Bishop, Peyton Randolph, House

The Peyton R. Bishop house is historically and architecturally significant as one of the few well-preserved residences remaining from the 19th-century Golden Hill neighborhood in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The house is also a notable example of a professional's residence remaining from the first period of the incorporated city's development and is allegedly the oldest brick dwelling in Bridgeport's urban core. As were most Golden Hill residences, the Peyton R. Bishop house was owned successively by men prominent in the city's 19th-century industrial, commercial, and political history. The house is also important for its Second Empire and Queen Anne style architectural modifications which reflect the changing tastes of Bridgeport society and are symbolic of the historic owners' desires to keep pace stylistically with the fashionable ongoing residential development of the neighborhood.

By 1836, the year building contractor Peyton Randolph Bishop (1810-1886) moved to Bridgeport from Guilford, Connecticut, Bridgeport was a rapidly developing industrial and transportation center with a population of approximately 4,000. Situated on Long Island Sound and within a day's shipping distance from New York City, the newly-incorporated city was engaged in the planning of a rail link inland to New Milford, a farming and mineral-producing town 40 miles north. The construction of the railroad line between 1837 and 1840 drew hundreds of workers, many inmigrant Irish, to Bridgeport.

Bishop's acquaintance with the area of Golden Hill may have begun when he was awarded the position of prime contractor for the construction of a railroad workers' housing complex on the north and east slopes of the hill. By 1839, the year Bishop erected his own house on Washington Street atop Golden Hill, this section and the south and west slopes constituted a small, newly established residential enclave of middle and upper-class professionals. The west slope of Golden Hill, previously farmland, had recently been purchased and subdivided for house lots by Lemuel Coleman. Coleman, who later superintended the construction of the Fairfield County Courthouse and was lauded in the Bridgeport Standard as "a man of fine taste, especially in architecture, as many of our buildings, both public and private, testify", built his own Greek Revival house (now severely altered) at 309 Washington Street in 1836.
Other early residents of the Golden Hill subdivision were two men involved in the construction of the new rail line to New Milford. Alfred Bishop, a cousin of Peyton, who had supervised the construction of the Morris Canal connecting Philadelphia with Newark and New York City, and Daniel Thatcher, a "wealthy Philadelphian" and developer of a large carpet mill and associated workers' housing in Bridgeport, built Greek Revival houses on Golden Hill Street.