is topographically varied, while modest in scale (figure 10). There are no real mountains, hills and valleys are relatively gentle, and harbors small. There are few sweeping views, and scenery is bucolic rather than dramatic. Second-growth forests further restrict the scenery, leaving few wide, distant views or open areas. This gives the state a divided quality, broken (apart from the central valley) into small segments where the inhabitants of one town are isolated from their neighbors in the next. It also gives it an intimate quality, in which humans are rarely overwhelmed, but rather feel at home.

FIGURE 10. Mount Riga, Salisbury. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

HISTORY

How the people of Connecticut have built is inextricably intertwined with how they lived their lives—economically, socially, politically, culturally. What follows is a brief sketch of the state’s historical and architectural development. It is meant to provide a general background for the one hundred places that follow.⁶

Beginnings: Prehistory to 1730

There is no written record for most of human history in what we now call Connecticut.⁷ What we know about the period prior to the arrival of Europeans comes to us in fragmentary form through the oral traditions of Native Americans and the discoveries made by archaeologists. Humans arrived here more than ten thousand years ago, and for millennia they moved from place to place by season in search of food. With the introduction of agriculture, particularly the growing of maize, as early as 1000 CE, longer-term settlements began to appear, but Connecticut’s Native Americans remained seminomadic.

The oldest structures for which there is physical evidence were rock shelters or pit dwellings dug into hillsides, some dating from as much as ninety-five hundred to ten thousand years ago. For the most part, Connecticut’s native inhabitants built light, impermanent shelters of bent saplings covered with slabs of bark. Called weetoos or wigwams, these structures lasted only a few seasons before returning to the earth (figure 11). However, evidence of their design remains in the archaeological record, in Native American cultural traditions, and in drawings or descriptions made by European settlers.

FIGURE 11. Wigwam, in a display at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center

In addition to these structures, Native Americans shaped the land itself. They cleared fields for crops, burned out underbrush to ease hunting, and constructed weirs to aid fishing. The geographical historian William Cronon quotes seventeenth-century Europeans who marveled at the parklike landscape they found. They believed this to be natural, but it was in fact the product of Native American practices. One other way Native Americans shaped the land was by blazing footpaths, some of which were taken over for colonial roads and in turn became the transportation corridors that underlie modern development. Although drawn in 1930, the map shown in figure 12 is still considered accurate.⁸ Many of the routes it shows are used by modern roadways, such as the Quinnipiac-Sucklauk Path connecting the sites that would become New Haven and Hartford along present-day Interstate 91, or the Old Connecticut Path, now Interstate 84.

FIGURE 12. Map of Connecticut circa 1625: Indian Trails, Villages, Sachemdoms. Compiled by Matthias Spiess, drawn by Hayden L. Griswold, issued by Connecticut Society of the Colonial Dames of America, 1930. The Connecticut Historical Society

As European settlers gained dominance, Native American building practices faded into obscurity. Interest in these practices reemerged at the end of the twentieth century, when a resurgence of tribal pride and political action led to federal recognition of tribal nations, and subsequent economic prosperity has made possible a burst of new construction for casinos, museums, and tribal facilities (see place 94, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center).

The first European settlement in Connecticut was a Dutch trading post built in 1633 at the present-day site of Hartford. Within a few years, Puritan settlers from England and Massachusetts began establishing permanent settlements that pushed out the Dutch: Windsor, Wethersfield, and Hartford on the Connecticut River, and New Haven and Saybrook on the coast. These settlements soon coalesced into two colonies, Connecticut and New Haven, which were united by the Charter of 1662, obtained from King Charles II of England by John Winthrop Jr. From the fertile central valley and the navigable shoreline, settlers moved inland to less-choice upland areas; by the mid-eighteenth century the entire area that now is Connecticut was occupied.

The colonial settlers’ first task was ordering the land—imposing systems of ownership and governance on what they perceived as virgin wilderness. The basic unit of government was the town, a self-governing geographical division that in most cases was founded by a group of proprietors. These were essentially shareholders who jointly acquired rights to a tract in exchange for financing its settlement.⁹ The proprietors laid out roads and set aside parcels for public functions such as marketplaces, militia training grounds, and meetinghouses. They might also offer land as an inducement for people with desirable skills, such as a minister, a miller, or a blacksmith, to settle in the town. The remaining land they divided among themselves, to keep or sell to others. By the end of the eighteenth century, almost all commonly held lands had been distributed. Remnants of this system survive in two Connecticut communities, New Haven and Lebanon, where the town greens are still considered to belong to the heirs of the original proprietors. Adjoining property owners still make hay on the Lebanon green (figure 13), while ultimate decision-making power for New Haven’s green is vested in the Committee of the Proprietors of the Common and Undivided Lands, a body chartered by the Connecticut General Assembly in 1805 that legally represents those heirs (place 40).¹⁰

The earliest settlements were compact, with residents living close together and working dispersed fields, sometimes in common. Rather than a contiguous allotment, each proprietor might receive several disconnected parcels, providing some of each type of land in the town: a home lot in the central settlement, fields for crops, pastureland, a woodlot, even marshland for hay. Very quickly, the attraction of working one’s own land, and then of living on independent farmsteads, led inhabitants to consolidate their holdings and move out of central villages. Later towns were laid out in larger individual parcels from the start, creating scattered farmsteads, each supplying much of its inhabitants’ basic needs.

FIGURE 13. Town green, Lebanon. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

Each town also had a church. The Puritans who settled Connecticut sought to create a society based on their ideal of a radically purified Christianity, through which God’s will permeated every aspect of life. All inhabitants were required by law to attend Sabbath worship. As populations grew and settlements expanded, differences over the location of the meetinghouse often caused disputes. Outlying residents sought permission to form separate religious parishes, or societies, which in many cases became the nuclei of separate villages and eventually split off as separate towns. However it was founded, each congregation functioned as an independent, self-governing entity, subject to no higher authority but God. This governance, by independent individual congregations, led the Puritans’ religious descendants to be called “Congregationalists.”

The political and religious system of organization devised by the first English settlers created a framework that still determines much of the present-day shape of Connecticut. The first towns are still occupied, and their boundaries, although subdivided, still can be traced on maps, along with early roads and land divisions, as in South Windsor (place 2).

Another legacy of early land planning is the town green found at the heart of many Connecticut communities (figure 14). Greens actually began as public spaces set aside for a variety of purposes: planned market places, lots for meetinghouses or schools, broad main streets, even leftover space at intersections (see Colebrook and New Haven, places 39 and 40). Whatever their origins, they have merged into a single category that has come to be considered uniquely characteristic of New England towns—landscaped spaces whose civic character distinguishes them from parks.¹¹

In addition to these physical characteristics, another legacy of the colonial period is a persistent mind-set that continues to shape how Connecticut builds. Based on their origins as self-governing, primarily agricultural, and both secular and spiritual in nature, Connecticut towns in the colonial period were inward-focused and independent, and they remain so. No matter how small, nearly every town has its own town hall, its own library, and its own fire and rescue service. (More than a dozen regional school systems represent rare examples of inter-town cooperation, as economies of scale have overridden municipal independence.) Each town shapes its built environment through its own zoning and planning regulations and competes to attract (or avoid) commercial development. Reinforcing the small scale of the land, this multiplication of municipalities breaks Connecticut up into a patchwork of small units.

