Architecture

"Connecticut, although it is the third smallest state in the nation, has one of the country's richest and most diverse architectural histories," writes David Dangremont in his "Forward" to Heritage Houses (noted below). "Here the rough-hewn timbers of a seventeenth-century dwelling stand in sharp contrast to the sleek geometry of a glass house by Philip Johnson. Here, within a few miles, are narrow streets lined with ship captains' houses, stretches of green bordered by merchants' mansions, and picturesque hillsides dotted with neat clapboard dwellings behind solid stone walls. Here too are the academic buildings at Yale, the gleaming corporate headquarters in Stamford, and the many-towered cityscape of Hartford. Worthy representatives of four centuries of Connecticut architecture stand side-by-side in pleasing visual harmony.”

Nevertheless, the state's architectural heritage cannot be studied without reference to the rest of the world. The really serious student might want to start with American Buildings and their Architects (New York: Doubleday, 1970-76), a four-volume work. Volumes I and II, by William H. Pierson, Jr., cover the colonial and neoclassical style and the nineteenth century to 1893. Volumes III and IV, by William H. Jordy, deal with the period since 1893. There are many illustrations, a glossary in each volume, bibliographies, and indexes--and nearly 2,000 pages, all told. Perhaps it is more of an undertaking than most readers are willing to tackle. John Burchard and Albert Bush-Brown's The Architecture of America: A Social and Cultural History (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961; abridged by the authors under the same title, 1966) would provide an adequate background, as would Wayne Andrews, Architecture, Ambition and Americans: A Social History of American Architecture (New York: Macmillan, 1969). The shortest adequate account we have found is Leland M. Roth's A Concise History of American Architecture (New York: Harper and Row, 1979). It has 400 pages, but much of the space is taken up by more than 300 illustrations.

A good starting place is William S. Hosley's "Architecture" in Gerald W.R. Ward and William S. Hosley, eds., The Great River: Art and Society of the Connecticut Valley, 1635-1820. Hartford, The Wadsworth Atheneum, 1985.

The Connecticut scene is most frequently included in works with a New England scope, and such works abound. But there is a fair amount of literature focused directly on Connecticut. A quick and easy introduction might be William Lamson Warren's Bicentennial pamphlet XVI, Connecticut Art and Architecture Looking Backwards Two Hundred Years (1976). Norman M. Isham and Albert F. Brown, Early Connecticut Houses: An Historical and Architectural Study (Providence, 1900; reprinted by Dover in 1965), is well illustrated and full of information. Many of its generalizations were challenged, however, by J. Frederick Kelly, Early Domestic Architecture of Connecticut (New Haven: 1925; reprinted by Dover, 1963). (Not to be confused with a digest of the same name by Kelly, published as Tercentenary pamphlet XII, 1934.) The book is full of photographs and diagrams. Kelly hypothesizes a typology of the development of the central chimney house that no longer holds the confidence of architectural historians. Anthony Garvan's Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951) deals with vernacular domestic buildings--the common man's home--and public buildings. Check the index for more on Garvan.

Connecticut: A Guide to its Roads, Lore, and People (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938), written under the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration for the American Guide series and commonly referred to as "the W.P.A. Guide," will tell you where the old houses are--or at least where they were in 1938. The Guide lists about 500 in an "Index of Old and Historic Houses" at the back of the book. The compilers identified forty-four seventeenth-century buildings. The Guide also includes a nice sixteen-page summary of architectural developments in the state, accompanied by nine pages of photographs. It was written by Elmer D. Keith. John Kelly prepared Connecticut's Old Houses: A Handbook and Guide (Stonington, 1963) for the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society. It is a small work of seventy-three pages. John Kelly's Handbook is a pale shadow, however, of J. Frederick Kelly's Early Connecticut Architecture: Measured Drawings with Full Site Details of Moulded Sections...with Photographs and a Second Series (New York: W. Helburn, 1924 and 1931). The Colonial Dames prepared a bibliography of manuscript histories of old houses about 1920, with a later short supplement. It is in typescript at the State Library.

