Connecticut Architecture. Christopher Wigren
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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