Like colonial settlement patterns, colonial building patterns started with English traditions, which gradually were adapted to local conditions. The only firmly documented structure to survive from the first generation of settlement is the Henry Whitfield House in Guilford, said to have been begun in 1639 (figure 15). Although extensively altered and heavily restored, it resembles, on a modest scale, an English manor house and suggests an intention to transplant English social patterns to the New World. Archival sources indicate that several other early leaders built similarly ambitious dwellings.

FIGURE 14. Town green, Southington. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

Although the Whitfield House was constructed of stone, wood dominated Connecticut building from the first. Most of the early English settlers came from East Anglia, a region that had a well-developed tradition of timber construction, and Connecticut’s forests offered them plenty of raw materials to work with. Timber-framed buildings are essentially cages of hewn wooden posts and beams fitted together with joints suited to the particular stresses of their location in the building (figure 16). Inside, framing members continued to serve decorative as well as structural purposes. They were smoothed and edged with chamfers or moldings, and occasionally further decorated with paint.¹²

Most surviving houses from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries follow a common plan, with two rooms flanking a central chimney, often but not always with a second layer of rooms behind them. From these, early twentieth-century historians such as J. Frederick Kelly deduced a linear evolution of house types (figure 17), starting with two-over-two room plans like the Buttolph-Williams House (place 79) and moving on to lean-to (“saltbox”) plans like the Deacon Adams House (place 80) and then full two-story plans, all with central chimneys. The sequence culminated in houses like that of Ebenezer Grant (place 87), with center halls and paired chimneys, which Kelly considered the most advanced. Recent researchers have concluded that there was a much greater variety of plan and construction than Kelly recognized, including one-room houses; long, linear houses; houses with end chimneys; impermanent structures constructed with no proper foundation, just posts set into holes in the ground; and smaller variants of the center-chimney plan such as the Benjamin Hall Jr. House (place 15). And while Kelly got the relative sequence right, many of the types that he placed within a particular period actually continued to be built alongside supposedly later types.¹³

FIGURE 15. Henry Whitfield House, Guilford, ca. 1639–1640. Courtesy of Henry Whitfield State Museum, Guilford, Connecticut

Part of the difficulty in understanding the architecture of Connecticut’s early colonial period is due to the difficulty of determining construction dates. Since the 1980s, new research, notably by former professor Abbott Lowell Cummings at Yale University, has begun to change our understandings of the state’s colonial building culture.¹⁴ Cummings concluded that Connecticut tended to be more stylistically conservative than Massachusetts and Rhode Island, which makes the earlier practice of dating based on stylistic comparisons across the region less reliable. Based on research by Cummings and others, the dates of structures such as the Buttolph-Williams and Hyland Houses (places 79, 82) have been revised, and further work will doubtless produce other revisions. The result, as Cummings warned, is that almost any seventeenth-century building date needs to be looked at skeptically.

FIGURE 16. Typical timber frame, from J. Frederick Kelly, Early Domestic Architecture of Connecticut, 1924. Courtesy of Yale University Press

FIGURE 17. Chronology of colonial plan types, from J. Frederick Kelly, Architectural Guide for Connecticut, 1935

Another recent development has been the recognition of architectural influences from the neighboring New York Colony with its more heterogeneous population and building practices. Differences in framing, the use of shingles rather than clapboards as a wall covering, and wide, flaring eaves all are features that have been attributed to Dutch or other continental European traditions that reached Connecticut through New York (figure 18).¹⁵

FIGURE 18. Chidsey-­Linsley House, East Haven, ca. 1790. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

When it came to public buildings, the colonial settlers relied less on English precedent. The Puritans insisted that the term “church” referred to a congregation of people, never a building, so they rejected traditional church architecture. Instead, they developed a new type of public building that could serve both religious and secular purposes: the meetinghouse.¹⁶ Influenced by Protestant architectural experimentation in Europe, meetinghouses were designed to allow a large body of people to gather and hear a speaker. Early examples were square or nearly square, with a raised pulpit on one wall, a floor tightly packed with seating, and, where needed, additional seating in galleries (figure 19). In new settlements or poorer communities, meetinghouses often were rudimentary structures, poorly built, poorly maintained, and quickly outgrown and replaced. However, in towns like Wethersfield, where circumstances allowed, they could be solidly built and finely ornamented (place 56).

In sum, our understanding of Connecticut architecture in the first century after English settlement is at once less complete and more complicated than previous generations thought. What remains constant is the overall point that its inhabitants transplanted European settlement and building patterns to the new land, then made necessary changes to adapt them to different conditions.

FIGURE 19. Second Meeting House, New Haven, 1668; demolished ca. 1757. Detail from James Wadsworth, A Plan of the Town of New Haven with All the Buildings in 1748, T. Kensett, engraver, Wm. Lyon for the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1806. Courtesy of the New Haven Museum

Agricultural Connecticut, 1730–1840

By about 1730, Connecticut was well established and beginning to prosper. Although the colony remained officially Congregational, its uniformly Puritan character changed, as religious fervor rose and sank, and the population became more religiously diverse (although still almost entirely Protestant), including Anglicans, Baptists, and Quakers. Society continued to be dominated by a small, interrelated elite, yet compared to other colonies there were narrower extremes of wealth and poverty.

The economy of the colony, and later the state, remained predominantly agricultural (figure 20). Nearly everyone farmed, including artisans and even professionals who pursued other occupations. Expanding opportunities for trade encouraged the growth of market agriculture, first in the fertile Connecticut Valley, and then in other areas. Specialized crops included tobacco and onions, as well as foodstuffs and livestock exported to the West Indies. However, by the first decades of the nineteenth century, many rural residents were moving to industrial cities or to cheaper, more fertile land on the frontier.

After the Revolution, release from British colonial restrictions opened new possibilities for trade. Increasing prosperity fueled urban growth, and Connecticut’s first cities, Hartford, Middletown, New Haven, New London, and Norwich, were incorporated in 1784. At the turn of the nineteenth century, private companies built turnpikes, vastly improving overland travel and commerce in communities like Thompson (place 50). The Farmington and Enfield Falls Canals extended navigation inland (place 51), and the new federal government took over improvements for coastal navigation such as lighthouses (place 49). These improvements further increased trade, and also opened up more of the state to religious, social, and architectural ideas from the outside world. Water remained the easiest way to travel, and this period saw the fullest development of Connecticut’s maritime economy.

In light of later history, the most significant development of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the emergence of industry. Gristmills and sawmills had been necessary economic components since the beginning of European settlement and continued to be vital to local economies (see Ledyard Up-Down Sawmill, place 30), but now larger-scale manufacturing appeared, employing capital generated by agriculture or trade and taking advantage of the power available from the state’s many watercourses. From the first, Connecticut’s chief products included armaments and textiles, exemplified respectively by Eli Whitney, who made rifles in Hamden beginning in 1798, and by early woolen and cotton mills in places such as Derby and Glastonbury (figure 21). Little remains of these earliest manufacturing complexes, but manufacturers like the Collins Company set patterns of industrial construction and development that others would follow (place 31). Connecticut’s growing size and prosperity during this era created a need for more specialized and more imposing architecture. In addition to transportation improvements, the increasingly complex society demanded new types of buildings such as town halls and alms houses (place 58). Private institutions such as colleges and hospitals sought appropriate facilities to accommodate their work. Expanding commerce and new manufacturing enterprises required commercial buildings and factories. Congregations, even in modest towns like Warren, built new meetinghouses that were more overtly religious in nature and began to call them “churches” (place 59).