There is a magnificent and huge volume of photographs, historical accounts, descriptions, and drawings prepared by the Connecticut chapter of the National Society of Colonial Dames, Old Houses of Connecticut edited by Bertha Chadwick Trowbridge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923). Charles M. Andrews supervised the work and wrote three of the sixty-four historical sketches. A work more easy to come by--and a lot easier to carry--is Sara Emerson Rolleston's Heritage Houses: The American Tradition in Connecticut 1660-1900 (New York: Viking Press, 1979). This is a copiously illustrated work with short essays on forty Connecticut houses, from the Stanley-Whitman house to Hill-Stead, both in Farmington. It is not an overall survey. At present the Connecticut Historical Commission is surveying, town by town, the architectural history and buildings of the state, and numerous reports and photographs are in its files in Hartford. The State Library has the files of the WPA survey, which include photographs and measured drawings. A brief bibliography of thirty-one works about old Connecticut houses is included in Architecture and Preservation in Connecticut: A Guide to Historic Homes Churches and Architectural Styles prepared by the consulting firm of Coppa and Avery and published by Vance Bibliographies, Monticello, Illinois (1981). It is superseded by the list below in most respects, but searchers might find a few items of interest in it.

The Connecticut Antiquarian, the bulletin of the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society, replaced the Newsletter of the Society in June, 1949, and its numbers are full of items about and photographs of old Connecticut buildings. Another group of publications not to be missed is the so-called "White Pine Series" pamphlets, published by the White Pine Bureau of the Northern Pine Manufacturers' Society under the distinguished editorship of Russell F. Whitehead, formerly editor of Architectural Record. Charles Magruder, in the Journal of the American Society of Architectural Historians 22 (March, 1963) 1:39, called them "one of the richest sources of data, measured drawings, and photographs available." (p. 39) They were published bimonthly from 1915 to 1940. The pamphlets are tiny architectural studies of towns, including several in Connecticut. They are:

Bessell, Wesley S. "Farmington, Connecticut" 12 (March-April, 1926).

--"Old Woodbury & Adjacent Domestic Architecture" 2 (October, 1916).

Dana, Richard H., Jr. "Old Canterbury on the Quinnebaug" 9 (December, 1923).

--"The Old Hill Towns of Windham County, Connecticut" 10 (January-February, l924).

Derby, Richard B. "Early Houses of the Connecticut Valley" 2 (June, 1916).

Eberlein, Harold Donaldson. "The Seventeenth Century Connecticut House" 5 (February, 1919).

Magonigle, H. Van Buren. "Essex, A Connecticut River Town" 6 (December, 1920).

Price, C. Matlack. "Historic Houses of Litchfield" 5 (June, 1919).

Tarn, David E. "The Town of Suffield, Connecticut" 7 (December, 1921).

The U.S. Treasury conducted a town-by-town census of housing in 1798. Only a few of the returns for Connecticut have been found. At CHS look under "U.S. Collector of Revenue -- Direct Tax." There are also some there for 1813, 1815, 1816. There are a few at Yale, also.

One Connecticut architect has been the subject of much recent scholarship. Asher Benjamin, the first American to write an architectural handbook, published in 1797, had a very substantial impact on American architecture during the first half of the nineteenth century. A convenient short account of his life can be found in Juliette Tomlinson's "Asher Benjamin--Connecticut Architect," Connecticut Antiquarian 6 (1954). The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 38 (October, 1979) 3 is devoted almost entirely to him. In addition to three articles about him and his work, there is a list of his buildings and a good bibliography of works by and about him. Much of the material is drawn from an Ohio State University dissertation written in 1950 by Abbot Lowell Cummings, "An Investigation of the Sources, Stylistic Evolution, and Influence of Asher Benjamin's Builders' Guides." See also William N. Hosley, Jr., "Asher Benjamin's Influence on the Federal Builders' Trade in Shelburne, Massachusetts," in Shelburne Historical Society Quarterly (April, 1977), and a Brown University dissertation, Quinan, John F., Jr., "The Architectural Style of Asher Benjamin, a Study of Provincialism," D.D. Brown 1973.

