New Listings on the National Register

New Listings on the National Register

Three Connecticut sites newly listed on the National Register of Historic Places have ties to the state's agricultural past. The William H. Thompson Farmstead is located in the Melrose section of East Windsor, an area that has been farmed since the early 18th century. William Howe Thompson (1813-1901) was a civic and religious leader in addition to a successful farmer who raised tobacco and various food crops. Thompson's house, built about 1850 in a simple interpretation of the Greek Revival style, has an unusual floor plan seemingly tailored for economy and to fit his business and civic activities. After Thompson, the farm passed to the Pease family, who raised dairy cattle, and then to the Bernard and Florence Smigiel, both children of Polish immigrants. By 1910, almost half the farms in Connecticut's Central Valley belonged to immigrants. Like many other Connecticut farmers at the time, the Smigiels held other jobs as well, Bernard as mail carrier and Florence at the Colt factory in Hartford. In the nomination, Janice Cunningham writes that the farmstead "derives much of its significance from the integrity of its setting. From the placement of the buildings to the layout and shape of the fields, the property clearly evokes its rural 19th-centuiry origins... Behind the cluster of buildings, the cultivated fields run straight and true, their boundaries unchanged since the farm was established, providing distant vistas still largely unimpeded by modern development." In Easton, the Easton Historical Society is currently restoring the Bradley-Hubbell house, built in 1816 for Aljah and Elizabeth Bradley. Bradley descendants sold the property to the Bridgeport Hydraulic Company in 1912, and much of the farmland was flooded for a reservoir. The company leased the house to one of its employees, Franklin Hubbell, until his death in 1996. Thanks to the water company, the house retains its rural agricultural setting. Two occupants of the house have left memoirs, a boon for historians. The first was John Dimon Bradley, son of Aljah and Elizabeth, who described life on what was mainly a subsistence farm in the 19th century-raising crops and livestock, spinning and weaving flax and wood, and making butter and cheese by "joining milk with a neighbor." It was also a time when Easton's population fell as sons left to work in Bridgeport's factories or to farm on the more fertile land of the west. In the 20th century, Patricia Hubbell, Franklin's daughter, wrote about life in the house between about 1932 and 1954. Like many houses in Easton, the Bradley-Hubbell house is Colonial in plan and conservatism. The plan follows the traditional center-chimney plan, reusing the foundation and part of the chimney stack of an older house. There is a small amount of delicate, Federal ornament-the oval windows in the gables, the parlor mantel, and the rope molding of the stair-but the house on the whole has a simple, unadorned character that seems to look backwards to the 18th century, a combination of conservatism and economy. The Ives-Baldwin house in Meriden has lost its setting to 20th-century development. The house was built for Timothy Ives, who like most craftsmen at the time farmed to supplement his earnings as a carpenter. Ives sold the house in 1815 to Moses Baldwin, a successful peddler who sold items produced by nearby factories door to door. Baldwin also operated a mill located near the house. Baldwin descendants continued to occupy the house until 1927, farming and operating the mill, although the last generation had its principal employment away from the farm. In the mid-1960s the then owner, Myrtle Reynolds, sold the farmland for development; houses and condominiums now occupy most of the property. Like the Bradley-Hubbell house, the Ives-Baldwin house is an example of the persistence of Colonial forms and ornament in the rural parts of Connecticut. It too retains the center-chimney plan, and some of the rooms have paneled fireplace walls that resemble work done thirty years earlier. Other rooms have a more up to date treatment, wooden mantels on plastered walls.