FIGURE 20. North View of Pequot Hill, Groton, from John Warner Barber, Connecticut Historical Collections, 1836

FIGURE 21. Cotton Factory village, Glastenbury [sic], from John Warner Barber, Connecticut Historical Collections, 1836

FIGURE 22. Jacobson barn, Storrs, ca. 1870. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

Farmers improved barn design, adding windows and cupolas for ventilation, and setting barns into banks to provide lower-level space for livestock. They adopted a new type of barn, framed with a series of transverse bents, which could be expanded more easily than the older three-bay English barn type seen at the Catlin Farm (place 24). Nonetheless, both types continued to be built, along with hybrids that combined features of each (figure 22).

One important architectural trend from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth was the desire to create an overall environment that reflected the growing prosperity and refinement of Connecticut and its people. As with the laying out of towns in the early period, this process was first seen in planning and landscape design. Towns began to clean up their streets and their greens by removing tumbledown utilitarian buildings and unkempt burial grounds, and by grading, fencing, and planting trees. New Haven was a leader in this trend, but other towns quickly followed (place 40).

The illustrations in John Warner Barber’s Connecticut Historical Collections, published in 1836, capture this civic improvement in mid-progress (figures 23, 24). Some show old, unpainted meetinghouses or rough greens like Ashford’s, littered with stumps or rocks; others show newly planted trees and stylish buildings, as in Canterbury. Barber depicted Connecticut as a place of tidy farmsteads and bustling towns ornamented with shade trees surrounding peaceful greens, an image that still holds sway nearly two hundred years later.

One trend reinforcing civic improvement was a growing taste for refined buildings that incorporated classical motifs from ancient Greece and Rome. The ways builders translated ancient classicism into current architecture varied over time. In the mid-eighteenth century the intertwined network of elite families that dominated the Connecticut Valley, known as the “River Gods,” adopted their own variant of Baroque design, combining big scale and bold effect in works like the Ebenezer Grant House in South Windsor (place 87). In the years before and after the Revolution, Georgian design used classical imagery from pattern books more correctly, but it was still often applied to buildings of vernacular plan and construction, such as the Epaphroditus Champion house in East Haddam (place 68).

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Charles Bulfinch’s design for the Old State House in Hartford (place 88) introduced Neoclassicism, an international movement based on recent studies of ancient ruins (still transmitted through books), as well as a taste for clear geometry and slender forms. Known in the United States as the Federal style, this phase of Neoclassicism gave way in the 1830s to a preference for Greek rather than Roman precedents, as well as for the chunkier proportions and more austere geometry seen in the New London Custom House (place 89). But all these designs were united by a conviction that the architecture of the age must be based on classical antiquity.

FIGURE 23. Southwestern View of Ashford (Central Part), from John Warner Barber, Connecticut Historical Collections, 1836

FIGURE 24. South View of the Central Part of Canterbury, from John Warner Barber, Connecticut Historical Collections, 1836

Although primarily associated with Enlightenment rationalism, early nineteenth-century classicism also appealed to the growing Romanticism that sought to engage the emotions rather than the intellect (see the Samuel Russell House, place 16). In Connecticut, as in other places, Romanticism first appeared in naturalistic landscape designs, such as the garden that painter Ralph Earl depicted behind Elijah Boardman’s house in New Milford (figure 25). Shortly thereafter, Episcopal churches began to make tentative explorations of Gothic design, as a way of claiming their denomination’s medieval English heritage in order to distinguish themselves from Congregationalists. These earliest Gothic Revival buildings were Neoclassical designs dressed up with a few pointed arches, as seen on the Union Episcopal Church at Riverton, in the town of Barkhamsted (figure 26).

FIGURE 25. Ralph Earl, Houses Fronting New Milford Green, ca. 1796. The Dorothy Clark Archibald and Thomas L. Archibald Fund, the Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, the Krieble Family Fund for American Art, the Gift of James Junius Goodwin and the Douglas Tracy Smith and Dorothy Potter Smith Fund, 1994.16.1. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. Photograph by Allen Phillips

Both classical and Romantic strains of architecture required new kinds of builders. The period saw the rise of a generation of master builders who employed architectural pattern books in addition to orally transmitted building lore. Figures such as Thomas Hayden of Windsor, William Sprats of Litchfield, and Lavius Fillmore of Norwich produced buildings that met their clients’ demands for refinement and sophistication (figure 27; Epaphroditus Champion House, place 68).

Even greater change was afoot. Charles Bulfinch, who designed the Old State House in 1796, later claimed to be the first professional architect in the country. However, it was not until the 1830s that any architects set up practice in Connecticut. Ithiel Town started as a master builder, executing Asher Benjamin’s design for Center Church in New Haven in 1812 (place 40). He worked as an architect in New York before moving back to New Haven in 1836. By that time, both Henry Austin and Sidney Mason Stone were practicing there. Austin had opened an office in Hartford in 1839 but didn’t stay long; that city didn’t get another resident professional architect until Octavius Jordan in 1850.

FIGURE 26. Union Episcopal Church, Riverton, 1829. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

FIGURE 27. Lavius Fillmore, East Haddam Congregational Church, 1798. Patrick L. Pinnell

FIGURE 28. David Hoadley, Darius Beecher House, Bethany, 1807. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

In the meantime, other master builders who were trained through traditional apprenticeships and relied on pattern books for inspiration continued to work throughout the state, among them David Hoadley in New Haven County (figure 28), John Bishop in New London, James Jennings in Warren (place 59), and the Truesdale/Truesdell family in Tolland County. Others provided engineering expertise needed for factories and infrastructure projects such as the Farmington and Enfield Falls Canals (place 51). But the professional lines remained indistinct; in the course of his career a man might successively call himself a carpenter, a master builder, and an architect. The distinctions in terminology seem in some cases to have been as much a matter of self-promotion as of training or practice.

The century between about 1730 and 1840 saw Connecticut move beyond its initial, primarily agricultural, economy to become an economically diverse society. This development was reflected in movements to improve its towns and landscapes, to adopt internationally recognized classical standards of architecture, and then to temper that classicism with Romanticism. Economic and social diversification inspired the development of new building types and the emergence of educated, professional architects.

Industrial Connecticut, 1840–1930

By 1840, Connecticut was a vastly different place from what it had been one hundred years before, and it stood on the brink of even greater changes. Over the next century, the processes that had begun after the Revolution completely transformed the state, turning it into an urban, industrialized society whose members traced their lineage to every country of Europe as well as many other places throughout the world. Other states experienced similar changes, but in small, densely settled, overwhelmingly homogeneous Connecticut they were particularly dramatic.

The main factor was industry. Manufacturing came to dominate Connecticut’s economy, and mills and factories appeared in nearly every town. Textiles and armaments continued to be principal products, but the state also became known for processed materials such as sheet brass, wire, and thread, as well as a wide range of consumer products, including clocks and watches, tools and hardware, and household goods. Less visible in the marketplace but crucial to continued industrial prominence were the companies that produced industrial machinery; ongoing innovation kept Connecticut at the forefront of the nation’s economic development during this period.

Industrial expansion sparked explosive growth in existing cities like Bridgeport and gave birth to new ones such as Shelton (figure 29; place 34). By the 1860s, improvements in steam power freed manufacturers from the need to locate where there was waterpower. Increasingly, they clustered in cities with their better transportation connections and ready labor supply. There, the need for infrastructure and services to support the industrial population fueled additional growth: transportation networks to move raw materials and finished goods, housing for workers and their families, stores to sell them the goods they needed for daily life, and schools, churches, and other community institutions.

