The
John Worthington House
by Doris Sherrow
The large,
white colonial-shaped house at 533 Main Street was built between 1842
and 1845 by a Haddam man, John Isham Worthington. Worthington had
married Jane Sage, who grew up in the four-bay colonial at 41 Bartlett
Street. The Worthingtons had a son, Joseph, born in 1835; they
seem to have had no other children.
In 1839, John bought a parcel of land that
included the then-century-old Ebenezer Gibbs house at 523 Main.
The three of them could have lived comfortably in the Cape Cod style Gibbs
house, small though it is. However, in 1842, Worthington mortgaged the
property with the one house on it. When the bank quitclaimed the property
back to him in January of 1845, the deed mentioned "buildings."
In all likelihood, he had built his new house by then, because the following
year, he sold the little Ebenezer Gibbs house to Robert A. Mitchell.
The Worthingtons’ new house was built
in the classic Greek Revival style, two stately stories tall and gable-to-street.
At the time it was built, there would have been far fewer houses than
you see today in that area. The nearest neighbors would have been 523
and 513 Main, to the south, and 497 Main to the north, all early-to-middle
1700s colonials. Another colonial-shaped house stood across the street
at 532 Main; it was built around 1804 by Joseph Sage, John Worthington’s
wife’s grandfather. Nearby were 492, 496, and a now-gone colonial
at 506 Main to the south, and 572, 582 and 584 Main to the north. Thus,
Worthington’s elegant Greek Revival house would have been an impressive
innovation amidst a colonial neighborhood.
Worthington was a sailing captain. He piloted,
among other vessels, the Joel Hall in 1836, and a schooner named
Joseph Rodgers and owned by the Middlesex Quarry Company in 1851.
In 1864 (this information coming from the records of the Gildersleeve
Shipyard as published in Beers’ History of Middlesex County), he
was part-owner of a schooner bearing his name - his son Joseph
was captain!
He also held civic power: he was tax assessor
in 1846, on the first board of directors of the First National Bank (which
stood at 269 Main, where Fleet now stands), and one of the directors of
the Middlesex Quarry Company in 1884.
When Worthington died in 1889, his son,
Joseph, was living across the street in 532 Main, the house that had been
his mother’s father Joseph Sage’s. Consequently, 533 Main Street
passed to the grandson, also named John Isham Worthington. But the grandson
lived only another seven years. He died at the young age of 38, and Joseph
Worthington sold the house to the Freestone Savings Bank. It passed into
the hands of Oliver Gildersleeve, and in 1905, to William and Atlida Andrews.
William Andrews was a former New
York City attorney, retiring to the country at age of 54. He brought with
him his wife Atlida, and her widowed sister, Nicolena Neilson,
a nurse. (It’s interesting to note that this area of Portland seems
to have had a beckoning charm for the New York City crowd in the early
20th century - the parents of Ruth Callander, who donated 492 Main
to house the Portland Historical Society, bought that house in 1918, also
to escape the city!)
On September 6th, 1910, Andrews and his
sister-in-law Nicolena took a ride down through Middletown, in a small
electric automobile which he was borrowing from the Electric Auto Company
in Hartford. He had a larger one on order; Electric Auto had loaned him
this one while he waited for his "dream car" to arrive. He had
even modified John Worthington’s barn into what the Penny Press called
"an automobile house" - apparently the word "garage"
had not yet been invented!
Unfortunately, Andrews’ driving experience
consisted solely of the two weeks he had been borrowing this small electric
car. He was heading back north up Route 17, three miles from Middletown
center, when another car, driving south, approached him. He steered to
the right, then veered off the side of the road. The car spun 180 degrees
then overturned. Both he and his sister-in-law were killed. Not long after,
the widow Atlida Andrews, whose health had been failing even before this
dreadful tragedy, sold the house to Oscar and Julia Hedstrom.
If you were surprised by William Andrews’
early 20th century vehicular fascination, let me tell you about Oscar
Hedstrom’s! Carl Oscar Hedstrom had come with his family from
Sweden when he was nine years old. Early on, his dad gave him a bike,
which he treasured. At sixteen, he took a job at a watch factory, and
soon rose to the status of toolmaker.
This mechanical talent also expressed itself
in his hobby, building racing bicycles. His 1960 obituary stated, "Hedstrom...
was regarded as one of the best riders of the day, appearing in the old
Madison Square Garden and other arenas." In 1901, he joined Hendee
Manufacturing Company, the Springfield, Massachusetts manufacturer that
produced the Indian Motorcycle, once the fierce competitor of Harley
Davidson. His inventions pushed the Indian from a bicycle with a motor
on it, to a smooth-moving, efficient device for traveling - fast! By 1913,
Hendee Manufacturing was the world’s top producer of motorcycles.
But Hedstrom left Hendee in 1913. One of
his race driver friends had been killed, plus there was friction in the
company over whether to strive for progress or profit. Hedstrom favored
progress; the investors wanted only profit.
In 1911, the Hedstroms had purchased the
beautiful Worthington house in Portland. With the Indian motorcycle no
longer his main concern, Oscar went to work on the house. The 1927 tax
assessor’s card for the house at 533 Main Street says, "remodeled
1913."
When
Gail Porteus and I were researching the Portland History and Architecture
book for the Greater Middletown Preservation Trust in 1979, we had a wonderful
conversation with Helen Carlson, Oscar and Julia Hedstrom’s
daughter. Mrs. Carlson showed us old pictures and told us great stories
about her childhood in the beautiful house.
She
remembered vividly how her father had remodeled the house when she was
a young girl. A pre-1913 photograph showed the three-bay, gable-to-street
Greek Revival part on the right side, with a two-story rear ell protruding,
ridge-to-street, from the back of the left side.
Hedstrom,
never one to fear an engineering challenge, had had the original gable-to-street
roof lifted off the Greek Revival style main block, rotated 90 degrees,
and extended further to the north to cover a front room on the north side
of the house! The result was a handsome imitation of the two-story, five-bay
colonial house.
During
the remodeling, the Hedstrom family--little Helen and her parents--camped
in three rooms, while carpenters swarmed about them, Helen told us with
a laugh!
Unlike
his hard-driving predecessor William Andrews, Oscar Hedstrom survived
to the age of 89. Even after his resignation, he was still called on to
solve mechanical problems with various Indian motorcycles. Helen, the
Hedstroms’ only surviving child, married Town Clerk David Carlson
in 1930, a year after he had built the house at 535 Main, on the northwest
corner of her parents’ large lot.
So
that’s why John Worthington’s stylish 1840s Greek Revival house
looks so much like a mid-1700s colonial. Every house holds many stories,
depending on how many people have lived there. The Worthington house holds
the stories of three families with a tremendous amount of zip, people
who have dreamed and accomplished many things. Or maybe most houses do,
but they simply don’t speak very loudly...!