Other Connecticut architects are discussed in the following:

Baldwin, Simeon E. "The Three Earliest New Haven Architects." Papers of the NHCHS 10 (1951) :226-39. This paper, read in 1919, briefly mentions Henry Caner, who came to Connecticut in 1717, but concentrates on Peter Harrison, who came from England in 1729; David Hoadley, who designed the United Church in 1815; and Ithiel Town, architect of the Wadsworth Athenaeum, among many other buildings.

Ransom, David F. George Keller, Architect. Hartford: Stowe-Day Foundation, 1978. Keller, Connecticut's leading nineteenth-century architect, arrived in Hartford in 1864 and influenced the high Gothic style of the era. Among a great many large buildings which he designed was the First Regiment Armory in Hartford. But he is best known for the huge Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Bushnell Park. Many photographs.

Seymour, George D. Researchers of Antiquity: Five Essays on Early American Architects. New Haven: priv. printed, 1928. This is a thirty-two page pamphlet dealing with Ithiel Town, Henry Austin and Samuel Belcher. It includes many illustrations.

Wiedersheim, William A. "Douglas Orr's New Haven." Journal of the NHCHS 26 (Summer, 1979) 3:3-22. Orr (1892-1966) designed, among many other buildings, the Southern New England Telephone Building, the New Haven Lawn Club, and the First New Haven National Bank. Illustrated.

Various public buildings have been studied, and there are many illustrated articles in nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular magazines and newspapers about them. A few of the more extensive and readily available works:

Anon. "Connecticut State Library and Supreme Court Building." Architecture 23 (February, 1911) 2:17-25. Plates, plans, and criticism.

Brainard, Newton C. The Hartford State House of 1796. Hartford: CHS, 1964. The Old State House is the first public building designed by Charles Bullfinch. This work is a combination guide and architectural history of the building--not scholarly, but sound.

Curry, David Park, and Pierce, Patricia Dawes, eds. Monument: The Connecticut State Capitol. Hartford: Old State House Association, 1979. This is a lavishly illustrated, thoroughly professional catalog to accompany an exhibit of the history of the building. The editors are trained scholars and have included excellent essays and a full bibliography.

--"Replication, Pattern and Symbolic Form: The Connecticut State Capitol in the Context of Nineteenth-Century Public Design." Doctoral dissertation, Yale, 1981.

Ransom, David F. "James G. Batterson and the New State House." CHS Bulletin 45 (January, 1980) 1:1-15. Batterson, who was in the marble and granite business, became the chief construction contractor for the Capitol. His work engendered tremendous controversy.

--"Upjohn's Other Work." CHS Bulletin 45 (July, 1980) 3:65-74. Upjohn, the architect of the State Capitol (1872-1879), also designed the Park Church, the West Middle School, the Charles Boardman Smith House, and others between 1865 and 1975.

Connecticut meeting houses have also generated a considerable literature. One might start with Marian Card Donnelly's The New England Meeting Houses of the Seventeenth Century (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1968) for an overview, but the standard work is J. Frederick Kelly's two-volume masterpiece, Early Connecticut Meeting Houses. Kelly stands up well, but his work is not the last word. William Lamson Warren, in "The Millington Society Church," CHS Bulletin 42 (October, 1977) 4:97-113, provides minute details of a church built just after Kelly's period of interest. There is a review by Anthony Garvan of several works on colonial and English meeting houses in New England Quarterly 37 (1964) :417-19. See also:

Kelly, John Frederick. "Raising Connecticut Meeting Houses." Old-Time New England 27 (July, 1936) :3-9. Some of the cross members weighed as much as 9,000 pounds, but nevertheless the same technique of assembling the frame on the ground and pushing it up with poles as was used in house and barn construction prevailed. Spires created different and greater problems later. Illustrations and diagrams.

Porter, Noah. The New England Meeting House. Tercentenary pamphlet XVIII (1933). President Porter of Yale published this piece in the New Englander (May, 1883). He died in 1892. His piece was condensed for inclusion in this series. It is wholly superseded by Kelly.