Even in the countryside, industrial development prompted changes. Most rural towns lost population as residents moved to cities to find work. Those who remained behind concentrated on providing city markets with foods that could not be transported long distances, or on cash crops such as tobacco (place 26). Nearly every rural community also had some small-scale manufacturing enterprise. Some of these served local needs; others eventually fostered the growth of a new industrial center or else moved to a larger existing community with better access to labor or transportation or suppliers.

The need for labor and the promise of economic opportunity drew immigrants from abroad. In 1840, Connecticut’s population still traced its roots primarily to the British Isles. In 1850, immigrants made up approximately 10 percent of the state’s population; by 1870, the number was 25 percent, and by 1900 Connecticut had one of the largest percentages of foreign-born residents in the country.¹⁷ The newcomers came in waves from different areas: Irish and Germans in the antebellum years, French Canadians beginning in the 1860s; Southern and Eastern Europeans from the 1880s. They brought new religions, new social patterns, and new faces to the state.

The growth in size and complexity of Connecticut society affected architectural development. First of all, there was simply more of everything, and everything was bigger: cities, factories, schools, commercial buildings—even houses for the prospering middle and upper classes and multifamily dwellings for urban workers. Prosperity and economies of scale thanks to mass production encouraged growth and elaboration. No building embodied the new scale and lavishness of Connecticut architecture better than the State Capitol, completed in 1879 (place 91).

FIGURE 29. View of Bridgeport, Ct. O. H. Bailey & Co., 1875 (detail). Library of Congress

Industrial architecture was dominated by multipurpose loft buildings suitable for many types of manufacturing, such as the Hockanum Mill (place 33). But as processes and products diversified, many manufacturers, particularly those such as the Clark Brothers Bolt Company who worked in metals, needed more-specialized structures (place 35). Whatever the type, structures had to withstand the weight and stresses of ever-bigger and ever-faster machinery. By the early twentieth century, the introduction of electric lighting and power meant that it no longer was necessary to have workers close to windows for illumination, or to keep machinery in the straight lines dictated by shaft-and-belt power transmission systems. With electricity, buildings could spread out, like the Willimantic Linen Company’s Mill Number 4 (1884; demolished; figure 30), claimed as the first industrial building in the country specifically designed for electric lighting. Insurance companies, many of them headquartered in Hartford, influenced industrial buildings as well. They pushed for fire-safety efforts such as eliminating attics, where flammable materials often accumulated, and building separate towers to isolate stairs. Beyond functional changes, owners often asked for ornamentation to proclaim their prosperity and stability to potential customers. At the Meriden Curtain Fixture Company’s plant, in Meriden, two powerhouses—one with an eye-catching arched roof—supplemented loft buildings, and bands of decorative brick ornamented the entire complex (figure 31). This ornament could benefit the bottom line as companies used images of attractive facilities like this in marketing materials.

FIGURE 30. Willimantic Linen Company, Mill Number 4, Willimantic, 1884, destroyed 1995. Insurance map, 1909. The Windham Textile and History Museum

Industrial architecture was not limited to factory or mill buildings. Factory complexes also needed auxiliary structures to house specialized processes, as well as warehouses, power plants, rail sidings, bridges, and dams and canals for waterpower systems (place 34). Companies continued to develop or expand factory towns and neighborhoods offering housing, stores, and community buildings for their workers. In the early twentieth century the Progressive and Garden City movements inspired efforts to improve working-class housing (see Seaside Village, place 44). A privately built example is Connecticut Gables (1917, W. H. Cox; figure 32), a multifamily structure erected by the Connecticut Mills Company in the Danielson section of Killingly. Its fourteen apartments each comprised three to five rooms, plus modern kitchens and bathrooms. The building, which resembled an English country inn, bore a plaque proclaiming it “A Forward Step in Good Housing for Working People.”

Companies were less likely to get involved in neighborhood building in the cities, where private investors were active. However, industrial expansion still drove rapid growth in Connecticut cities from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. During this period the two- or three-family house emerged as the most common urban residential type. These narrow buildings with units stacked one on top of the other gave each unit windows on all four sides, providing more light and air than the older row houses or side-by-side double houses (figure 33). Multifamily buildings like the Perfect Sixes of Hartford (place 19), or bigger apartment blocks could accommodate larger numbers of people. Fire laws required brick construction in inner neighborhoods, changing the texture and visual weight of buildings.

FIGURE 31. Meriden Curtain Fixture Company, Meriden, 1891 and later. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

FIGURE 32. W. H. Cox, Connecticut Gables, Danielson, 1917. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

Immigrants faced challenges fitting into the built environment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the cities they generally lived and worked in buildings constructed and owned by the Yankee upper classes. In the countryside, they moved into farms abandoned by their Yankee owners. The newcomers’ most visible effect on the built environment was in houses of worship: synagogues and Catholic and Orthodox churches brought new forms to Connecticut communities. Catholic churches, convents, and schools formed complexes that served as a religious centers for the Irish, Germans, Italians, Eastern Europeans, and French Canadians who worked the state’s mills or farms (see Catholic churches in Baltic and Ashford, places 61, 75). Jewish immigrants built synagogues with onion domes and other Moorish Revival design motifs that expressed the Middle Eastern roots of their faith and distinguished the buildings from their Christian counterparts (place 97). Eventually members of some immigrant groups went into the building trades and contributed to the construction of many character-defining structures in the state (Villa Friuli, place 93).

FIGURE 33. 50 Francis Street, Ansonia, ca. 1900. Robert Egleston

Downtowns became ever more densely developed, as commercial buildings pressed to the sides and rears of their lots and grew taller. In Bridgeport, the Bishop brothers adopted an uncommon building type, the arcade, to use one property more fully (place 43). Even in small towns a few multistory “blocks” (as commercial buildings were called) proclaimed modernity and prosperity (figure 34). Very tall buildings remained rare, but each of the state’s large cities has at least one structure that might qualify as a skyscraper, relatively speaking. A city’s tallest building might become a local landmark, like the Travelers Insurance Company’s tower in Hartford (1906–1918, Donn Barber; figure 35).

FIGURE 34. Main Street, New Hartford. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

FIGURE 35. Travelers Insurance Company, Hartford, 1906–1918. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

In transportation, railroads broadened their coverage to create a statewide network of rails and stations, as well as engineering wonders like the Rapallo Viaduct in East Hampton (figure 36). Built in 1873 for the Air Line Railroad, it spans an eight-hundred-foot valley on slender wrought-iron trestles sixty feet high (eventually filled in with sand and compacted cinders to support heavier loads). Many a town’s fate—whether it prospered or withered away—depended on whether or not it gained a railroad connection.

FIGURE 36. Rapallo Viaduct, East Hampton, 1873, altered 1912–1913. Archives and Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries. Accession number UC17–0264, IMG0028–1015

The Connecticut Highway Department, established in 1895, improved roads and bridges, an effort that gained momentum after 1900 as automobiles proliferated. By the 1930s, the statewide network of roads and highways had become a prominent feature of the landscape (figure 37). Meanwhile, the growing cities’ need for water and electricity prompted the construction of reservoirs that flooded vast portions of rural towns such as Barkhamsted (place 6).

