New Listings on the National Register of Historic Places

A Tavern, A Bank, and A Dam

            Three sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places illustrate the effects of larger events on Connecticut history, from the politics of road construction, to financial booms and busts, to the vast expansion of the federal government’s local role in the 20^th century.

Despite its name, the Medad Stone Tavern, in Guilford, never actually served as a tavern. It was built as a gamble, in 1800, along the road that Stone, a Guilford tavernkeeper and postmaster, hoped would become a new turnpike carrying traffic from New York to Boston. Unfortunately for Stone, the turnpike was built elsewhere, and his expansive tavern became a farmhouse. It passed down through successive generations of the Davis-Hubbard family until it was willed to the Guilford Keeping Society in 2001.

            The little altered house retains its original tavern layout and features, including unusually massive framing (perhaps to accommodate wear and tear of public use), a large kitchen and other work areas, formal parlors for entertaining, numerous bedrooms, and a two-story veranda that wraps around the front and one side.        Family papers held by the Guilford Keeping Society document the property’s history, including the division of the house among various family members. When Joel Davis died in 1861, his will divided ownership of the house’s rooms among his survivors. Joel’s widow, Acsah, received one-third of the living space, including the Smoke Oven room and two bedrooms; she and her daughter Sarah also shared the old kitchen. Sarah received four other rooms on her own. Joel’s son Joel Leonard received the first- and second-floor halls and four other rooms. While dividing rooms of a single dwelling among different owners was well known in colonial Connecticut, by the second half of the 19^th century it had become very rare.

            The house sits among woodlands and pastures surrounded by stone walls. Also on the site are a large barn built in 1898, a 19^th-century corn crib, and a garage constructed with timber felled by the 1938 hurricane.

            In New Britain, the Commercial Trust Company building is a symbol of both the prosperity of the late 1920s and of the hardship that hit financial institutions after the stock market crash of 1929. Organized in 1915 to serve New Britain’s booming hardware industry and its employees, the company soon erected a new headquarters on a prominent downtown site. When it opened in November of 1927, the building, designed by the New York firm of Hopkins and Dentz, was featured in a special section of the New Britain Herald.

Designed to express Commercial Trust’s strength, stability, and good taste, the building employed expensive materials such as limestone, marble and bronze, along with careful attention to well-coordinated details, such as classical moldings and repeated use of the company’s logo, a blacksmith’s anvil, all employing a mix of stylistic influences that includes neoclassical, Venetian Gothic, and Italian Renaissance Revival. The banking hall was described as “early Florentine Classic.” The seven-story building is the tallest in its streetscape, providing in addition to the banking facilities, rental offices on the upper floors.

Less than two years after the new building opened, the stock market crash decimated financial markets as panicked depositors rushed to withdraw their money. Commercial Trust closed its doors on December 13, 1930. In 1938 the property was acquired by New Britain National Bank, and it continued to serve as a bank until 1996.

The building sat vacant for over ten years, until Aron Eisenberg, a developer from New York, secured equity and debt financing to convert it to 28 apartments for senior citizens, along with ground-floor retail in the banking hall, which still contains the original sconces and chandeliers, and marble walls, as well as much of its brass trim at the doors, bank vault and elevator. A seven-story elevator tower at the back of the building will allow it to meet modern code requirements.

More than one-third of the project’s cost will come from Federal and State Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credits, which has meant that the work must meet the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation. The balance of the financing is coming from Bank of America debt financing, Housing Credits, Connecticut Housing Finance Authority, owner equity and the City of New Britain. Residential occupancy is scheduled for April 2010.

The Mansfield Hollow Dam, in Mansfield, was the first flood control project constructed by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers in Connecticut. After severe floods paralyzed New England in 1936, Congress passed the Flood Control Act of 1936, which gave the Corps the responsibility for carrying out a national policy on floor control. Additional flooding caused by the hurricane of 1938 led to the creation of a flood control plan for the Thames River basin, to protect communities and industrial facilities, which had suffered extensive damage. The plan called for seven reservoirs, four located in the upper Quinebaug basin in Massachusetts, and three in the upper Shetucket basin in Connecticut.

The Mansfield Hollow Dam was authorized in 1941, but civil works projects not directly related to World War II ceased in 1943 and did not resume until 1947. Construction at Mansfield did not start until 1949, after the Corps modified its plan to reduce the amount of property taken and the number of houses to be relocated or demolished and eliminated the relocation of two cemeteries—all in response to vocal community opposition in Mansfield. Further delays resulted when bids came in substantially above government estimates.

The dam was completed in 1952 and showed its worth in 1955, when torrential rains from Hurricane Diane fell across southern New England. While flooding still was extensive, the Mansfield Hollow reservoir filled to 67 percent of its capacity and was estimated to have reduced damage by more than $3 million.

The dam is located on the Natchaug River about five miles above its confluence with the Shetucket River at Willimantic. It consists of a rolled-filled earth dam approximately 14,000 feet long and 15 feet wide, a spillway with a concrete ogee weir, and mechanical works to control outflow. Six earth-fill dikes extend the dam, and provide storage capacity for recreation and flood control. Other related structures consist of a control house, and administration building/garage, and an early 20^th-century house used as dam operator’s quarters until 2002.

The dam actually was listed on the National Register in 2003, but due to the Army’s signoff procedures the listing was not publicly announced June of this year.