History in houses: the Butler-McCook house and garden in Hartford, Connecticut

Magazine Antiques, August, 2002 by Beverly Johnson Lucas

Hartford was settled by the Reverend Thomas Hooker (1586-1647) and his followers in 1636. Laid out along the Connecticut River and incorporating the Little River (now the Park River), it became a busy port and an economic, cultural, and political center of the colony in the eighteenth century, sharing the role of capital with New Haven. (1)

Main Street in Hartford developed into a major thoroughfare, which gradually faded with the years. Today, the Butler-McCook House is the only eighteenth-century single-family dwelling remaining on the street. (2) It was lived in by the same family for four generations, from 1782 until 1971, and has been restored over the past four years by the Connecticut Antiquarian and Landmarks Society. It has recently reopened to the public as the Butler-McCook House and Garden.

Daniel Butler was the eldest of eight children of Moses and Sarah Butler (c. 1730-1813), and grew up in his father's popular tavern on Main Street. By the age of twenty-two Daniel was practicing medicine, with many prominent citizens of the city as his patients. They included Jeremiah Wadsworth (1743-1804), the city's wealthiest resident, and Ebenezer Watson (1744-1777), the publisher of the Connecticut Courant. Butler's medical ledgers document visits and doses administered, with the occasional references to bleeding, extracting teeth, and dressing wounds (see Pl. III). (3)

Daniel Butler married Sarah Sheldon Ledyard, the widow of Austin Ledyard (1751-1776), in 1779. She inherited her first husband's various mills, providing new business opportunities for her second husband. Daniel became part owner of the grist- and sawmills located along the Little River in Hartford and a paper mill established by Ledyard and Ebenezer Watson in Manchester, Connecticut, in 1776.

The paper mill was built to supply the Connecticut Courant, which had trouble finding paper during the American Revolution. Ledyard and Watson died shortly after establishing the mill, leaving their widows, Sarah Sheldon Ledyard and Hannah Bunce Watson (1749-1807), to operate the business. After his marriage to Sarah, Daniel Butler operated the mill with a business partner, Barzillai Hudson (1741-1823), who became Hannah Watson's second husband. They erected another paper mill on the Hockanum River in 1784. (4) Although the paper mills were in Manchester; Daniel maintained a store on Main Street in Hartford, where he bought rags for papermaking and also sold the finished paper. (5)

In 1782 Daniel and Sarah Butler built a house (P1. I) on Main Street on land originally assigned to Andrew Bacon (d. 1669) in 1639 (6) and subdivided several times in the eighteenth century. Butler purchased his lot from a blacksmith and butcher named Will Hooker for [pounds sterling]144. To build his house and one-story ell, according to his account books, Butler made payments to John Thomas, Ashbel Shepard (1753-1813), and Abraham Sedgwick (1721-1797) for joinery and framing, while several of Butler's customers paid their debts to him by performing duties such as clapboarding and whitewashing--making the construction practically a neighborhood affair. (7)

Family tradition suggests that the main house was built onto a small existing structure once used as Will Hooker's blacksmith shop, but documentary and architectural evidence indicates otherwise. The original property deed notes Daniel's purchase of "that certain piece or parcel of land...being part of my homelott," but does not mention any existing structure. Also, the architect Henry S. Kelly (1901-1960) concluded in his 1931 architectural survey that the main house and ell were erected at the same time. He found that the cellar extended under both sections of the house, that the stone foundation walls were uniform throughout, and that the first-floor framing indicated a single sill common to both the main house and ell. (8)

Daniel and Sarah Butler's oldest son, John (see P1. II), became the head of the household on the death of both his parents in 1812. He had a store on Main Street, south of the Little River Bridge, where, according to his account books, he sold a variety of goods including molasses, tea, raisins, nutmeg, coffee, indigo, rum, cider, brandy, tobacco, and flour He also sold paper, presumably from his father's mills, which he operated from his father's death until his own. (9) Although his father had had many financial difficulties, as documented by several mortgage deeds and advertisements offering the mill properties for sale, (10) John expanded the business with agents in New York City and Philadelphia, and paper was shipped as far as Baltimore, Savannah, Detroit, Saint Louis, and New Orleans. John also continued to operate the Main Street store, which he moved north of the bridge in 1816 to be closer to the developing retail center of Hartford. (11)

In 1837, at the age of fifty-seven, John Butler married for the first time. His wife was Eliza Royse Sheldon (1797-1858), the widow of the book publisher George Sheldon (P1. XII), who was supporting herself by teaching. Her mother, Lydia Bull Royse (P1. V), the daughter of the tavern keeper and merchant Frederick Bull (1753-1797) and the widow of John Royse (1772-1798), had established a school for girls in Hartford in 1799, one of the two major female academies in the city in the early nineteenth century There, Lydia taught reading, writing, drawing, embroidery arithmetic, geography painting, music, and filigree. (12) When Eliza married George Sheldon in 1816, Lydia closed her school. However, when Sheldon died suddenly the following year, mother and daughter were forced for financial reasons to reopen the school. Lydia Royse eventually stopped teaching but Eliza continued in order to support herself and her family, which now included her daughter, Mary Lydia Sheldon (see Pl. XI, left). After her mother's d eath Eliza taught school in Canada and Ohio before returning to Hartford to work as a governess. (13)