60 Main Street - Howard V. Humphrey House

1887-1888 Queen Anne/ Victorian

This house has an asymmetrical facade with steep cross gabled roofs and a turret tower. The four different patterns of wood siding help accentuate the asymmetry and the additional amount of trim around each of these sections is reminiscent of another Victorian style, the Stick or Eastlake style. Exaggerated verge boards with carved and cut out relief designs in the upper story gabled facade are also typical of the Stick style.

Howard W. Humphrey was the son of “Deacon” Russell Humphrey (20 Lovely St). Russell, born 07Dec1812 in Farmington township, youngest child of Ralph and Rebecca (Woodford) Humphrey, had a very brief partnership c1841-1842 in clockmaking with Virgil C Goodwin following which, in 1848, he began a firm doing business as Goodwin and Humphrey which manufactured tin spoons. His brief clockmaking endeavor and the early spoon business appear to have been located in rented quarters in or connected to the former (1832) Patent Wood Screw Manufactory building (located in the oldest part of what ultimately became Sanford & Hawley) in Unionville, as he owned in 1843 a 3.5 acre parcel adjacent to that building in which Edward Seymour had conducted clockmaking operations.

During the 1870s Howard joined his father, Russell, in the company and, succeeding him, expanded the business of tin spoons, washers, and other hardware to include paper boxes, constructing a new factory for the HW Humphrey Company c1886 on the southeast bend/corner of the former Water Street, Unionville (at the mouth of Roaring Brook), which business was continued by his son-in-law, Joseph J Bailey, until the 1955 flood. Howard Humphrey purchased ¼ acre from Frank A. Tryon in 1887 and built the 60 Main Street house.