Gideon Welles House
house in Glastonbury, Connecticut
The Gideon Welles House is a historic house at 17 Hebron Avenue in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Built in 1783, it was home to generations of the locally prominent Welles family, whose most famous member was Gideon Welles, the United States Secretary of the Navy under Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War. Now re-adapted to commercial uses, the house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970.
Description and history
The Gideon Welles House stands in an area of dense commercial construction in northern Glastonbury, at the northeast corner of Main Street and Hebron Avenue. It is a 2+1⁄2-story wood-frame structure, with a side-gable roof, central chimney, and clapboarded exterior. Its front facade is five bays wide, with 12-over-12 sash windows placed symmetrically around and above the center entrance. The entrance is flanked by sidelight windows and pilasters, and is sheltered by a hip-roof porch with round columns. A single-story ell extends to the right side at a recess, with a porch across its front that is topped by low balustrade.
The house stands on land that was purchased by Thomas Welles of Wethersfield in 1655. This house was built in 1783 by Captain Samuel Welles for his son, also named Samuel.
“Gideon Welles House” enters the record as house in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Gideon, Welles and House can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q46222017. Authority coordinates are 41.712, -72.608. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1783, 1970 and 1655.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gideon Welles House” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.