nothin Hillhouse To Rent Out Rooms | New Haven Independent

Hillhouse To Rent Out Rooms

Not classrooms at James Hillhouse High School, but at the mansion on Grove and Temple Streets. Two hundred and one years ago, the gentleman after whom the high school is named lived there … and gave one Henry Hubbard permission to turn his elegant mansion” into a boarding house.

To call it a boarding house is not intended to invoke images of low rent and squalor known to the boarding houses of the 1930s.

Instead, think hotel on the healthy, bucolic, garden-filled periphery of early 19th Century New Haven’s dirty, manure-filled downtown streets.

Think fancy ladies and gents coming in their carriages not for a weekend but a longer stay, and guests who might want to be contiguous to most of the public edifices in the city,” as an advertisement in the Sept 21, 1814 Connecticut Herald suggests. To read — or hear — more about it, click on the audio above or find the episode in iTunes or on any podcast app under WNHH Community Radio.”

At this time New Haven shared the honor of being state capitol with Hartford. In that city 40 miles north, Hillhouse would be a player in the infamous Hartford Convention. That was the angry gathering of Federalists, like Hillhouse, who did not like the effects of the then ongoing War of 1812 on American business, among many other complaints.

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