While progress was often celebrated, the sweeping changes wrought by industrialization and urbanization also prompted reaction. The beauty of the natural world provided the central theme, expressed in picturesque, Romantic, or eclectic buildings designed to harmonize with their landscape settings and to hark back to seemingly simpler eras. In planning it expressed itself in the building of naturalistic parks and the proliferation of suburbs (figure 38). Almost every Connecticut city established one or more parks during this period, a number of them designed by Hartford native Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903). Vacationers escaping the heat and dirt of the cities also flocked to Connecticut’s countryside and coasts, creating resorts at every level from farmstead boardinghouses (Orchard Mansion, place 28) to grand country estates (Eolia, place 3).

To guide growth, cities turned to more intensive planning from the 1890s on. Allied with the reformist goals of Progressivism, the City Beautiful movement advocated carefully considered transportation networks, systems of parks to provide recreation and literal breathing space, and construction of public buildings as civic amenities—many the gifts of wealthy industrialists like Timothy Beach Blackstone of Branford (place 92). Both Hartford and New Haven commissioned wide-ranging city plans by nationally known firms in the 1910s. Only fragments of these City Beautiful ideas were executed—a new bridge and approaches in Hartford, a new railroad station and a couple of parks in New Haven—but they remained on the books as ideals. On a smaller scale, in 1921 the city of Bristol opened Memorial Boulevard, a landscaped gateway to the city and a monument to its World War I dead (figure 39).

FIGURE 37. Railroad station (1886) and concrete highway bridge (1930), Cornwall. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

Aesthetically, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century designers focused on the concept of “style” and cycled through an ever-changing assortment of architectural fashions. Almost all of them sought to harmonize with nature through rambling footprints, picturesque outlines, and muted color schemes, as seen in the Harral-Wheeler House in Bridgeport, designed by Alexander Jackson Davis (1846; figure 40). By the 1870s the mixing of styles and materials and encrustations of ornament were becoming more and more complex, usually combining elements from a number of periods and places in a single composition. In newly developed upper-middle-class neighborhoods, like Prospect Hill in Willimantic, the array of ornament and color can be dizzying (figure 41).

FIGURE 38. Olmsted, Vaux, and Co., Walnut Hill Park, New Britain, 1870 and later. TO Design, LLC

FIGURE 39. Memorial Boulevard, Bristol, 1921. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

FIGURE 40. A. J. Davis, Harral-­Wheeler House, Bridgeport, 1846–1850, demolished 1958. Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image #MAH-­61190

Beginning in the 1890s a reaction set in, in the form of a trend toward more disciplined design. It still remained possible to choose from among a variety of sources, including Old English, the French Beaux-Arts, Italian, and others. But instead of mixing historical sources in a single building, architects replicated designs of the past more precisely, as seen in suburban streets such as those of New Haven’s Beaver Hills neighborhood (place 21).

In the hands of a skilled designer, the combination of modern planning and historic imagery could produce a masterpiece. Nowhere in Connecticut is this better seen than in Yale University’s great rebuilding of the 1920s and ’30s. In order to convert to a system of residential colleges, Yale demolished entire blocks for new construction (figure 42). Most of this was the work of architect James Gamble Rogers, who gave his designs careful craftsmanship and details, as well as an illusion of development over centuries that evoked Britain’s Oxford and Cambridge universities. Rogers skillfully and subtly wove the new Yale into the city, following existing street patterns and aligning gates or towers to focus views from all parts of New Haven. By the mid-1930s Yale had established an architectural image of a quality and consistency that few American universities could match, though many tried.¹⁸

FIGURE 41. Prospect Hill, Willimantic. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

One historic style came to define Connecticut, both in its own eyes and in those of outsiders: the Colonial Revival, which drew on the state’s own heritage and consciousness of its history. As early as the 1850s, members of Hartford’s Fourth Congregational Church found inspiration in colonial buildings (place 81), but widespread enthusiasm for the movement began in the 1870s, when celebrations of the centennial of the American Revolution focused attention on the nation’s history and architecture. Elements of “Colonial” design (the term could cover anything built from the seventeenth century up to, and sometimes including, Greek Revival) first appeared as part of the late nineteenth-century eclectic mix, but by the twentieth century, designs more faithfully resembled colonial buildings, reinterpreted to suit modern lifestyles (figure 43).

Paralleling the use of period styles was a strain of nonhistorical design, beginning with the Arts and Crafts movement. In reaction to industrialization, Arts and Crafts promoters stressed hand-craftsmanship as an antidote to impersonal mass production. While its principles could be applied to historic styles, the American branch of the movement is chiefly associated with rustic buildings characterized by chunky forms and materials left in their natural state (see the Nathaniel R. Bronson House, place 20).

FIGURE 42. James Gamble Rogers, Harkness Tower, Yale University, New Haven, 1917–1921. Robert W. Grzywacz

In the 1920s and ’30s, nonhistorical design took another form in the stylized motifs of the closely related Art Deco and Art Moderne, as seen in the Warner Theatre (place 45), or in streamlined interpretations of historical styles, as seen in New London’s Post Office (figure 44) with its abstracted pilasters and low-relief carvings. More radical was European Modernism, which eschewed ornament altogether and promoted rationalism in planning. Introduced to Connecticut in the 1930s through such buildings as Ansonia High School (place 66), Modernism did not become a major design force in the state until after World War II.

Underlying stylistic changes, advances in materials and technology moved along in a parallel path. Here industry played a direct role, with Connecticut’s factories developing and making materials and products that changed American architecture (figure 45). Russell & Erwin in New Britain and Sargent in New Haven manufactured hardware, and Bigelow Boiler, also in New Haven, made giant boilers for central heating. Wire screening came from Gilbert & Bennett in the Georgetown section of Redding, Lincrusta embossed wall coverings from Stamford, and brick from Windsor and North Haven. Lumber mills in nearly every city supplied the mass-produced trim that both reflected the taste for ornamentation and by reducing costs made it possible to indulge that taste. One Connecticut product found all across the country was iron-truss bridges from the Berlin Iron Bridge Company (place 12).

FIGURE 43. 44 Center Street, Windsor Locks, 1929. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

FIGURE 44. Payne & Keefe, United States Post Office, New London, 1933. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

FIGURE 45. Russell & Erwin Manufacturing Company, New Britain, door hinge, patented 1880. Collection of the New Britain Industrial Museum

Architecture became professionalized during this period. In 1840 Connecticut had only a handful of professional architects. Self-proclaimed and self-qualified, they learned construction through apprenticeship with a master builder and design from pattern books, producing works like the Indian-inspired Willis Bristol House (place 70).¹⁹ By 1900, architects in every city in the state were producing designs for institutional and commercial buildings and fashionable houses. Less well known was that they also designed factories and even the double-decker houses and tenements of working-class neighborhoods. Many were professionally trained—Yale established its architecture department in 1916—although many others still learned through apprenticeship.

FIGURE 46. Fletcher-­Thompson Inc., Bridgeport. Drafting room, ca. 1955. Fletcher-­Thompson Inc.

By 1930, the increasing size and complexity of construction meant that some architectural firms, such as the offices of Douglas Orr in New Haven or Fletcher-Thompson in Bridgeport, now had dozens of employees (figure 46). Firms from nearby New York and Boston also worked in Connecticut, exposing local clients and builders to big-city influences.

