The Hunt for Hartford's History: CT Open House Day 2013, Part Three

We concluded our CT Open House Day 2013 expedition with a quick walk through the Old State House.  It was the first state house to be constructed in the new nation and was completed in 1796, built on the site where the original colonial capitol building had stood from 1720 until 1783 (when it was destroyed by fire).

Connecticut's Old State House, Hartford, CT. 

Apologies for the ugly scaffolding that's obscuring the pretty architecture!

Did you know that Connecticut, despite its small size, actually had two seats of government until 1873?  State government was divided between Hartford and New Haven for almost a century, until the state constitution was officially changed in 1873 to recognize Hartford as the only official captiol city.  Five years later, the newly proclaimed sole capitol city finished work on a new, much larger capitol building and the state legislature moved to its new - and current - home in 1878.  After this date, the Old State House served as Hartford's City Hall for a number of years before it was quite recently restored and re-opened as a museum.

The grand entrance hall of the Old State House.

The Senate chamber (below) has been restored to its original Federal-era appearance.  The room features a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington that was commissioned by the Aseembly in 1801.

Old State House Senate chamber.

Washington portrait, painted between 1801-4 by Gilbert Stuart.

The House of Representatives (below), in contrast, has been brought back to its Victorian days, a choice made by the city when the room functioned as the convening space of the City Council.

House of Representatives in the Old State House.

Because there is no photographic or written evidence of how the courtroom looked in its earlier days, the room has been restored but left largely empty and now caters to events and other functions.  It was in this room that Prudence Crandall, CT's official state heroine, was tried in 1833 for breaking the state's "Black Law" and admitting a young African-American woman to her female academy.  This courtroom also saw the beginning of the Amistad trial.

Old State House's courtroom.

Statue of "Blind Justice" that once crowned the building's cupula.

Additional photos from the day can be found in our Hartford flickr set.

The Hunt for Hartford's History: CT Open House Day, Part Two

Our next two visits on Saturday were to two historic houses owned by CT Landmarks, a state-wide organization that operates nine historic properties which collectively preserve three and a half centuries of Connecticut and New England history.

First, we took a tour of the Butler-McCook House and Garden and Main Street History Center, which, as its name implies, documents two hundred years of Hartford history through the eyes of a single family.  The main part of the house was built in 1782 and is now one of only four surviving 18th-century structures in Hartford, and the only 18th-century building still standing on Main Street in the capitol city.  It sits on a corner, now literally dwarfed on all sides by surrounding twentieth-century constructions, its restored Victorian back garden the only buffer against the encroaching modern world.

The Butler-McCook House.

The Butler-McCook House is a truly unique museum experience because the house remained in the same immediate family throughout its entire history.  Its rooms and attics are thus full of centuries of family heirlooms, from furniture to generations of childrens' toys to portraits and photos to the family art collection to souvenirs from the Civil War and trips abroad.  Photographs and the oral accounts of the last surviving member of the family have enabled the museum staff to return every room in the house back to its appearance in the latter decades of the 19th century, when the house was home to Eliza Bulter, her cousin/husband John McCook (one of the famous "Fighting McCooks" from the Civil War), and their large family.

The back of the Butler-McCook House.

Frances McCook, the last surviving daughter of Eliza and John, remained unmarried and lived in the house her entire life.  Before she died in 1971 at the age of 94, she gifted the property with the house and all its contents to the Antiquarian & Landmarks Society (the earlier name for the current CT Landmarks).  Realizing the incredible importance of the multi-generational collection surrounding her in the house, she stipulated that it be preserved and opened as a museum to honor both her family and the early history of Hartford.  Her immense appreciation for history led her to record an extraordinary set of oral histories recounting all of her memories, from the stories her elderly aunt and parents used to tell, to her own remembrances of growing up and living in Hartford her entire life.

The restored 1865 Jacob Weidenmann garden behind the Butler-McCook House.

If you're interested in reading more about the family and the house, check out the excellent article at this link and be sure to plan a visit to the Butler-McCook House the next time you're in Hartford!  I plan to visit again with Ashley the next time she's home because this little museum represents something truly special, and I know she'll love it!

The Isham-Terry House.

The second CT Landmarks property we visited in Hartford on Saturday was the Isham-Terry House.  Less than a mile from the Butler-McCook House and a short hop off Main Street, the Isham-Terry property sits somewhat precariously perched at a major intersection and entrance ramp to an interstate highway.  Its house and tiny yard look like a mirage amidst the pavement, concrete, and brick that was sprung up around it over the centuries.

The Isham-Terry House shares a number of commonalities with the Butler-McCook House; indeed, the two families were friends and owned neighboring summer houses on CT's shore.  The Isham-Terry House, originally constructed in 1854 in the then highly-fashionable Italianate style, was purchased by Dr. Oliver Isham in 1896, who used it both as a residence and as his medical office.  Isham moved into the home with his elderly parents and two of his unmarried sisters, Julia and Charlotte; when the parents died, the sisters remained with their bachelor brother as housekeepers and receptionists for his busy practice.  When Dr. Isham died in 1949, his two sisters continued to live in the house, staunchly refusing to allow it to be sold to and destroyed by modern developers.  Julia passed away in 1977 and Charlotte in 1979, but not before they ensured that both the house and its contents would be preserved, much in the same way that their neighbor, Frances McCook, had guaranteeed the survival of her own family home.

