Yesterday – circa 1808
South Windsor (then still part of East Windsor) was a bustling community of farmers, tradesmen, merchants and businessmen. Commerce was conducted along Main Street and ships laden with goods such as sugar, molasses, tobacco, etc. from the West Indies delivered these goods up the hill on Ferry Lane from the CT River to the general store on Main Street. The sailors then roomed at the old tavern next door, along with travelers from all over New England.Nearby was born the famous Pastor Jonathan Edwards, and Oliver Wolcott, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Eli Terry of clock fame and John Fitch of steamboat fame. The ancestral home of Ulysses S. Grant is just a short distance away.
This was a hub of activity in the 18th and 19th centuries, and remains so today.
Increase Clapp, moved to this corner, just up from Main Street, situated on the road to Wapping, in 1808. He married a local girl and, as is the custom, built a house for his new wife and future family. He was a blacksmith and his trade was much needed here and apparently would prove fruitful enough to later, in 1820, purchase one of the “mansion” houses down the street at East Windsor Hill. His son, Carlos, would carry on the trade in the old house.
In 1938, a highway separated this old house from East Windsor Hill, as it would all of the back yards of the houses on the east side of Main Street.
Today – circa 2024
But progress can be redirected. We can leave some of our relics in their place. Just as the spirit needs open space in its travels through cities and urban areas – it needs honest architecture. It needs the real materials of wood and brick and stone and iron, materials from the real world, from right under our feet to reflect upon.Toward that end, we have formed Clapp House Preservation, Inc, and our goal is to preserve just such a sight. At an intersection where otherwise would stand another gas station or warehouse or worse, instead stands an important piece in the thread of our history, the Increase Clapp house.
What a lovely sight to see if one is lucky enough to stop at the light and get a moment to gaze upon the stately two-chimney brick colonial with its arched doorway, leaded fan light window, and old house marker stating Increase Clapp, Blacksmith, 1808, to remember for a brief moment, how life used to be.
From the archives
INCREASE CLAPP HOUSE
Sullivan Avenue and John Fitch Boulevard
Original Owner: Increase Clapp, Blacksmith
Imagine this house as it was when it was built in 1808, over a century before John Fitch Boulevard (Route 5) slashed through town. This was the first house beyond Main Street on the road to Wapping, the eastern and inland area of the town. Throughout the eighteenth cnetury Wapping had been a primitive wilderness, removed from the prosperous and elite river culture on Main Street.
But in 1808 approximately fifty families, three hundred people, lived in Wapping. They had even built themselves a proper church seven years earlier and now employed a minister year-round. The first bridge over the Connecticut River was soon to be built at Hartford and the decline of the Main Street river culture was imminent. Increase Clapp was an enterprising man. He recognized all of this and acknowledged both worlds when he chose a site for his home and blacksmith's shop. His finely detailed Federal style house is grand enough and near enough to Main Street to allow him to participate in the elite culture there, yet it faces the road to Wapping and is removed enough from Main street to bow to the respectability for Wapping. The house retains nearly all of its original detail, altered only by the storm windows covering the original 12-over-12 pane window sashes. The front entrance is capped with a leaded fanlight and dual nine-light arched windows decorate the gables. The main cornice is detailed with brackets and a dentil course. Increase Clapp's stately home still today represents a bridge between the old and the new, a well-preserved reminder of the town's rich heritage surviving proudly amidst the encroachment of twentieth-century commercial development.