Historic Homes Tour Will Offer 300 Years Of Hattertown

By Shannon Hicks

With their old creaky boards and huge beams that strike awe when visitors enter, old homes are attractive outside and in. Unlike many of their brand-new counterparts, old homes have character: small windows, uneven doorways, wide-plank floors that may have been cut by hand, and more nooks and crannies than one can shake a stick at.

Old homes also have history. Some dwellings have been home to historic individuals, while others may have played a role in a town’s formation.

Newtown Historical Society will host its annual historic homes tour on Saturday, July 6. From 11 am to 5 pm, the public will be welcomed into seven homes in Newtown’s historic Hattertown section, where they can see the inside of some of the town’s oldest dwellings and meet the people who call them home. The tour will be held rain or shine.

Open this year will be the homes at 188 Hattertown Road, 201 Hattertown Road, 1 Hi Barlow Road, 3 Hi Barlow Road, 71 Aunt Park Lane, 8 Eden Hill Road, and 26 Eden Hill Road. The tour includes homes older than the town’s charter to one that was built just last year.

Tickets are $20, and can be ordered in advance by sending a check made out to Historical Society House Tour and sent to Newtown Historical Society, PO Box 189, Newtown, CT 06470. Tickets can also be reserved by calling 426-5937, or purchased directly at C.H. Booth Library, 25 Main Street.

On the day of the tour, knowledgeable guides will be available at each location, and each location will offer a rare look into a private home. Organizers and homeowners have requested that the tour be open to children over the age of 12. Without exception, pets are not allowed.

On July 6 tickets can be purchased at the library or at Matthew Curtiss House, 44 Main Street in Newtown.

Because the tour is being held rain or shine, refunds will not be given in the event of inclement weather.

The tour is completely self-guided, and ticket holders can visit the homes in any order they choose. Maps with directions to each of the properties will be available at the library and Curtiss House on the day of the tour for all ticket-holders. Each property will be clearly marked.

Proceeds from the event will support the historical society, specifically its maintenance of the Curtiss House as a museum and the presentation of free monthly programs at Booth Library.

Sallie Meffert, a past president of the historical society, had the challenge of deciding on the homes to be included in this year’s tour.

“We try to find an area that has a number of homes within close distance to each other,” Mrs Meffert said this week. “Sometimes this works better than others, but sometimes the homes are spread all over town.

“This year people were very generous. We had seven homes right off the bat.”

Thanks to the proximity of five of the homes, hearty participants will be able to park once and walk to five of the seven properties this year. The two homes on nearby Eden Hill Road are also within walking distance for regular walkers.

The historical society has hired a police officer to help with automobile traffic in the area of Hattertown’s green, which is a typically busy thoroughfare. A police presence will also help pedestrians moving between the homes in the historic south-southwestern section of town.

“It’s such a nice year to celebrate history, especially in light of the events of September 11,” says Mrs Meffert. “It’s nice to look back and see where we’ve come from, both here in Newtown and nationally.”

Will the fact the tour is taking place over what is considered by many a holiday weekend be a help or hindrance? Only time will tell; organizers are not making any predictions.

“I’d like to think that the holiday weekend means people will be spending time with their families, and will be interested in looking at part of Newtown’s past,” suggested Mrs Meffert. “Maybe couples will be interested in taking this tour together, or spending time exploring these homes with relatives who have come in for a visit. We’ll see.”

Historic Hattertown

The Hattertown Historic District was founded on October 5, 1970. Located at approximately the junction of Aunt Park Lane, and Castle Meadow, Hattertown, and Hi Barlow roads, the district includes 12 homes. It was placed on the National Register in December 1996.

Hattertown is so named because hatting factories were located in that section of town during the 19th Century. Hattertown Road today follows what 200 years ago was the Monroe-Newtown Turnpike.

According to an August 1996 Newtown Bee article called “Hattertown: Newtown’s Bequest From The Hatting Trade,” at the height of hat making in Newtown, around 1840, “there were seven hat ‘factories’ operating in Newtown with a total of 56 employees who made 30,400 hats in the year 1846 alone. Individual sites and houses associated with hatting families throughout the region have been identified, but Hattertown was one of the few places where an entire village was directly involved in the trade.

