The father built it, the son died for it

A farmer's son expanded his father's timber house

David Phelps built the house at what is now 800 Hopmeadow Street in 1711. It was a working Connecticut farmstead, timber-framed, plain. He passed the land to his son Elisha Phelps, born in Simsbury in 1737. In 1771, Elisha expanded the house, adding onto his father's original frame. He was thirty-four. He had no way of knowing he had five years left to live.

The house he built up would outlast him by centuries. It stands today as the Capt. Elisha Phelps House, a museum called the Phelps Tavern.

Brothers rode north and helped take a fort

Four years after Elisha finished his additions, he and his brother Noah Phelps rode north with a small colonial force. Their target was Fort Ticonderoga, a British stronghold on Lake Champlain. The garrison was thin and half-asleep. The fort fell almost without a shot. It was one of the first American victories of the Revolutionary War, and it happened months before independence was even declared.

The Continental Congress noticed. Elisha Phelps was appointed commissary of the Northern Department, the officer responsible for feeding and supplying the army's northern campaign. It was not a combat post. It put him in daily contact with sick and dying soldiers, in camps where disease killed more men than musket fire ever did.

Elisha Phelps died caring for sick soldiers

Elisha Phelps died in Albany, New York, on July 14, 1776, ten days after the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia. He was 43. The article that records his death is plain about the cause: diseases he caught from the soldiers he was caring for. He never saw the country he had helped fight for take its final shape.

The house passed to his widow, then to his descendants. When the line ran short, it went to his brother Noah, the man who had ridden beside him to Ticonderoga. Phelps descendants held the property until 1962. It later became a canal-era hotel. Then it became a museum. Its rooms were fitted out to show what an inn looked like. Travelers came through by stagecoach and barge.

A forest settlement emptied out after a killing

Not every household near Simsbury got to leave and come back. A settlement called Pilfershire once stood in the forest not far from where the Phelps family farmed. Its residents feared the Native American population and witchcraft. They allegedly murdered a Native American man. The town did not recover. It emptied out and was abandoned. Stone walls and cellar holes still sit scattered through the trees. They are the only proof it existed at all.

A cottage survived by being lifted and moved

A cottage built around 1795 stood for over a century on the north bank of Hop Brook, facing West Street. It is believed John Poisson built it. It took its name from its last owner, Fanny Josephine Pomeroy Hendrick. In 1965, the whole building was lifted and moved half a mile to join a cluster of preserved structures now called the Massacoh Plantation. The Hendrick Cottage survived by being uprooted and resettled. The Phelps land passed hand to hand until it found a use that would keep it standing. The cottage did the same.

West Indies money built two Simsbury schools

Money made far from Simsbury built the schools that still crown Hopmeadow Street. Horace Belden's grandfather made his fortune trading with the West Indies. Belden spent it at home. He funded the water company. He paved roads. He paid for two schools built to look like European colleges. They had heavy brownstone walls, Gothic arches, and steep gabled roofs. The Horace Belden School and Central Grammar School opened in 1907 and 1913. The money left Simsbury for generations before it came back to build something permanent with the family name attached.

A cemetery predates every building around it

Before any of these buildings stood, the ground was already a cemetery. It was laid out in 1688, decades before David Phelps raised his timber frame, before Horace Belden's grandfather ever sailed for the islands. Everything in what is now called the Simsbury Center Historic District grew up around those older graves. Houses were built, torn down, moved, sold, and turned into museums. The cemetery just kept accepting what the town sent it.