On its 300th anniversary, Litchfield holds its 67th house and garden tour
The Litchfield Green is going to be the place to be during the Home and Garden tour on July 13.
The Charles Butler Corner House, 1792. Photo: Visko Hatfield
I’m not quite sure which is more impressive: the fact that the town of Litchfield, Conn. is celebrating its tercentennial (that’s three centuries) or that the town is putting on its 67th (sixty-seventh!) historic open house and garden tour. That’s a lot of history in a lot of different forms, and the town is helpfully observing all of it on July 12 and 13.
The Litchfield House and Garden Tour is one of the earliest known house tours in the United States, and has served as a fundraiser for Litchfield Aid of the Connecticut Junior Republic (CJR) since its inception in 1934. The CJR provides residential and community-based care, treatment, education and family support for vulnerable at-risk, special needs and troubled young people. Today, the organization's programs serve around 1,500 boys and girls annually.
“It’s the last chance for the kid that doesn’t have the skills to fit in with the norm, or conventional schooling, or has been through traumatic family experiences,” said Marla Patterson, house tour chair and staunch supporter of the CJR.
Six years have passed since the last tour.
“We started seeing a decline in attendance,” Patterson explained. “We hated to see it go but couldn’t make the numbers work, so we decided to take a vacation from it for a while and see what would happen. We exchanged it for smaller events and waited for a big event to tie it to. The tercentennial was perfect.”
The tour returns with a robust schedule, featuring not just 10 houses and gardens dating from the 17th to the 20th centuries, but also auxiliary activities in and around the properties. All are within a one-mile walking tour in the Borough of Litchfield, itself a National Historic Landmark District.
A team of volunteers have done research on each of the properties, and Litchfield High School students will serve as docents, offering stories about the homes from the American Revolution and the Civil War. In the center of town, on the Green, local thespians will reenact historic figures with Litchfield connections. Visitors can expect to meet George Washington, Tapping Reeve, Benjamin Talmadge and a young boy playing town crier, lightheartedly roaming up and down the streets.
The 10 distinguished houses (several of which have never been opened to the public) include the Thomas Painter House (1682), one of the oldest houses in Connecticut, which was moved and reconstructed at its current location, stone by stone and board by board; the Ozias Seymour House (1807), a central chimney, Federal style home; the Frederick Barnard House (1886), a Colonial Revival; the Phineas Miner Law Office (1820), an example of the Greek Revival architectural style popular at the time; and the Frederick Barnard Garden, a formal landscape surrounding a majestic home. To bring Litchfield into the last century, the tour also includes the Marcel Breuer house (one of three in town), a Midcentury Modern masterpiece — worth the price of admission alone.
Of course, you can’t tour Litchfield and not take in some of its most famous buildings: The Tapping Reeve House (1733) and Law School, which attracted over 1,000 young men from all over the country to study law with Judge Tapping Reeve; and the Litchfield County jail (1812), the oldest public building in Litchfield, and one of the oldest penal facilities in the state.
The weekend begins Friday, July 12 with a preview tour and cocktail reception at the Ozias Seymour Homestead, but the big event is on Saturday, July 13. The tour begins at the house tour tent on the Green and runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. A program will be provided at time of check in. For more information and to order tickets, click here.
Happy 300th birthday, Litchfield!