“Visitors to the now-historic district,” the article continued, “probably would not realize that 150 years ago the quaint little area of historic homes was a thriving community with four hat shops, a comb and button shop, two blacksmith shops, two wagon shops, a general store and a grist mill.” It is this picturesque section of town that Newtown Historical Society has chosen to highlight this year.

(Picturesque, but not always pleasing to the nasal senses to those who lived or visited there in the 19th Century. In their 1996 book Touring Newtown Past: The Settlement and Architecture of an Old Connecticut Town, Mary Mitchell and Albert Goodrich wrote, “Machinery rattled and a stench peculiar to hatting factories hung in the air around the rear of some cottages.”)

Matterich House and Barn, at 188 Hattertown Road, is a 20-year labor of love for its current owners, says Mrs Meffert. Matthew Schlansky and Richard Barker have lived in the house for nearly 20 years, and have carefully selected each item inside the home, which dates to circa 1790.

Most drivers along Hattertown Road do not have any idea what the house or its surrounding yard look like, thanks to a privacy fence installed decades ago that cuts down significantly on the amount of noise created by traffic passing a house situated so close to a main road.

Aside from the property’s red barn, the windows looking out from the upper floor of the farm house, the flag over the front door, and perhaps –– but not too likely, judging from the speed most people drive along Hattertown these days –– the rooster weathervane atop the screened-in and inviting porch, most participants have not seen the handsomely landscaped lawn, the tidy driveway lined with potted plants, nor anything within the walls of 188 Hattertown Road.

The Goodwick home, at 201 Hattertown Road, is also dated to circa 1790. The third circa 1790 home on the tour is at 1 Hi Barlow Road, opposite Hattertown Green. At some point in its history, the home now owned by Patricia McCormick had one of Hattertown’s hat factories moved from elsewhere on the property attached on to the back of the building. That former “factory” –– by today’s standards about the size of a workshop –– now serves as the home’s kitchen.

Next door, Jane and C.R. Shaw live with their children at 3 Hi Barlow Road in a home with Greek Revival influences that dates to circa 1810. Mrs Shaw thinks one of the outbuildings on the property may have been one of Hattertown’s button shops.

The Shaws have put on an addition recently that, according to Sallie Meffert, “was done so architecturally wonderfully, you don’t even notice it right away.” It was that addition that made the Shaws hesitate when they were first approached about opening their house for the tour.

“I told them we wanted people to not only enjoy their beautiful old home, but to see that the addition was done the way it should be,” Mrs Meffert said. “It isn’t some added-on monstrosity. Everyone just exclaims about how gorgeous it is.”

Across the green from the two Hi Barlow Road homes is 71 Aunt Park Lane, which has the original district schoolhouse on its property. The house, now the home of Sallie and Ned Jones, was once a general store with two hat factories and a button shop behind the main building. The schoolhouse even served one weekend during the 1870s as a courtroom when Newtown police arrested a madam, a young girl, and a young man on charges of prostitution after Hattertown residents complained of “a house of ill fame in their neighborhood,” according to the Mitchell-Goodwick book.

The house at 8 Eden Hill Road is an amusing concurrence of past and present: Atop the northeast-facing roofline of what many believe may be the oldest house in town a satellite dish has been mounted.

Dating to 1690, the house was constructed 15 years before Newtown was granted its charter. Between 1687 and 1701, according to Touring Newtown’s Past, “the General Assembly granted Captain Ebenezer Johnson of Derby some 300 acres on the north boundary of Stratford in this immediate region.”

Documentation and state requirements of that era suggest the home, today owned by Sharon Cohen and Jean Mutherin, was constructed by Captain Johnson. It is certainly one of the oldest, if not the oldest, homes anywhere in town.

The house has a fireplace, wrote Ms Mitchell and Mr Goodrich, “big enough to accommodate a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, which it once did.”

At 26 Eden Hill Road, Valerie Hawk and David Hoffman built in 2001 a house that is a reproduction of a house in Colonial Williamsburg. It is, says Mrs Meffert, a beautiful home and an ideal contrast to the other six homes on this year’s tour.

“It’s a jump of 300 years forward, and the contrast is an eye-opener of what we have now and what our ancestors put up with when they first set up house in Newtown.

“You could probably set the entire house at 8 Eden Hill into the garage of 26,” she laughed.