With Faith Restored

The home of a prominent 18th-century preacher was reclaimed by a 20th-century activist who left her own mark.

A prominent Georgian-period home in the Colonial Revival taste.

A passionate voice of the Great Awakening, the Rev. Joseph Bellamy was a larger-than-life character in 18th-century Bethlehem, a fledgling town in rural Litchfield County, Connecticut. Both his prestige and his imposing physical presence—he stood over six feet tall, and weighed nearly 300 pounds—were reflected in the house in which he lived, taught, and wrote from 1754 until his death in 1790.

Now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and managed as a museum by the preservation organization Connecticut Landmarks, the house and its collection of Colonial-era antiques reflect the life of the privileged pastor. Just as present in the home are the trappings of another life—that of Miss Caroline Ferriday, the woman who is credited with saving not just the Bellamy home, but also the lives of dozens of

women caught up in the horrors of a 20th-century war.

The Bellamy–Ferriday house has been described as one of the best surviving examples of Georgian architecture in Connecticut ... but more than a century and a half of additions, remodels, and restorations make it a case study in architectural bewilderment. By most accounts the house began in 1754 as a two-storey gabled farmhouse, one room deep, with a front door centered on the long, east-facing side.

The original structure’s open first floor included a cased stair on the south gable end and a cooking hearth and oven on the opposite wall. The nearly 8’ ceilings in the house have been attributed to both Bellamy’s height and his standing as a pastor.

Bellamy soon added on, more than doubling the size of the house with a two-and-a-half-storey addition set perpendicular to the original ridge line. Dates and details vary, but a National Park Service floorplan sketch showing the house as it might have been in 1760 includes rooms laid out roughly as they are today. The front door, in the addition and facing the green, opens to an entry hall with a curved staircase. A parlor is located to the left, a library to the north. Taking up the corner between library and hall, a sitting room completes the rectangular footprint. A door in the sitting room connects it to the original part of the house. The sketch shows the extant double-faced fireplace between library and front parlor, as well as a fireplace in the sitting room.

Although the 1754 home of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy was extensively added to in the 1760s, its high-style features were likely part of a facelift undertaken in the 1790s by Bellamy’s son David.

ABOVE & BELOW Drapes embroidered by Eliza Ferriday hang in the library, which the Ferridays painted in a green color matched to original paint found by scraping.

TOP RIGHT & RIGHT The parlor or sitting room, in the 1760 addition, was further expanded with a bay window during the late 1800s. In this room, a door next to the fireplace leads to the original 1754 section of the house.