Category Archives: Longmeadow

After his first home in Longmeadow burned, Calvin Cooley built a new brick house on the same site, 418 Longmeadow Street, in 1827. Calvin Cooley’s eldest son, James, became a lawyer and in 1826 was sent by Henry Clay, president John Quincy Adams’ Secretary of State, to Lima, Peru as charge d’affaires, where he died several months later. Another son, Alford Cooley, married Caroline Bliss Saxton Cooley in 1833. Their daughter, Caroline L. Cooley Eveleth, later lived in the house with her husband. The Cooley-Eveleth House has a rear wing added in the 1930s.

The Bliss-Colton House, at 1077 Longmeadow Street in Longmeadow, was built in 1790 for Aaron Bliss (1730-1810), who married Miriam Colton in 1754. One of their sons, Aaron Bliss, Jr., was in Capt. David Burt’s company of minutemen from Longmeadow who marched to Boston on April 20, 1775. Aaron Bliss, Jr. died during the Revolutionary War, on June 25, 1776. The house was later owned by Alvah Colton.

Built around 1794-1796, the house of Capt. Gideon Colton is a Federal-style residence at 1028 Longmeadow Street in Longmeadow. It was constructed with beams cut from trees on the Colton property. When the house was photographed in 1934 for the Historic American Buildings Survey, it still displayed the later additions of a balustrade on the roof and an elaborate entry portico, which have since been removed.