The following article was written by Dr. Julie Hughes, the Wilton History Room Archivist.
Two historic Danbury Rd. houses near Town Hall are for sale. Perhaps these buildings have inspired your imagination as you drove by on Rte. 7. If so, here is a bit of history about each.
Painted pale blue with a two-story addition to the north, the southern wing of 232 Danbury Rd. is its oldest section. This part of the house was built by Daniel Betts IV sometime after 1800, probably as a home for a hired man and his family. The little house was directly across the street from Betts’ own home and right next to his horse stables, making it a convenient spot to put up an employee.
Its first known resident was John C. Walley, who bought the place from Betts in 1838 and probably worked for him, too. Walley was honored with a Witness Stone installed at the Wilton Historical Society this past summer. He was born into slavery in Wilton in 1803. State law forced his owners to emancipate him in about 1824. It took him another dozen years or so to save up enough cash to marry, start a family, and buy his own home. Walley’s house is the only remaining home in Wilton once owned by a formerly enslaved person.
After Betts died, Walley’s steady employment dried up, and so he sold 232 Danbury Rd. a few years later, in 1848. The next owner who stayed for any significant amount of time was Jerusha A. (Beeman) Holt, who inherited the property from her father in 1854. Holt and her husband seem to have used the house as either a country retreat or rental property, as they also maintained a home in New York City. After the Holts, the house passed to the Gregory family in 1908, several members of which owned it until 1975. Since then, the place has housed real estate offices and an advertising firm.
A little to the north, 250 Danbury Rd. is the pale yellow house south of the intersection with Old Highway. This building has long been associated with Joseph Platt Fitch II, who lived there in the 1860s and 1870s. According to Bob Russell’s book, Wilton, Connecticut, Fitch was “a farmer, blacksmith, militiaman during the War of 1812, merchant, postmaster, staunch Democrat, and chorister of St. Matthew’s Church.” Fitch’s uncle, Joseph Platt Fitch I, supposedly built the place in 1792, but the land records reveal that he never owned the property and that no structures were on it until well after he died.
The actual builders of 250 Danbury were the brothers Asahel III and Zadok Raymond in the late 1810s. Both fought in the Revolutionary War and together carried on their father’s tannery business. It is unclear if either brother ever lived in the house before they sold it in 1823 to Elias Sturges, who was memorably killed a few years later by a wagonload of hats (technically it was the wagon that did him in).
From 1877 through 1922, the house belonged to women of the Gregory family (a Danbury branch only distantly related to the Wilton family). First, the widow Harriet A. (Fitch) Gregory inherited the home from her brother Sherman Platt Fitch, and then it passed to her daughter Minnie. In 1908, Minnie rented out part of the house to Abigail Rundel and Ethel R. Betts for their “Sign of the Wild Goose Tea-Room and Women’s Exchange.” This was one of the earliest women-owned businesses in Wilton. Rundel and Betts offered “light lunches, home cakes and pastry and lunch baskets for picnic and motor parties” passing by on Rte. 7. The ladies kept a guestbook for their patrons, who variously claimed to have arrived by “row boat,” “Leggomobile,” “tetrahedral kite,” and “aeroplane.”
Like 232 Danbury Rd., the 250 Danbury Rd. property eventually shifted from residential to office use. By the mid-1970s the first of a series of real estate firms was operating out of the building.
While Rte. 7 may not seem like a particularly historical road nowadays, its roots are firmly in the past. The few holdouts from our town’s rich inheritance that still survive along the road offer a tantalizing glimpse to passersby that there may be more to Wilton than just modern office buildings, generic strip malls, and ungainly apartment buildings.