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 turnpikes, vastly improving overland 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
