A brickmaker built his house from his own backyard

Giles Barber built his own house from his own clay

Giles Barber dug clay from the ground across the road and turned it into a house.

He ran brickyards on the other side of what is now Windsor Avenue. The soil there was good for firing brick. Barber used it to build his own home instead of selling every load. The result was the Giles Barber House, a brick house at 411-413 Windsor Avenue, raised around 1825.

The house he built was not showy. It followed an L-shaped plan common to early Greek Revival homes. But its plainer details and a half-round window under the peak of the roof belonged more to the older Federal style. Builders of that era often worked between two fashions at once. Barber's house shows both. It still stands two and a half stories tall, its brick walls holding brownstone lintels over each window.

Barber's choice mattered because so few houses like his survived from that period in southern Windsor. Brick was expensive and most people built in wood. A man who owned the brickyard could afford to build differently, and did.

A brick house outlasted the yards that made it

The brickyards that gave Barber his walls did not last as long as the walls themselves.

Windsor Avenue grew up around the house long after the clay pits stopped producing. By the time historians surveyed the town's oldest buildings, the yards were gone. The house was one of the few things left to prove they had ever been there. In 1988, the Giles Barber House was added to the National Register of Historic Places. It was recognized as a well-preserved example of a house built between the Federal and Greek Revival styles.

The bricks that made it came from ground a man dug himself. He fired them and stacked them into walls for his family to live behind. Nearly two hundred years later, they are still standing.

Windsor's oldest gravestones still stand in Palisado Cemetery

Windsor claimed its permanence in the ground before anyone thought to bake it into brick.

The town laid out its first burying ground in 1637. It sat on a plot behind where the First Church would later stand. People know it today as Palisado Cemetery. Some of Connecticut's oldest surviving gravestones stand there. They are cut from local sandstone. One marks Ephraim Huit, who died in 1644. Families who settled Windsor put their dead into this same soil. The stones are still legible.

An epidemic turned Windsor against Alse Young

An epidemic swept through Windsor in 1647. It killed neighbor children in a house next door to a woman named Alse Young.

Suspicion followed the deaths. Young was accused of witchcraft and sent to Hartford. She was hanged that May. She was the first person on record executed for witchcraft in the American colonies. The Connecticut General Assembly exonerated her in 2023, more than 375 years later. The soil that fed Windsor's brickyards and filled its burying ground also carried this. A town under strain turned on one of its own.

William Phelps never left the ground he founded

William Phelps (colonist) came to Windsor as one of its founders. He was an English Puritan who had already helped settle Dorchester, Massachusetts.

He stayed. Windsor was where he built his life. In 1672, he died. His name sits among the earliest recorded in the town's founding generation. Other families would go on farming and building here for centuries. Phelps never left the ground he helped claim. Half a mile south of where he is remembered, Giles Barber would dig that same ground for clay. This happened two centuries later. He raised a house that is still standing.