Connecticut Architecture. Christopher Wigren

into a patchwork of small units.

      Like colonial settlement patterns, colonial building patterns started with English traditions, which gradually were adapted to local conditions. The only firmly documented structure to survive from the first generation of settlement is the Henry Whitfield House in Guilford, said to have been begun in 1639 (figure 15). Although extensively altered and heavily restored, it resembles, on a modest scale, an English manor house and suggests an intention to transplant English social patterns to the New World. Archival sources indicate that several other early leaders built similarly ambitious dwellings.

FIGURE 14. Town green, Southington. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

      Although the Whitfield House was constructed of stone, wood dominated Connecticut building from the first. Most of the early English settlers came from East Anglia, a region that had a well-developed tradition of timber construction, and Connecticut’s forests offered them plenty of raw materials to work with. Timber-framed buildings are essentially cages of hewn wooden posts and beams fitted together with joints suited to the particular stresses of their location in the building (figure 16). Inside, framing members continued to serve decorative as well as structural purposes. They were smoothed and edged with chamfers or moldings, and occasionally further decorated with paint.¹²

      Most surviving houses from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries follow a common plan, with two rooms flanking a central chimney, often but not always with a second layer of rooms behind them. From these, early twentieth-century historians such as J. Frederick Kelly deduced a linear evolution of house types (figure 17), starting with two-over-two room plans like the Buttolph-Williams House (place 79) and moving on to lean-to (“saltbox”) plans like the Deacon Adams House (place 80) and then full two-story plans, all with central chimneys. The sequence culminated in houses like that of Ebenezer Grant (place 87), with center halls and paired chimneys, which Kelly considered the most advanced. Recent researchers have concluded that there was a much greater variety of plan and construction than Kelly recognized, including one-room houses; long, linear houses; houses with end chimneys; impermanent structures constructed with no proper foundation, just posts set into holes in the ground; and smaller variants of the center-chimney plan such as the Benjamin Hall Jr. House (place 15). And while Kelly got the relative sequence right, many of the types that he placed within a particular period actually continued to be built alongside supposedly later types.¹³

FIGURE 15. Henry Whitfield House, Guilford, ca. 1639–1640. Courtesy of Henry Whitfield State Museum, Guilford, Connecticut

      Part of the difficulty in understanding the architecture of Connecticut’s early colonial period is due to the difficulty of determining construction dates. Since the 1980s, new research, notably by former professor Abbott Lowell Cummings at Yale University, has begun to change our understandings of the state’s colonial building culture.¹⁴ Cummings concluded that Connecticut tended to be more stylistically conservative than Massachusetts and Rhode Island, which makes the earlier practice of dating based on stylistic comparisons across the region less reliable. Based on research by Cummings and others, the dates of structures such as the Buttolph-Williams and Hyland Houses (places 79, 82) have been revised, and further work will doubtless produce other revisions. The result, as Cummings warned, is that almost any seventeenth-century building date needs to be looked at skeptically.

FIGURE 16. Typical timber frame, from J. Frederick Kelly, Early Domestic Architecture of Connecticut, 1924. Courtesy of Yale University Press

FIGURE 17. Chronology of colonial plan types, from J. Frederick Kelly, Architectural Guide for Connecticut, 1935

      Another recent development has been the recognition of architectural influences from the neighboring New York Colony with its more heterogeneous population and building practices. Differences in framing, the use of shingles rather than clapboards as a wall covering, and wide, flaring eaves all are features that have been attributed to Dutch or other continental European traditions that reached Connecticut through New York (figure 18).¹⁵

FIGURE 18. Chidsey-­Linsley House, East Haven, ca. 1790. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

      When it came to public buildings, the colonial settlers relied less on English precedent. The Puritans insisted that the term “church” referred to a congregation of people, never a building, so they rejected traditional church architecture. Instead, they developed a new type of public building that could serve both religious and secular purposes: the meetinghouse.¹⁶ Influenced by Protestant architectural experimentation in Europe, meetinghouses were designed to allow a large body of people to gather and hear a speaker. Early examples were square or nearly square, with a raised pulpit on one wall, a floor tightly packed with seating, and, where needed, additional seating in galleries (figure 19). In new settlements or poorer communities, meetinghouses often were rudimentary structures, poorly built, poorly maintained, and quickly outgrown and replaced. However, in towns like Wethersfield, where circumstances allowed, they could be solidly built and finely ornamented (place 56).

      In sum, our understanding of Connecticut architecture in the first century after English settlement is at once less complete and more complicated than previous generations thought. What remains constant is the overall point that its inhabitants transplanted European settlement and building patterns to the new land, then made necessary changes to adapt them to different conditions.

FIGURE 19. Second Meeting House, New Haven, 1668; demolished ca. 1757. Detail from James Wadsworth, A Plan of the Town of New Haven with All the Buildings in 1748, T. Kensett, engraver, Wm. Lyon for the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1806. Courtesy of the New Haven Museum

      Agricultural Connecticut, 1730–1840

      By about 1730, Connecticut was well established and beginning to prosper. Although the colony remained officially Congregational, its uniformly Puritan character changed, as religious fervor rose and sank, and the population became more religiously diverse (although still almost entirely Protestant), including Anglicans, Baptists, and Quakers. Society continued to be dominated by a small, interrelated elite, yet compared to other colonies there were narrower extremes of wealth and poverty.

      The economy of the colony, and later the state, remained predominantly agricultural (figure 20). Nearly everyone farmed, including artisans and even professionals who pursued other occupations. Expanding opportunities for trade encouraged the growth of market agriculture, first in the fertile Connecticut Valley, and then in other areas. Specialized crops included tobacco and onions, as well as foodstuffs and livestock exported to the West Indies. However, by the first decades of the nineteenth century, many rural residents were moving to industrial cities or to cheaper, more fertile land on the frontier.

      After the Revolution, release from British colonial restrictions opened new possibilities for trade. Increasing prosperity fueled urban growth, and Connecticut’s first cities, Hartford, Middletown, New Haven, New London, and Norwich, were incorporated in 1784. At the turn of the nineteenth century, private companies built