Heritage Trail Guide

Stop #2 - The Abiel Beers House (c.1745)

Our second stop, along the Stepney Heritage Trail is the Abiel Beers house located at 65 Old Newtown Road and owned by Mary and James Donnelly.

Approximately ten years before the Thomas Hawley house was built Abiel Beers came to Stepney to farm and build a home.  This homestead is a reminder that until the early 1900s most Monroe residents farmed for a living.

Modern Monroe was originally the northern part of Stratford, Connecticut, which was settled in 1639.  In the early 1700s descendants of Stratford’s original settlers, Abiel Beers among them, carved farms out of the wilderness acres in the north end of town.  Beers built this one-and-one-half story house around 1745.

In 1761, Abiel Beers and his son Nathaniel were among 48 men who submitted a petition to the Connecticut General Court permission to form their own religious parish.  The nearest meetinghouse, as Congregationalists called their house of worship, was three miles away, making it difficult for residents of north Stratford to comply with the Connecticut law requiring everyone to attend all-day worship services on the Sabbath.

The Connecticut General Court granted their request, and in 1762 created the New Stratford Ecclesiastical Society.  In 1823 this society became the Town of Monroe.

Abiel Beers was nearly 80 when he died in New Stratford in 1778.  Abiel’s son Nathaniel spent the rest of his life in Monroe as well.  But two other sons followed their father’s example in seeking their fortunes far from home.  By 1775 Ebenezer Beers had moved to the town of Washington in northwestern Connecticut.  Abiel Beers, Jr.  had settled in New York State by 1794.  The brothers were part of the exodus of men and women seeking fresh opportunity that caused Monroe’s population to stagnate, then decline until the advent of the Housatonic railroad in 1840.

The Beers house is placed among open rocky fields that surround the property.  The House is a single story vernacular structure, meaning a structure without any specific stylistic attributes, though still typical of its time and place.  The five bay façade is balanced around a central entry and the chimney is placed centrally along the ridge.  The windows are all 12/8 double-hung sash with plain trim.  The house is sheathed in wood shingles and rests upon a fieldstone foundation, created from fieldstone found on the site from clearing the fields.  Fieldstone foundations were common among many of the dwellings that were built in Stepney in the 1800’s.

The Abiel Beers house, a pre-revolutionary dwelling is one and one-half stories high and was typical of the type of residential dwellings found through out Stepney in the 1800’s. The house and the roof is sheathed and roofed with natural shingles.