Weatherstone

One of the region’s most impressive Georgian homes stands on the South Green in Sharon, begun in 1765 by Dr. Simeon Smith (1735-1804). A native of Suffield, Connecticut, Smith studied in Edinburgh, migrated to Sharon in 1759, and operated a prosperous drugstore which dispensed medicines imported from London and Amsterdam. During the Revolutionary War, Simeon Smith was captain of a company of Sharon men who fought in the Long Island campaign, while his brother, the Reverend Cotton Mather Smith (1731-1806), Congregational minister of Sharon for more than fifty years, served as chaplain at Ticonderoga. Simeon Smith’s house was on the route followed through Sharon when Burgoyne’s army, as prisoners of war, was marched into Connecticut. On that occasion, while the army was encamped for the night in the meadow across the street, the American officers dined at Weatherstone. In peacetime (1779 and 1780) a group of physicians from Massachusetts, New York and Connecticut met at the house as the “First Medical Society” in the new United States. John Cotton Smith, governor of Connecticut during the War of 1812, lived here when he led, and lost, the post-war fight against the adoption of the constitution of 1818 that brought about the belated separation of church and state in Connecticut. The house, which became known as “Weatherstone” after 1938, is a monumental three-story five-bay granite Georgian manor house, (National Register) incorporating a double hipped roof, dormers, Chinese Chippendale balustrade, Palladian window in the west elevation, broken pediment over a former entry, and peaked gable with wheel window above the entry. The house was devastated by fire on January 22, 1999 and has been subsequently restored to its former grandeur.