The largest brick house tobacco money built

A tobacco farmer built Windsor's grandest brick house

Eli Phelps grew tobacco on this ground, and it made him rich enough to build a house nobody in Windsor could match. He built it on what is now Marshall Phelps Road. That's a short walk northeast of where you stand. He built it in brick, which was expensive and rare for a farmhouse of that era. Most of his neighbors built in wood.

The Eli Phelps House rises two stories, flat-roofed, with deep eaves. Paired brackets hold up the eaves in the Italianate style. This was an architectural fashion from Renaissance Italy that swept through American farmhouses in the mid-1800s. A square cupola tops the roof. It has its own small gallery of round-arch windows facing every direction. Two polygonal bays jut from the north and south walls. Each one runs the full two stories. A porch wraps the east and south sides. A brick ell ties the house to its own brick carriage house out back.

None of it was accidental. A tobacco farmer built this large. He chose brick. He added a cupola built for nothing but the view. He was making a statement about what the crop had done for him. Windsor's shade-grown tobacco fields had turned modest colonial farms into real fortunes by the mid-19th century. Phelps built the proof of it in brick and glass.

The house stands today much as Phelps left it, 735 meters from this spot. It entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1988. The register recognized what a good tobacco season could build in Windsor, Connecticut.

Windsor buried its dead in Palisado Cemetery from 1637

Windsor's founders set aside a burying ground before they had much else settled. Palisado Cemetery went into use in 1637, near the town's original stockade. Within twenty years, the plots were full. The town had to add adjoining land just to keep burying its own dead. Connecticut's oldest surviving gravestone stands there, marking Reverend Ephraim Huit, who died in 1644. The same families clearing fields and building fortunes were filling this ground just as fast.

Amy Archer Gilligan poisoned residents in her care

Amy Archer Gilligan ran a home for the elderly in Windsor, taking in residents who trusted her with their care. Between 1907 and 1914, an unusual number of them died. She was convicted of poisoning five men, including her own husband, Michael Gilligan. Investigators exhumed bodies and found arsenic in several of them. She was suspected of killing about twenty people who had been in her care. Newspapers of the era called her home "Windsor's murder factory." The case became one of the first American serial-poisoning prosecutions to draw national attention.

William Phelps helped found Windsor and farmed its land

William Phelps (colonist) left Dorchester, Massachusetts, and helped found Windsor in the 1630s. He farmed this land as one of the town's first Puritan settlers, building a life from the same soil his descendants would later work. He died in Windsor in 1672. Two centuries later, a namesake descendant named Eli Phelps put up a brick house. It still stands off Marshall Phelps Road. The family's claim on this ground outlasted the meetinghouses and the wooden farmhouses both.