New Video: Hartford Mansions of the Perkins Dynasty of Lawyers

Enoch Perkins House (c. 1790), which stood at the corner of Main Street and Capitol Avenue. It was torn down in 1895 to make way for an extension of the Linden apartment building.

My latest YouTube video is about three houses erected for three generations of the Perkins family of lawyers. First, the now lost home built by Enoch Perkins in about 1790 on Main Street at the corner of Capitol Avenue. Then the house on Hawthorne Street where Enoch’s son, Thomas Clap Perkins and his wife, Mary Beecher (sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe) lived from 1853 until 1866. It was later occupied by writer Charles Dudley Warner and then, in the early twentieth century, was the childhood home of Katharine Hepburn. It was later torn down. The third house was the home of Thomas and Mary’s son, Charles E. Perkins, who was a friend and legal advisor of Mark Twain. That house survives today on Woodland Street. Charles’s son Arthur Perkins was the family’s fourth generation lawyer. Before his death in 1932 he lived in a house on Gillett Street that is also now gone (I don’t have any pictures or information about it, so I can’t say much about it in the video).