Sinnott, E.W. "Old Connecticut Meeting Houses." The Antiquarian 6 (November, 1954) 2:11-19. The author, a Yale biologist, postulates a chronological typology and brings his story up as far as the Victorian Gothic style.

Sweeney, Kevin M. "Meeting Houses, Town Houses, and Churches: Changing Perceptions of Sacred and Secular Space in Southern New England, 1720-1850," Winterthur Portfolio 28(Spring 1993) 59-93.

Below are listed a number of items relating to early Connecticut architecture and architects. The field is a broad one, and approaches are disparate; the list is miscellaneous.

Andrews, William G. "The Henry Whitfield House and the State Historical Museum." Papers of the NHCHS 7 (1908) :237-57. A discussion, especially of the fireplace and chimney, of the oldest house in Connecticut.

Bessell, Wesley S. "Colonial Architecture in Connecticut," Architectural Record. This is a five-part piece, complete with illustrations, photographs, and some measured drawings by Bessell. They are Part I: 37 (May, 1915) 5:361-69; II: 37 (June, 1915) 6:445-52; III: 37 (July, 1915) 7:547-56; IV: 38 (December, 1915) 6:72-80; V: 39 (January, 1916) 1:53-64.

At the State Library, they have been removed from the magazines and bound together. Look under Bessell in the card catalog.

Bridenbaugh, Carl. "Yankee Use and Abuse of the Forest in the Building of New England, 1620-1660," Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 89(1977) 3-35. This article deals much more with house types than with forest depletion. Bridenbaugh describes buildings of all kinds prior to 1660. See also Harold R. Shurtleff, The Log Cabin Myth. Cambridge, 1939 on the Swedish origins.

Cummings, Abbott Lowell, "Connecticut and its First Period Houses," Connecticut Preservation News 16(Jan.-Feb., 1993) 1:1, 8-10. An update on the method of dating old houses with a surrey of the seven 17^th century houses still standing in 1993, and eight other early 18^th-century houses. This is an important reassessment of both the method for dating houses through architectural analysis and of the dates of construction of Connecticut's oldest houses.

Keith, Elmer D. Some Notes on Early Connecticut Architecture. Hartford: Prospect Press, 1938. Keith was the author of the WPA Guide section on architecture. This pamphlet is a quick sketch, with illustrative examples of the six periods of Connecticut architecture as developed by Keith. It includes a useful essay by Frederick C. Palmer, "The Nomenclature of Rooms in the 17th and 18th Century Connecticut House."

Kelly, John Frederick. "Early Connecticut Stairs." Notebook of the Walpole Society. Boston, 1943. Sixteen pages.

Koch, Carla Sternberg. "A Stylistic Comparison of Two Early Connecticut Houses." CHS Bulletin 44 (April, 1979) 2:44-51. The Hitchcock-Phillips house in Cheshire (1785) and the Ashahel Hart house in Berlin (1786). Nice sketches by the author.

Lewis, Thomas. "Pre-Nineteenth Century House Types in the Connecticut River Valley." Proceedings of the New England-St. Lawrence Valley Geographic Society (Fall, 1977); reprinted in Lewis' Near the Long Tidal River (Washington, D.C., 1981). Lewis wrote a doctoral dissertation on the historical geography of the Valley which includes a chapter on architecture.

--"'To Planters of Moderate Means': The Cottage as a Dominant Folk House in Connecticut Before 1900." Proceedings of the New England-St. Lawrence Valley Geographical Society 10 (October, 1980) titled Settlement In New England: The Last 100 Years, edited by Timothy J. Rickard. Numerous examples of this dwelling type built between 1650 and 1850 exist. (Drive up route 10 from Hamden to Farmington, for instance.) The cottage "was a logical extension of the one-room house built during the initial years of settlement." It is smaller than the Cape Cod house, though also a one-and-a-half-story building. The cottage has a center chimney, with one room on each side. From tax records and paintings, Lewis concluded that the cottage was "a dominant cultural landscape feature before the age of steam and iron." (p. 23) An important addition to our architectural knowledge.