The second half of the nineteenth century also saw the emergence of other building-related professions. Connecticut native Frederick Law Olmsted is well known as the father of landscape architecture in the United States. His firm, although based in Massachusetts, worked extensively in the state, designing parks in Bridgeport, Hartford, Waterbury, and New Britain, as well as campuses and estates. Landscape architecture provided opportunities to women, and Connecticut has works by national leaders such as Beatrix Farrand (notably at Eolia, place 3), as well as by local designers, including Marian Coffin of New Haven. Not surprisingly, industrial design and construction became a needed specialty for some architectural and engineering firms in the Northeast. The most prominent, such as Boston’s Lockwood Greene, were located outside Connecticut, but in-state firms such as Fletcher-Thompson of Bridgeport also developed industrial expertise.

Connecticut’s third century—its industrial era—created the urbanized, industrialized, diverse state that we know today. Despite the state’s colonial image and the overwhelming development of the post–World War II period, a large proportion of Connecticut’s architecture dates from this era. It reflects a people and a time that were dynamic, prosperous, and confident.

Modern Connecticut, 1930 to present

An industrial giant in the early twentieth century, Connecticut saw its economic base weakened in the Great Depression of the 1930s, as companies closed or moved elsewhere in search of cheaper labor. In fact, the roots of the decline go back even farther, to a slowing of innovation and investment in new machinery and facilities that began in the 1920s or even earlier.²⁰ World War II briefly revived the state’s industries, but since the war Connecticut’s economic history has largely been one of industrial loss. Nonetheless, manufacturing continues to contribute to the economy, with companies producing jet engines and parts, electronics, helicopters, and submarines.

As industry shrank, other economic sectors gained importance. Connecticut became home to large corporate headquarters, particularly in Fairfield County, where major companies such as General Electric, American Can, Pitney Bowes, and Union Carbide (place 38) settled after moving out of New York City. (Nearness to top executives’ suburban residences often was an unstated factor driving the relocations.) Hartford continued to be a center of the nation’s insurance industry, with some companies remaining in the city while others, like their New York counterparts, moved to the suburbs. An influential pioneer was the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company, which built a new headquarters in Bloomfield in 1957 (figure 47). Designed by the corporate architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with art and landscaping by sculptor Isamu Noguchi and interiors by the design firm Knoll Associates, Connecticut General’s new headquarters received nationwide attention as a model of Modernist design and planning. However, by the end of the century, mergers and offshoring were weakening the corporate presence, and companies that remained found it more advantageous to occupy rented quarters rather than invest in imposing headquarters that future reorganization might render redundant.

FIGURE 47. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Connecticut General Life Insurance Company headquarters, Bloomfield, 1957. National Register of Historic Places

Education, always important in Connecticut, came to the forefront as other sectors declined. This is most dramatically seen in New Haven, once known primarily as a manufacturing city. As factories closed, Yale University became the city’s biggest and richest employer and played an increasingly influential role in the city’s overall development. Trinity College has played a similar role in its neighborhood of Hartford, where it has promoted redevelopment projects to benefit the city while enhancing its own surroundings. In addition, the state college and university system grew rapidly. The flagship University of Connecticut exploded from thirty-five hundred students in 1945 to more than twenty-five thousand today, and regional normal schools established to train teachers have been upgraded to universities (figure 48). Private education also continues to draw national and even international student bodies, and prestigious secondary schools like Avon Old Farms are prominent presences in a number of communities (place 73).

FIGURE 48. Amenta / Emma Architects, Advanced Manufacturing Technology Center, Naugatuck Valley Community College, Waterbury, 2007–2009. Robert Egleston

Despite the economic changes, Connecticut continued to attract new residents. African Americans from the South and Puerto Ricans came to the cities in the 1940s and ’50s, ironically as the industries that attracted them were beginning to fail (see New Haven’s Dixwell neighborhood, place 99). After changes to immigration law in the 1960s, Asian immigrants increasingly came to the state. These newcomers shaped the places where they lived, worked, and worshipped in a variety of ways, both subtle and overt. In Montville, for example, recent Chinese immigrants are making their mark on the suburban landscape (place 48).

As the period from 1840 to 1930 was dominated by the growth of industry and cities, the time since then could be characterized as the age of suburbanization and regulation. No doubt the most significant development of the past seventy years has been the growth of the suburbs. While suburbanization in Connecticut had roots as far back as the early nineteenth century, and by the 1920s was becoming a significant factor in the state’s development, after World War II it intensified dramatically. Part of a sweeping change in settlement patterns that affect the whole country, suburbanization in Connecticut reversed the centralizing forces of the industrial era, spreading the state’s urban population back across the countryside. New planning types, such as residential subdivisions (Broadview Lane, place 77), shopping centers, and industrial parks (Medway Business Park, place 37), along with new versions of older building types such as schools, factories, and corporate offices (Union Carbide, place 38), took their places in a landscape of widely scattered construction linked by new roads.

FIGURE 49. 2 Arnold Street, Havemeyer Park, Greenwich, 1950. Greenwich Historical Society

While suburbanization has well-known social and environmental problems, it represented a broadening of the housing market. Subdivisions like Havemeyer Park in Greenwich (1946; figure 49), intended largely for returning veterans of World War II, or individual houses like that of Axel Nelson (place 22), offered convenient, spacious, and affordable housing to a larger share of the population than ever before.²¹

Connecticut is best known nationally for the Fairfield County communities linked to New York City. Featured in books such as Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (published in 1946 and made into a movie in 1948) and in television shows of the 1950s such as I Love Lucy, Connecticut gained a national reputation as a retreat for New Yorkers weary of city stresses and crowding.²² Commuters had been traveling to New York from Fairfield County towns as early as the mid-nineteenth century, first by steamship and, after 1848, by railroad. By the 1860s developers were laying out middle-class neighborhoods close to railroad stations, such as Prospect Avenue in Darien, built by Melville Mead in 1865. In the meantime, the very rich were building opulent estates in the countryside (figure 50).

FIGURE 50. John H. Duncan, “Walhall,” residence of Jacob Langeloth, Greenwich, 1912–1914. Greenwich Historical Society

Automobiles greatly increased the rate of growth in Fairfield County. In addition to providing a bypass to the chaotic Boston Post Road, the Merritt Parkway (place 54) was promoted for its potential to open new territory in the county’s backcountry to development. Always keeping one eye on New York, Fairfield County’s suburban towns can seem a world apart from the rest of the state. Nonetheless, the dominance of the Colonial Revival continued to provide cultural linkage to New England.

Outside New York’s sphere of influence, suburbs also grew up around Connecticut’s own cities. Some, like Norwich or Torrington, had space for suburban development within their own boundaries. In other cases, towns like West Hartford or Hamden connect almost seamlessly with a neighboring city. Perhaps most characteristic of Connecticut suburbanization are the places that, while primarily bedroom communities, manage to maintain the appearance and atmosphere of independent municipalities. Among these are places like Glastonbury, Guilford, and Ridgefield, which have functioning small-town downtowns even though much of their citizenry works elsewhere (figure 51). Despite the overlaying of suburban development on colonial agricultural towns, these communities jealously guard their independence.

FIGURE 51. Main Street, Ridgefield. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

Since the 1930s, government at every level—federal, state, and local—played an increasingly visible role in shaping the physical environment. The federal government led the way. During the Depression, it funded public works projects that provided infrastructure improvements, public buildings, and park buildings like the People’s State Forest Museum (place 76). After World War II, federal financing for homebuyers favored suburban development (see Broadview Lane, place 77), while urban renewal programs demolished and rebuilt the state’s cities. New Haven was a national leader in urban renewal, receiving more federal money per capita than any other city in the country, but nearly every Connecticut city embarked on major redevelopment efforts (see, for instance, Constitution Plaza and the Phoenix Building, Hartford, place 46, and Dixwell Plaza, New Haven, place 99). Federal highway programs had an even greater impact, affecting both cities and countryside (figure 52). Conceived to ease travel to cities, new highways also encouraged movement from them, further dispersing the state’s population.

