A Look Into Waterford's Oldest Homes

The simple drawing, done in 1835, is of a house with a center chimney and low sloping roof. The window panes are detailed, as are the puffy trees and bushes outside. It looks like it may have been done quickly, or from very good memory. There's nothing fancy about it - the Connecticut History Online database, where I found it, calls it a “rough sketch” -  but it held my eye for a long time. I sent it to my mom. “It looks like the houses you drew when you were little,” she says. “Except you would have put the windows in the roof.”

There is writing on the picture. It says "Beckwith House, Waterford, Con. 1/2 East of Niantic R. - 3/4 South of Meeting Ho.- 4 miles from New London." I wondered if I could find it. There is a Beckwith Street, I discovered, in Niantic, and on it a Beckwith House, a special education facility. Could that be it? That was west of the river, though, and a little more than four miles from New London. Still, I thought, who knows what John Warner Barber, the man who created the sketch, was thinking? As for the reference to the meeting house, there had been several at different times. It was less than promising, but it was the only lead I had, and I was impatient. I found Beckwith Street, a small quiet road, and the house. It had two stories, a flat roof and a pretty porch, and was clearly not “my” house.

I shifted my focus to the Beckwiths themselves. Waterford has had a lot of Beckwiths - I had encountered one , buried in the Jordan Cemetery - and some of them had houses. In the library, I read about Guy Beckwith, who served in Captain Nathan Hale’s company in the Revolutionary War. His house was on Butlertown Road. John Beckwith, who also fought in the Revolution, had two houses, one on Spithead Road and the other on Daniels Avenue. This was going to require a lot of driving.

But there was more. Jason Beckwith owned a shipyard on the Niantic River. During the War of 1812 he hid one boat on the other side of the river and could not refloat it again. He also hid numerous other craft from the British Navy on Niantic Bay. I wondered if some similarly crafty later Beckwith had hidden their house, too.

And then came the moment where if I’d been a movie character, I would have looked up from my book with an inspired expression, and rousing music would have played. There was, once, a Beckwith homestead overlooking the shipyard. It was not there now, but it was somewhere: someone, at some point, had transported it to Locust Court off Niantic River Road.

Locust Court was quiet, much like Beckwith Street in Niantic had been. I drove slowly, feeling like a house-stalker. And then, there it was. At least I thought it was. I circled around and drove past again, like a 16-year old girl outside the home of the boy she likes. It didn't look very old at first glance, but then again, if the drawing was accurate, the structure was so basic as to be timeless. It was freshly painted, and the doors were different. The doors in the sketch had struck me as charmingly lopsided; maybe they had been rendered incorrectly and the “new” door was right all along. Or maybe the house had been updated sometime within the past 176 years, or the strangely-placed doors were concealed on the other side. The center chimney and sloping roof remained.

The house had no visible advertisement of its connection to Waterford's old shipbuilding family. There was no plaque, no mention of its venerable age. If I hadn’t been pursuing it, I probably would have passed it by. But it was a sweet house, with a simplicity just like that captured in the sketch. I took its photograph, guiltily, feeling a bit predatory and ridiculous. Then I left, promising that from now on I would leave it alone.