Charles Benedict's Prospects

The architects of Charles Benedict’s hilltop fantasy cottage were Palliser & Palliser, champions of Queen Anne or “Stick Style” architecture. The house sits proudly atop an expansive lawn positioned to ensure that nothing encroaches on its commanding prospect over Waterbury. 

Benedict-Miller was designed to be a showpiece for its owners, so it was also a showpiece for promoting Stick Style and shaping American Stick Style dreams and fantasies as can be seen among houses on the grid of streets below and and in prosperous neighborhoods beyond. Queen Anne Stick Style as its accumulation of names reveals sought to look at once casual, rustic and graciously aristocratic.

In addition to designing mansions for the wealthy, Palliser & Palliser sought to bring Queen Anne Style to democratic America by publishing "pattern books” so those who owned no brass mills might have a peak and a tower, properly spread with timbers and a smorgasbord of brick and shingle patterns and rooms glittering with jeweled light through transoms of leaded glass.

 

Union Station Tower from Timbered Brass

From the porches and through the windows of Benedict-Miller Cottage Charles Benedict might have watched Benedict & Burnham thrive and Waterbury transform from farm town to industrial hub, a major junction in the busy railroad system that moved valuable goods and busy people. 

However, Charles Benedict died young, only occupying his new “cottage” for a very short time. In 1889 it was purchased from his daughter by Charles Miller, part owner of "Miller & Peck,” prosperous, Waterbury, dry goods merchants from 1860 to 1978.
 

 

King-size, Queen Anne Timbered Brass

 

Charles Benedict was Waterbury royalty, son of  brass industry founder and patriarch, Aarron Benedict, known widely as "Deacon Benedict,” and Charlotte Porter, daughter of Abel Porter, a founder of Scovill Brass and reputed to be the first person in America to mix copper and zinc to make brass. In 1879, at the top of the slope above their cousins' Rose Hill, and commanding a longer and broader prospect over the Naugatuck Valley, Charles Benedict built a king-size, Queen Anne, timbered, brick and shingle, multi-gabled fantasy soberly known as Benedict-Miller Cottage. Charles's father, Deacon Benedict's home is one of a dozen along Hillside Avenue, beyond the perimeter fence of Benedict-Miller's grand lawn, that face up the hill as if in homage to Charles Benedict's, Queen Anne palace.
 

Union Station from the cast-iron gate to Rose Hill, Waterbury

I know relatively little of the history of this cast iron gate except that it stands at the street before the front entrance to 63 Prospect Street, Waterbury. If it is contemporary with the house behind it, it was put here in 1852 by William H. Scovill, powerful citizen, sometime mayor of Waterbury and brass industry president, on a site with what was then the most commanding prospect of the town’s green spread below along the bottom of the hill. 

The home, known as "Rose Hill," would later be famously occupied by Scovill's descendants, so called, “barons of brass." Occupants would include eccentric Caroline Welton, only child of brass aristocrats, Joseph C. Welton and Jane E. Porter. Carrie's antics on horseback were topics for gossip. When she died she left money for to immortalize her black stallion, Knight, with a bronze statue at the head of the town green. Knight had, it was said, kicked her father to death.
 

Union Station #6 — McKim, Mead & White Details

Whether or not McKim, Mead & White approved of adding a 24-story tower to their Union Station design in Waterbury, their crisp terra cotta and brick detailing make it as beautiful up close as from a distance and, despite the views of early critics, I find the detailing makes the proportions pleasing.

 

Corbeling

 

Autumn Swamp Grass, Little Pond, Litchfield

 

Autumn Is Eye Candy #3, White Memorial, Litchfield, CT

 

Autumn Is Eye Candy #2

 

Autumn Is Eye Candy