State and local governments followed the federal lead (in many cases they administered federal programs). The result was that, in the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning years of the twenty-first, planning emerged as a dominant force. Town planning and economic development efforts often determine what is built where, and increasingly detailed building codes determine how it is built. The near-universal adoption of zoning has driven the separation of activities by use and contributed to suburban sprawl. In many communities, zoning regulations intended to preserve rural character have in fact created a very different landscape, one in which widely spaced single-family houses sit on uniformly sized lots served by shopping centers along busy connector roads. Changes in zoning also made possible new types of development such as large condominium complexes, like Heritage Village in Southbury (place 23).

FIGURE 52. Planned route of Interstate 84, Hartford, 1960. Hartford History Center, Hartford Public Library

Toward the end of the twentieth century, a regional planning movement began to attempt to overcome the fragmented growth patterns created by Connecticut’s patchwork of towns, but with only limited success. At the same time, new regulations protecting clean air, water, and natural features complicated large-scale infrastructure works like dams and roadways, while fostering greater attention to the natural and physical environment and the social consequences of new construction.

The overarching architectural movement since the mid-twentieth century has been Modernism. For its proponents, Modernism was not a style but rather an entirely new way of building. To Modernists, “style” meant decoration unrelated to the structure or function of a building, merely pasted on after the real work of determining layout and construction was completed, which made it inauthentic. They wanted to get away from that approach and build “truthfully” with the latest materials and planning methods, experimenting with new plans for buildings like Ansonia High School (place 66) or with new technologies like prefabrication, seen in two early examples in New London (place 13).

Connecticut was well situated to take part in the spread of Modernism after World War II. The western part of the state had easy access to the international cultural center of New York. Its wealthy, educated populace eagerly called on leading New York architects, as the state’s elite had regularly done for more than a century, only now the architects were Modernists such as Wallace K. Harrison, who designed the First Presbyterian Church in Stamford (place 14). Yale’s architecture program was training many of them, and bringing nationally and internationally known practitioners to teach or lecture—and get commissions. To a lesser degree, Boston and Providence played a similar role for eastern Connecticut. In New Haven, both the urban renewal program and Yale’s postwar expansion projects deliberately included up-to-date Modernist architecture by prominent leaders of the architectural profession, a model followed by other cities and institutions. These policies brought cutting-edge design to users who otherwise might not have chosen it, such as the Dixwell Avenue Congregational United Church of Christ, an African American congregation that had been considering a Colonial Revival edifice before the Redevelopment Agency assigned the Modernist architect John Johansen to it (place 99).

While New Haven was uniquely located at the intersection of academia and aggressive urban renewal, Connecticut had other, if smaller, centers of Modernism. Enclaves for like-minded pioneers popped up, often around other colleges or universities or in suburbs like Guilford or Farmington. Village Creek, in Norwalk, was founded in 1949 as a multiracial community based on equality and nondiscrimination; Modernist architecture reflected its progressive social goals (figure 53). An important circle of patronage operated in Litchfield, in contrast to that community’s well-known self-image as the ideal colonial town (place 78).

One of the nation’s most publicized Modernist hotbeds was New Canaan, where five architects formerly associated with Harvard University settled in the late 1940s (place 5). Known as the “Harvard Five,” Marcel Breuer, John Johansen, Philip Johnson, Eliot Noyes, and Victor Christ-Janer led a flowering of Modernist architecture in the town. Seeking prestige and a progressive image, corporations and schools also enthusiastically adopted Modernism. Almost any American architectural journal printed between about 1945 and 1970 will include at least one Connecticut building, whether a school, office building, or residence.

FIGURE 53. 12 Split Rock Road, Village Creek, Norwalk, 1964. Tod Bryant

Amid Connecticut’s well-publicized Modernist activity, it is easy to forget that a significant segment of the population resisted Modernism. Suburban residential building in particular continued to be dominated by the Colonial Revival (see the Axel Nelson House, place 22). A large portion of this was the work of speculative builders and non-architect designers, although some architects continued to produce traditional designs. They were resolutely ignored by the mainstream architectural press, so it can be difficult to find information about them and their work (figure 54).

In the 1960s and ’70s the dividing lines softened somewhat as architects dissatisfied with the rigidity of Modernism explored ways of reincorporating traditional design into their work. Among the leaders of this Postmodernism were Charles Moore, dean of the Yale School of Architecture from 1965 to 1970, and Robert Venturi, a Philadelphia architect who occasionally taught at Yale. Venturi’s firm, Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown, designed the widely publicized Izenour House in Stony Creek in the town of Branford (figure 55). As built, the house featured a porch with supports in the form of cutout silhouettes of Doric columns with exaggerated chunky proportions, plus a window like a huge ship’s wheel—cartoonish features typical of many Postmodernist works. This game-playing opened the way for the revival of more conventionally traditional designs, although an ongoing legacy of Postmodernism was an attitude that historical styles no longer were subject to the compositional rules that previously had governed them (see Salisbury Town Hall, place 86).

FIGURE 54. Russell & Gibson Architects, Bakerville Methodist Church, New Hartford, 1958–1960. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

Whatever clients’ attitudes toward Modernism and tradition, new technologies and materials strongly influenced planning and construction. Although most new houses were built of traditional brick and clapboards and featured pedimented front doors and small-paned windows flanked by shutters, their split-level forms, open plans, and picture windows all reflected trends introduced by Modernists. And even the most conservative buyers insisted on up-to-date mechanical systems.

FIGURE 55. Steven Izenour of Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown, George Izenour House, Stony Creek, 1980. Tom Bernard, Courtesy of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates Inc.

Resistance to Modernism also fed the rise of historic preservation. Like the Colonial Revival, preservation had roots in the late nineteenth-century rediscovery of American history and architecture. Early preservationists had concentrated on restoring colonial buildings as private homes or museums like the Hyland House in Guilford (place 82). But reaction to the widespread demolition of urban renewal and the unfamiliar forms of Modernism brought preservation to public consciousness, and a broader movement emerged.

In spite of its active Modernists, Connecticut with its long history actively took to preservation. As early as 1955 the state established the Connecticut Historical Commission to promote its historic heritage. Two developments in 1959 indicated the growing influence and changing face of the preservation movement. First, the town of Litchfield established a local historic district, which required that a town historical commission approve any alterations to the exterior of buildings or any new construction within the district (place 84). Passed under special enabling legislation from the General Assembly, Litchfield’s was the first of what now are more than one hundred such districts across the state. The second development was the adoption of an urban renewal plan for New Haven’s Wooster Square neighborhood (figure 56). This was one of the first projects in the nation to take advantage of a change in urban renewal regulations allowing federal funding to be used for renovation in addition to demolition and new construction. The Wooster Square plan also demonstrated the broadening of the preservation movement in its acceptance of Victorian-era buildings.²³

FIGURE 56. 87–93 Lyon Street, New Haven. Renovation images from the New Haven Redevelopment Agency, from Mary Hommann, ed., Wooster Square Design, 1965. Courtesy of the New Haven Redevelopment Agency

These two developments epitomized the new face of preservation. It is publicly administered and uses public funds to supplement and encourage private investment. Its targets are entire communities and neighborhoods, places of many types and from many eras. No longer focused primarily on commemorating the past, preservation is seen as a tool for planning and revitalization, and reusing significant buildings such as the abandoned Cheney Yarn Dye House (place 100). To accomplish this, it employs feasibility studies and marketing analyses alongside architectural and historical research. One such study, completed by the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, led to the conversion of the Peter Robinson Fur-Cutting Factory in Danbury to apartments in 1983 (figure 57). Over the years, specific programs have come and gone, funding has risen and fallen, but preservation itself has increasingly influenced the shape of Connecticut.

