Bradley-Wheeler House

The Bradley-Wheeler House has been associated with several of Westport's most prominent citizens: Ebenezer Coley, a local merchant who built the house for his son, and Farmin Patchin, Morris Bradley, and Charles B. Wheeler, all local businessmen who lived in the house during the nineteenth century. The Bradley-Wheeler House was built in the late eighteenth century and was remodeled during the second half of the nineteenth century in the Italianate style, probably under Bradley's ownership. The house has been little altered since this remodeling and represents the evolution of taste and the changing styles and methods of construction in residential construction in Westport. The unusual cobblestone barn on the property is the only documented structure of its type built of stone in the state.

The Bradley-Wheeler House is one of the oldest surviving residences in the center of Westport. Although most of the house's eighteenth-century features are visible only in the interior, the house retains many significant construction details. The only significant feature to be obscured by the most recent renovation was a rare survival of a cistern in the basement which was covered when the basement was renovated and the vault was added. The Victorian features of the house, most of which date from the Post-Civil War remodeling which gave the house an Italiana te appearance, exemplify the taste and values of the period. The BradleyWheeler House is one of eleven documented Italianate houses in Westport. This style enjoyed popularity in coastal Connecticut from c. 1850 through the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The molded cornice, broad overhanging eaves, and curious paired bull's-eye windows give the house a distinctive appearance.

The octagonal cobblestone barn at the rear of the property is very rare and unusual. A recent survey (on file at the Connecticut Historical Commission) listing all octagonal structures in Connecticut notes that only eighteen octagonal buildings have been documented in the entire state. Of these, only seven are masonry construction. Most surviving octagons were built as residences, and the only other barn in the survey is a frame octagon in Woodbury. The Bradley-Wheeler House barn is the only documented cobblestone octagonal barn in the state. Similar nineteenth-century structures are more common in western New York State, and the cobblestone barn in Alloway, New York, seems more closely allied to the Bradley-Wheeler House barn than any structure in Connecticut.