Because the Isham sisters were passionate about history and their family genealogy, they made little changes to the house over the decades, carefully preserving its original details and the antique and family heirlooms in their care.  So proud of their personal history were they that when they decreed that the house should become a museum to continue that heritage, they stipulated that it be called the Isham-Terry house because their mother's family, the Terrys, were descended from William Bradford (of Mayflower fame) and also related to the family of state hero Nathan Hale.

The house has only very recently been re-opened to the public, and is well worth a stop for its beautifully-preserved Victorian architectural details (including a tower), stained-glass windows, and antique furnishings.  You can read the houses's nomination form for the National Register of Historic Places here; it gives some fascinating insights into both the family and the house itself.

Additional photos can be found in our CT Open House Day 2013 flickr set.  For more information on visiting any of the CT Landmarks properties or in joining the organization to aid their preservation efforts, visit their website.

The Hunt for Hartford's History: CT Open House Day 2013, Part One

For being the third-smallest state in the country, Connecticut certainly has its share of fascinating history, having been home to numerous famous authors, national heroes, and other significant cultural contributors.  The impressively lengthy list of participants in this year's CT Open House Day 2013 is a testament to the wide range of museums, historic sites, events, organizations, and experiences our itty bitty state has to offer.  I decided to plan a day that would pay homage to both the very well-known and the more obscure of CT's treasures, and I set out on Saturday morning with a couple of friends to see what we could discover.

We arrived at our first site, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, just after ten o'clock, and the property was already buzzing with visitors ready to see the house and exhibit and to take part in all of the numerous presentations and activities scheduled to take place throughout the day to celebrate not only Open House Day, but also Stowe's 202 birthday.  Despite being life-long CT residents, none of us had ever visited the Stowe Center before, so we thought this would be the ideal place to begin our day.

Nestled in the heart of Hartford's famous Nook Farm neighborhood, the CT home of author Harriet Beecher Stowe sits right next door to that of her more famous contemporary, Mark Twain.  It was actually Stowe's residence in the area, however, and not Twain's, that provided the spark that led to the creation of the internationally-recognized Nook Farm community.  The most prestigious area of Hartford from the 1870s through the turn of the century, the neighborhood was the literary and artistic center of the city, home not only to Stowe (from 1873 until her death in 1896) and Twain (from 1874 to 1891), but also to social reformer Isabella Beecher Hooker (HBS's sister and one of the founders of the National Women's Suffrage Association), actor William Gillette, and journalist and author Charles Warner, among many others.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was already world-famous as the author of the international bestseller Uncle Tom's Cabin when she moved to Hartford in 1873.  She was born about an hour west of Hartford in Litchfield, CT into a family of ministers and social reformers who instilled in her a sense of duty to strive to better the world and make a difference.  She married Calvin Stowe, a theology professor, in 1836.  Calvin Stowe was an outspoken abolitionist and he and Harriet offered their Ohio home as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

The Stowes relocated to Maine in 1850, and it was there that Harriet wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly in response to the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law that same year.  The story originally appeared serially (from 1851-2) in The National Era, an abolitionist Washington newspaper, and was only intended at first to be three or four parts long.  The popularity of Stowe's early installments, however, prompted the extension of the run into more than 40 parts.  In 1852, the installments were collected and published as a novel in a two-volume format, and Stowe's place as an international celebrity was assured.  In 1862, just after the Civil War began, she was introduced to President Lincoln and her son reported that the President's response was, "so you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."

When Calvin Stowe retired from his teaching career in 1864, he moved his wife and twin daughters to Hartford.  They purchased this Victorian Gothic brick house in 1873, and Harriet Beecher Stowe set out to create in it a domestic retreat that represented her simplistic ideals and her love of nature.  Here, she continued writing (she published more than thirty works throughout her life, though none of course ever rivaled the success of her first novel) until her death in 1896.

The house was built in 1871.  After Stowe died, it was sold outside of the family, but only remained so for about three decades.  In 1924, Stowe's grandniece, Katherine Seymour Day, purchased the house and lived there for more than 40 years, working to restore it and eventually donating it as a museum to help found the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center.  It was Day's influence, too, that saved the next-door Mark Twain house from demolition, thus preserving through her efforts monuments to CT's two most extraordinary literary figures.

Part of Day's restoration and preservation efforts included the collecting of Stowe and Beecher family heirlooms, furniture, pictures, books, and other personal items, and bringing them back to Hartford; much of what is in the house now was owned and used by Stowe or her family.  Photographs and Stowe's own meticulous accounts have allowed the rooms to be restored to their exact appearance during her residence here.  Walking into the house now is like walking into a time capsule of the 1870s and 1880s, and the museum did a beautiful job presenting both Stowe's home and her life during the house walk-through.  Because we visited on Open House Day, we were only able to visit the ground floor of the house, so I will definitely be returning in the very near future to see the remainder of the house and experience the complete guided tour.