FIGURE 57. Peter Robinson Fur-­Cutting Factory, Danbury, 1884, 1895; converted to apartments, 1983. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

The most recent architectural trend to affect Connecticut is sustainability, which emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century. The need to conserve fuels first became a significant issue during the oil shortages of the early 1970s. In Connecticut, which relied heavily on oil for heating, builders and homeowners eagerly sought to reduce energy consumption. But as shortages eased, the search for efficiency lost its urgency. It reappeared in the 1990s along with growing awareness of the toxic effects of some building materials and concerns about climate change caused by the use of fossil fuels.

FIGURE 58. Thomas Lamb, Capitol Building, Hartford, 1926; converted to the Hollander Foundation Center, 2008–2010, Crosskey Architects. Crosskey Architects, LLC

To many, “sustainability” still primarily means efficiency in the use of energy for lighting, heating, and cooling—the main concerns of the 1970s. New buildings have more insulation, and increasingly are designed to use solar, wind, or geothermal power for at least part of their operation. In its current sense, though, sustainability addresses other considerations as well, as the Yale School of Forestry has demonstrated in building Kroon Hall (place 8). Materials are evaluated for the environmental effects of extracting, processing, and transporting them. Planners and developers favor higher densities, to avoid the high costs and disruptions of building new infrastructure systems, and locations easily served by public transportation, to reduce automobile use. Landscape designers incorporate hardy native plants to reduce the need for irrigation or mechanized maintenance such as lawn mowing. Preservationists promote recycling existing buildings as a way of conserving the materials and energy used in their initial construction. They also highlight traditional, low-tech ways of keeping buildings comfortable, such as solar orientation for passive warming and natural lighting, while also adding new features like the green roof installed on the Capitol Building in Hartford (figure 58).

These are, briefly put, some of the historical developments and architectural trends that have shaped Connecticut’s evolution over more than four hundred years. Keeping them in mind, let us now look at one hundred places whose stories will flesh out this overview.

NOTES

1. William Hosley, Colt: The Making of an American Legend (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press in association with the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, 1996).

2. For more on what architecture is see James F. O’Gorman, ABC of Architecture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).

3. For more on why architecture is important see Paul Goldberger, Why Architecture Matters (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009).

4. Michael Bell, The Face of Connecticut: People, Geology, and the Land (Hartford: Connecticut Geological and Natural History Survey, 1985).

5. Robert M. Thorson, Stone by Stone: The Magnificent History of New England’s Stone Walls (New York: Walker Books, 2002).

6. For a short summary of Connecticut history see Bruce Fraser, The Land of Steady Habits: A Brief History of Connecticut (Hartford: Connecticut Historical Commission, 1988). Regional histories with architectural summaries are found in the Connecticut Historical Commission’s six-volume Historic Context series, Historic Preservation in Connecticut: volume 1, Western Coastal Slope, by Janice P. Cunningham (1992); volume 2, Eastern Uplands, by Linda S. Spencer (1993); volume 3, Central Valley, by Janice P. Cunningham (1995); volume 4, Western Uplands, by Geoffrey L. Rossano (1996); volume 5, Eastern Coastal Slope, by John Herzan (1997); and volume 6, Northwest Highlands, by Geoffrey L. Rossano (1997).

7. Lucianne Lavin, Connecticut’s Indigenous Peoples: What Archaeology, History, and Oral Traditions Teach Us about Their Communities and Cultures (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013); William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of Early New England (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983).

8. I am grateful to Laurie Pasteryak Lamarre, former executive director of the Institute of American Indian Studies and currently curator of exhibitions for the Fairfield Museum; and to Katherine Grandjean, assistant professor of history specializing in early American and Native American history at Wellesley College, who both recommended this map.

9. In Connecticut, as in the rest of New England, the term “town” refers first to a geographical/political division, not necessarily a built-up settlement. In other regions, the less-confusing term “township” is used. Built-up settlements within a town may be called villages (although that term has no legal meaning) or, more vaguely, sections or areas, with the principal one referred to as the town center. In the nineteenth century, boroughs and cities were established as legally incorporated areas within a town that have special taxing privileges in order to supply services not required in less densely settled areas. Today, a few towns still have boroughs (Litchfield and Stonington, for example), while most cities have been expanded to have coterminous boundaries with their towns. For settlement history see Anthony N. B. Garvan, Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1951).

10. James Sexton, “Not a Park or Mere Pleasure Ground: A Case Study of the New Haven Green,” documents, www.towngreens.com.

11. For more on town greens in general, as well as specific Connecticut greens, see www.towngreens.com.

12. For English timber framing and its adaptation in Massachusetts see Abbott Lowell Cummings, Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979). Note, however, that Massachusetts information does not always apply to Connecticut.

13. Ross K. Harper et al., Highways to History: The Archaeology of Connecticut’s 18th-Century Lifeways (Connecticut Department of Transportation, 2013); Ann Y. Smith, “A New Look at the Early Domestic Architecture of Connecticut,” Connecticut History 46, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 16–44.

14. Abbott Lowell Cummings, “Connecticut and Its First Period Houses,” Connecticut Preservation News 16, no. 1 (January/February 1993): 1, 8–10.

15. Abbott Lowell Cummings, “Connecticut and Its Building Traditions,” Connecticut History 35, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 192–233.

16. Peter Benes, Meetinghouses of Early New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012).

17. “Late 19th-Century Immigration in Connecticut,” ConnecticutHistory.org; “Early 20th-Century Immigration in Connecticut,” ConnecticutHistory.org; Bruce Clouette, “‘Getting Their Share’: Irish and Italian Immigrants in Hartford, Connecticut, 1850–1940” (PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 1992).

18. Vincent Scully et al., Yale in New Haven: Architecture and Urbanism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), especially Paul Goldberger’s chapter, “James Gamble Rogers & the Shaping of Yale in the Twentieth Century.” See also Patrick Pinnell, Yale University: An Architectural Tour (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999) and Elizabeth Mills Brown, New Haven: A Guide to Architecture and Urban Design (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976).

19. James F. O’Gorman, Henry Austin: In Every Variety of Architectural Style (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 7–8, 179–186.

20. Douglas W. Rae, City: Urbanism and Its End (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005).

21. Richard Longstreth, Looking beyond the Icons: Midcentury Architecture, Landscape, and Urbanism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), chap. 5, “The Extraordinary Postwar Suburb.”

22. In later seasons of I Love Lucy, the Ricardos moved to Westport. Eric Hodgins’s Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946) spoofs his own experience in building a house in New Milford.

23. Christopher Wigren, “Keeping History on the Map,” Hartford Courant, September 13, 2009, page C5. See also Mary Hommann, Wooster Square Design: A Report on the Background, Experience, and Design Procedures in Redevelopment and Rehabilitation in an Urban Renewal Project (New Haven, Conn.: New Haven Redevelopment Agency, 1965).