211 Main Street
Old Wethersfield, CT 06109
Phone: 860-529-0612
http://webb-deane-stevens.org
“Ye most ancient towne in Connecticut.”
— THE MOTTO OF WETHERSFIELD
The neighborhood known today as Old Wethersfield was founded in 1634 by ten Puritan men and is Connecticut’s largest historic district. Within its two square miles there are 1,100 buildings which date to the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
The Buttolph-Williams house was built in 1714 for Benjamin Belden and his wife, Anne Churchill. It came into the hands of the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society in 1941, and it was restored and then opened to the public as a museum in 1951.
This is a two-and-a-half-story timber-frame house with a one-and-a-half-story addition, an unadorned front door, a steeply pitched roof, and a large central chimney. It has much of its original wood: the timber framing, floorboards, doors, and interior woodwork. Much of the stonework is original as well: the fireplaces, chimney, and foundation. The house has an outstanding collection of late-seventeenth-century furniture and household objects.
This house was completed in 1789, and here Isaac Stevens, a leatherworker, not only lived but also worked. The kitchen doubled as a work area for Mr. and Mrs. Stevens.
The first floor of this house is furnished as it might have been in the 1820s and 1830s. The furniture and decorative items are true to the period and the wallpapers are accurate reproductions of the originals.
The rooms and exhibits on the second floor tell us much about the life of nineteenth-century children. The childrens’ bedroom is furnished for five children, and the paint colors are the originals as discovered during the course of restoration in the 1960s. Other rooms display the Colonial Dames collection of dolls, dollhouses, and other toys.
This Georgian-style house was built in 1752 for merchant Joseph Webb IV (c. 1727–1761). He and his wife, Mehitabel Nott (c.1732–1767), had six children. Joseph died at the age of thirty-four. The executor of his will, Silas Deane, married the widow Mehitabel and built the home just next door. The Webb house then passed to son Joseph Webb Jr. The younger Joseph and his wife made this house a center for lavish parties and gatherings, and they accommodated overnight guests. It became known as “Hospitality Hall,” and justifiably so. General George Washington (1732–1799) was here for five days and five nights in 1781. Here he met with the French General comte de Rochambeau (1725–1807) to strategize in planning the Battle of Yorktown.
Webb sold the house in 1790. It had various owners before it was bought by Judge Martin Welles (1787–1863) in 1820. It remained in the Welles family until it transferred to Wallace Nutting (1861–1941) in 1913. Nutting was a well known champion of the Colonial Revival movement. He was a photographer, and his subjects were New England landscapes, colonial buildings, and early American furniture. An astute businessman, Nutting sold his photographs. He also manufactured and sold reproductions of colonial-period furniture. Mr. Nutting commissioned a series of murals depicting scenes from colonial times for the hall and parlors in the Joseph Webb House. He did this to add appeal to the house as one stop on his “Chain of Colonial Picture Houses.” Tours were given here, and there was a shop in which his photographs, books, and furniture were sold. With the advent of World War I and gasoline rations, fewer folks were able to travel. The Joseph Webb House failed as a Nutting business venture, and in 1919 he sold the property to the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, which restored the property and maintains this house museum. There is a special exhibit here dedicated to Wallace Nutting, his work, and his legacy.
Mehitabel Nott Webb, widow of the elder Joseph Webb, married her attorney and business advisor Silas Deane (1737–1789). In 1766 they built this house just steps from Mehitabel’s former home. Mehitabel died the following year, leaving Silas with their son and her six children from her previous marriage. Deane then married another wealthy widow, Elizabeth Saltonstall Evards, in 1769.
Silas was a Yale College graduate. In 1774, he was a delegate to the Second Continental Congress. Known as America’s first foreign diplomat, he became the country’s envoy to France in 1778. There he lodged with Benjamin Franklin, and they helped to secure a treaty of alliance with France. Deane died in England in 1790.
Over the course of the next century or more, there was a series of owners. The last was Mrs. Margaret Clark Fenn. A Colonial Dame, she willed the house to The National Society of Colonial Dames of America in Connecticut. The Dames meticulously restored the house from 1960 to 1974.
On entering this two-story house, visitors are treated to an impressively large and light-filled hall. The carved balustrades on the grand staircase are original, as is much of the other woodwork. One of the mantels is made from brownstone from Portland, Connecticut. Portraits of the Deanes greet visitors when they enter the parlor.