Capt. Amos Palmer

Fire was a stem regulator of village life in Stonington, CT. James Hammond Trumbull (1821-1897), a Connecticut state archivist, wrote about the first devastating fire--on May 24, 1789--in his notebook:

A barn full of hay belonging to Esq. Nathaniel Miner [1732-1815], took fire, and communicated to a store & dwelling house belonging to Capt. Amos Palmer which were both consumed, with a quantity of West Indian goods, two or three hundred bushels of Indian corn & a quantity of household furniture.

Capt. Palmer's loss is about [pounds sterling]1000.

Amos Palmer built a new house on his land, and an 1809 deed for the adjoining property to the south describes the boundaries of the land conveyed with this phrase: beginning 32 links south from the southeast corner of a dwelling house that formerly belonged to Capt. Amos Palmer which house is since burnt and a new house rebuilt but not exactly on the same foundation.

The Capt. Amos Palmer House is located on Main Street in Stonington Borough. The house was built by Amos Palmer in 1787, replacing his earlier home on the same site, which had burned down when a barn on an adjoining property caught on fire. When a British cannonball hit the house during the War of 1812, Capt. Palmer waited until it had cooled and brought it to the fort to be returned to its sender! From 1837 to 1840, the house was occupied by Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler, whose sister was married to Dr. George E. Palmer of Stonington, and her family. Her husband, the engineer Major George Washington Whistler, was working on the Providence to Stonington railroad. Their son, the artist James McNeill Whistler, was a child at the time. He later painted the famous portrait of his mother in 1871. The family frequently revisited the house. In the twentieth century, it was the home of the poet, Stephen Vincent Benét, and later the Canadian artist, author and filmmaker, James Houston.