Historic Properties—

House & Garden Tour Reveals

Elaborate Landscaping

By Andrew Gorosko

Members of the public last weekend toured nine local historical residential properties with formal gardens, where property owners have enriched the landscape with their own horticultural skills.

It was the 16th Annual Newtown Historical Society House & Garden Tour on Saturday, June 30, at which participants walked the sites of the well-established gardens. The fundraising event for the society had the theme “A New Look at Newtown’s Oldest Places.”

Participants on the self-guided tour were able to visit nine locations, six of which allowed house and garden entry, and three of which permitted garden-only visits.

Properties on the tour were: 44 Main Street; 59 Main Street, 95 Boggs Hill Road; 8 Eden Hill Road; 29 Taunton Hill Road; 16 South Main Street; 6 High Rock Road; 6 Surrey Trail, and 7 Bradley Lane.

The society’s circa 1750 Matthew Curtiss, Jr, House at 44 Main Street has a dooryard garden that was created for the society by The Garden Club of Newtown. The dooryard garden contains culinary, medicinal, and common household plants and flowers that were typical for the Colonial period through the year 1850. The house there serves as the historical society’s museum.

Brid Craddock and Harvey Pessin live in a circa 1749 Colonial house at 59 Main Street. The property contains both a front yard garden and a formal backyard garden. The backyard garden extends westward on the deep lot.

Ms Craddock is a professional landscape designer. Mr Pessin is the volunteer director of Newtown Victory Garden at Fairfield Hills, which provides fresh vegetables for the local food pantry.

Tour participants also visited the circa 1785 Northrop Farm farmhouse at 95 Boggs Hill Road, near Head O’ Meadow School. The house is the home of Barbara and Sean Patrick.

The heavily landscaped yard contains multiple outbuildings and many ornamental plantings, as well as a livestock shed that houses a variety of colorful exotic fowl.

Proceeds from the house and garden tour benefit the historical society’s maintenance of its Curtiss House Museum, as well as its educational programs.