Antique Homes | New England’s Gifts

Light shines brightly on Zaccharias Walker’s house, built in 1691 in Woodbury, Connecticut. We know Zaccharias built it, because the small wooden marker at the corner of this handsome white chunk of Colonial history tells us so. His house has weathered sun, rain, and snow for 325 years, alongside dozens more antique homes along this pretty Main Street: monuments to our past, many marked with similar plaques, named and dated, theliving counterparts of the weathering tombstones that often tilt in a cemetery not far away. They speak of the townspeople who walked these streets of Woodbury, exactly as we’re walking here today.

The burgundy Colonial not far from Zaccharias’s, for instance, belonged to Hezekiah Thompson, who built it in 1760, 13 years before the Boston Tea Party. Who was Hezekiah? we wonder as we walk by. Or Moses Brown, for that matter, who built his elegant home in 1794 in Newburyport, Massachusetts. “Sea Captain,” reads his plaque. A whiff of tangible past. Remington Straight built his Wickford, Rhode Island, residence in 1882. Their names conjure images of somber beards and straight backs: men who built a country.

We walk these streets, past these dwellings, making their spaces our own. Today’s owners are proud of those names from long ago, a daily reminder of those who came before, even as they too become part of the story. Here is where we live, side by side, with our region’s past, where we meet our history every day, and wonder. —Annie Graves