The 1764 Stevens House, Part 2: A Hatter’s Norfolk Legacy

By Joe Kelly

When Nathaniel Stevens came to Norfolk in the mid-1700s to set up his business as a hatter and build the house that still stands on Old Colony Road—and which the Stevens family would occupy well into the 20th century—he would become one of many craftsmen to ply a trade here. 

Isolated farming communities like Norfolk depended on artisans like Stevens to produce the boots, shoes, clothes, tools, leather goods and, yes, hats that people needed. Soon, however, that began to change. Factory automation, better transportation, westward migration, immigration, the coming of the Civil War—all of this wrought big changes in America’s antebellum economy and diminished the role of the individual artisan. Basic generational change was also a factor—as new careers beckoned, children and grandchildren pursued them.

A Small Town Scandal

In 1808, the year Nathaniel Stevens died, his oldest grandson, Benjamin R. Stevens, turned 18 and participated in an amateur theatrical performance in Norfolk’s meeting house (the Congregational Church). Well attended, it caused a bit of a small-town scandal. As recalled more than 60 years later in a Salisbury newspaper, the performance of a tragedy in the church was seen by some as “profane” and “a thoughtless mockery.” It was said that if his grandfather, the hatter, had still been alive, he would have stopped it. He wasn’t, and it was just the start of different path that Benjamin took through what would be a very short life. 

Benjamin was the first Stevens to attend college (Williams), the first lawyer (he apprenticed under Augustus Pettibone) and the first to leave the family homestead and head west. By 1827, he was a prominent attorney in Huntington, Penn., married to Margaret Moore (who hailed from County Armagh, Ireland), and chosen to deliver Huntington’s 4th of July oration. Then, four months later at age 37, he dropped dead, leaving Margaret with four children under the age of 10. She brought them back to Norfolk.

Hoes for the South

Her oldest son, Nathaniel (N. B.), just five years old, went to stay with his aunt Jerusha Stevens and her husband, E. Grove Lawrence. Soon, factories were starting to appear along the Blackberry River in Norfolk, and Lawrence played a role in several of them. When N. B. became an adult, Lawrence supported him in building a large plant called the Long Stone Shop, which achieved great success making planters’ hoes.

Hoes—arguably the oldest of all agricultural implements—remain a mainstay for today’s weekend gardener, but in early America they were much more than that. In the hands of the slave, the hoe helped make the spread of plantation agriculture possible. Stevens’s mass-produced hoe was strong and lightweight, drawn from a single piece of cast steel. Southern planters snapped them up by the thousands, launching Stevens into the upper echelon of Norfolk’s commercial world. He would marry, have two daughters and purchase the house on North Street across from the original Stevens homestead (now the home of Alyson and Tony Thomson).

The Civil War and Norfolk

But a Northern industrialist catering to Southern plantation owners clearly had to reckon with the threat of secession and war. Stevens took an active role in the Democratic Party, which in 1860 opposed federal efforts to abolish or restrict the spread of slavery. In April of that year, he ran for Connecticut secretary of state on the Democratic ticket. With tensions at a fever pitch in anticipation of the November presidential election, state elections in the Northeast were closely watched to gauge the electoral power of the anti-slavery Republicans. Lincoln, already actively campaigning, barnstormed Connecticut, giving speeches in Hartford and Bridgeport. The Republicans pulled through in a squeaker, winning by just 600 votes out of nearly 90,000 cast. (Norfolk went Republican, voting against its own favorite son.)

When the Civil War soon erupted, leaving Stevens’s Long Stone Shop idle, he pivoted. Instead of making tools that enabled slavery, the plant was used to make the muskets and pistols Union soldiers needed to bring it to an end. That effort met with mixed success, but Stevens had other ventures, including the routing of the new Connecticut Western railroad through Norfolk, the founding of the Norfolk Savings Bank and developing a block of stores at Shepherd Road and Route 44, where the ambulance building now stands. When the railroad began bringing tourists to Norfolk, he refitted the block into the highly successful Norfolk Hotel, which stood until 1968. Stevens continued to play a prominent role in politics as editor and publisher of the Litchfield County Leader newspaper. He died in 1905.

A Doctor, Banker and Teacher

Back at the Stevens homestead on Old Colony Road, three cousins of N. B. Stevens—Jonathan, Halsey and Louise—were also making their marks in the world. These were the children of Halsey Stevens, the younger brother of N. B.’s father, Benjamin. While his brother pursued a career in law, Halsey took over the hatting business. Like his brother, Halsey died young—age 37 (in 1837)—leaving the children to be raised by his widow, Dasiah Humphrey Pettibone. 

The oldest, Jonathan Humphrey Pettibone Stevens, studied medicine under Norfolk’s Dr. William A. Welch and graduated from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. When the Civil War broke out, Pettibone headed south to serve as assistant surgeon of the Fourth Connecticut Infantry. He came back home after serving 18 months and for the next two decades devoted himself to his Norfolk patients. He was admired for his willingness to treat anyone regardless of their ability to pay. 

His younger brother, Halsey Jr., entered the world of banking, first in Falls Village and then New York City. In time, he became secretary of the Charter Oak Life Insurance Company in Hartford and found himself testifying in court when that company was enmeshed in a major fraud trial. His son, Warren Fisk Stevens, would eventually take over the homestead on Old Colony Road and become the last of the family to live there.

The youngest child, Louise, availed herself in 1859 of the opportunity to attend Northampton’s Mount Holyoke Seminary, an all-women’s college. Norfolk and Mount Holyoke already had a strong connection: its founder, Mary Lyons, had been assistant to and gotten many of her ideas about women’s education from Zilpah Polly Grant, originally of south Norfolk. During its first 75 years, nearly 30 women from Norfolk attended Mount Holyoke, far more than from any other area town. 

Jonathan and Louise remained single and shared the house on Old Colony Road with various nieces and nephews. In 1883, they added a front entry porch, dormer and bay window, as well as a room for Jonathan’s medical practice. But the latter got little use—Jonathan died just two years later.

An Iconic Norfolk Photo

When Louise died in 1919, her nephew Warren Stevens and his wife, Grace, took over the Stevens homestead. They are the subjects of one of Norfolk’s most iconic photos—the American Gothic-like staging shows them sitting by the fire in their front parlor. Taken in the 1940s, it’s the first photograph in the book “Picturing Norfolk,” the very epitome of Victorian domesticity.

Warren Stevens died in 1954—the last direct descendant of Nathaniel Stevens to occupy the house—a run of over 180 years. Grace sold the house in 1968 to Edward R. “Ted” Stevens, whose father and grandfather had operated the Norfolk Hotel, later renaming it the Stevens Hotel. (Despite sharing the last name, he was not a direct relative of the hatting Stevens.) Ted Stevens remodeled the Stevens homestead for his sister, Florence, reversing many of the 1880s changes and restoring its original Cape-like simplicity. He also owned the home of Nathaniel B. Stevens across North Street and what had been the home of Jerusha Stevens and E. Grove Lawrence on Old Colony Road (now the home of David and Amy Troyansky). 

In 1975, the Stevens homestead was sold to the Romanos family. Daniel Romanos, a psychiatrist, along with his wife Dianne, raised three daughters there, calling the Stevens House home for nearly 40 years. In 2013, the house was sold to its current owners, Jane and Rick Andrias.

Next month, in the final installment of this series on the Stevens homestead of 1764, current owner Jane Andrias will reflect on what it’s been like acclimating to life in a pre-revolutionary, 260-year old Norfolk house.