Sexton, James Cahill. "Craftsmen, Clients and Buildings: The Domestic Architecture of Guilford, Connecticut, 1689-1789" DD Yale. 1999. DA 9930942

Trowbridge, Thomas R., Jr. "Ancient Houses of New Haven." Papers of the NHCHS 2 (1877) :173-204. Detailed descriptions of some seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses and comments on colonial architecture in general.

Warren, William L. "William Sprats, Master Joiner: Connecticut Federalist Architecture." Connecticut Antiquarian 9 (December, 1952) 2:11-21. Sprats came from Litchfield.

--"William Sprats and his Civil and Ecclesiastical Architecture in New England: Part I, The Litchfield County Court House, 1795-1797." Old-Time New England 44 (January-March, 1954) 3:65-78. Illustrations. Part II, in the following issue, does not focus on Connecticut.

Town planning and urban architecture are the subjects of an increasing number of monographs, most with contemporary rather than historical focus. Those of particular interest to historians:

Anon. "Modern Science of Building as Exemplified in Highland Court." Connecticut Magazine 8 (1903) 2:385-94. A description with photographs of a huge apartment building built in Hartford, c. 1903. "The dining hall has 200 electric light bulbs and seats 100 guests."

--"Science of Modern Building." Connecticut Magazine 8 (1903) 3:631-39. A description and discussion of the New Connecticut Hotel, Waterbury, c. 1903.

Archer, John. "Puritan Town Planning in New Haven." Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 34 (May, 1975) 2:140-48. Archer disputes Garvan (below) and asserts that the location and layout of New Haven were determined by John Davenport's reading of Biblical clues.

Brocklesby, William C. "Architecture in Hartford." Vol. II, sect. VI in Memorial History of Hartford. Edited by James Trumbull. Boston, 1886. Many illustrations, with a focus on Hartford City. A useful piece if you want to know what Hartford looked like a century ago.

Brown, Elizabeth Mills. New Haven: A Guide to Architecture and Urban Design. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. This excellent guide is a model of its genre. It is organized by streets so as to facilitate a walking study of the town's architectural heritage.

Cloves, Richard R. "Where Art is Combined with Nature: Village Improvement in Nineteenth-Century New England." Dissertation, Cornell, 1987. Focus is on the development of the town common into passive recreational greens and sites for town gatherings.

Garvan, Anthony. Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial Connecticut. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951. Based on his 1948 Yale dissertation, Garvan's work is an excellent account of New Haven's unique geographic history. Garvan shows the relationship of the town location and layout to seventeenth century theories. We are persuaded that British practices and the theories and plans of Vitrovius were dominant, as Garvan claims, Archer (above) notwithstanding. This is a superb work.

Hartford Architecture Conservancy Survey. Hartford Architecture: Volume I Downtown. Hartford, 1978. With Brown, above, this ranks as a model of what such a guide should be. Volume II is forthcoming.

Roth, Leland, M. "Three Industrial Towns by McKim, Mead and White." Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 38 (December, 1979) 2:319-47. The only Connecticut town is Naugatuck. Many excellent photographs.

St. George, Robert. Controversy by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture. Chapel Hill, Univ. of N.C. Press, 1998. There is a chapter on Ralph Earl and another on Samuel Desborough's enclosed farmstead built in Guilford in 1641 and on Jared Eliot's Essays on Husbandry as indicators of several layers of culture, their relation to contemporary England and transfer to the New England environment.

Interesting pieces on Connecticut restorations are:

Leibundguth, Arthur W. "History of historic preservation in Connecticut." CA. 27 (July 1975), 10-28. Connecticut Antiquarian (pub. Of Antiquarian and Landmarks Society).

Meeks, Carroll V. "Lynx and Phoenix: Litchfield and Williamsburg." Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 10 (December, 1951) 4:18-24. Meeks was a longtime editor of the Society's publication. Williamsburg's "enjoyable make-believe suffers by comparison with the genuine natural effect of Litchfield," he says. (p. 22)

Sizer, Theodore. "The Lebanon Meetinghouse, Lebanon, Connecticut." Journa1 of the Society of Architectural Historians 14 (May, 1955) 2:871+. A case study of restoration after the hurricane of 1938. Interesting photographs.