The Collins Hotel
By Sandy Clark

The building of turnpikes was one of the first extensive internal improvements undertaken in early America. Little evidence of these improvements remains, and until thirty years ago the Collins Hotel was one of the few that still stood.

Sometime between 1800 and 1810, four brothers by the name of Collins came to this country and settled in the Straitsville section of Salem Bridge. They built the Collins Hotel on the newly completed Straits Turnpike which connected New Haven to Litchfield. The hotel accommodated stagecoach traffic at the time.

The architect for the hotel was likely David Hoadley (1774–1839), who had built many distinguished houses in and around Waterbury. Records concerning the construction date of the hotel are missing, but the design and detail of the building is characteristic of Hoadley’s work; local tradition has always attributed it to him. The Collins Hotel was larger than most New England taverns for wayfaring dwellers and were very basic.

The Collins Hotel had a good reason for calling his establishment a “hotel.” Clouds of war were gathering between England and the States. The War of 1812 was but a year away. Hotel, a French word, was chosen intentionally to prevent a loss of customers. Using the English terms “inn” or “tavern” would have constituted favoritism towards the English. With a new enterprise, Collins could not afford to provoke prospective customers.

The Collins Hotel was basically a large inelegant block. It was a 2 ½ story, gable-roofed, rectangular structure which measured about 50 feet by 25 feet and faced the road. A small one-story cell used for storage projected from the rear on the right side. The exterior of the building was covered with clapboards.

The Collins Hotel’s original sign provides a hint of the feeling about the War of 1812.

The front of the Hotel was highly distinctive. A two-story colonnade was formed by setting the front wall back three feet and supporting the eaves with 6 plain Tuscan columns with regular spacing. The front of the building had three evenly-spaced portico style entrances.

The middle entrance was closely framed by two columns. The end columns were in line with the side walls. The second and fifth columns were symmetrically placed. Each entrance had its own steps, and each column rested in its own brownstone block. Windows existed on each side of the doors and above the middle entrance.

Each entranceway had a pitched roof and was an open porch covered with wooden shingles. An interior, less elaborate entrance was found at the east side of the Hotel. The building served Straitsville as a hotel, tavern and post office. The three separate entrances suggests the building was designed with that intent.

Visitors who registered at the hotel entered into a large hall or main hall with stairs leading up to narrow hallways on the left and right of the building. The bedrooms on the second floor opened from the hall. Rooms on the third floor were without windows and had numbers etched on their doors.

The hotel served as the center of Straitsville with a post office in one part of the building. Later Collins had a store there as well. The hotel was the local center of gaming and cockfighting as well as a stopping off place for traveling menageries and wax works. The history of the Collins Hotel illustrates how transportation was used to introduce cultural diversity into rural areas.

Source
Naugatuck Historical Society Newsletter
Volume 13, Issue 1
January - February 2008

The Collins Hotel
Part II
By Sandy Clark

The Collins Hotel in Straitsville (part of Rt 63, Naugatuck) served as a stopping point for the stage coach line that traveled from New Haven to Litchfield. Owner, Ahira Collins, and his staff were very busy seeing to the needs of tired and hungry passengers. Collins offered some of the finest food in the area, and his kettles were always filled on the fires of the four brick ovens.

Ahira was a short, thickset person with a jovial disposition. He is remembered not only for his food but for his famous fruit punch as well.

Stories abound about the Hotel, the Post Office there and the small store Collins kept across the street.

Two elderly sisters who lived down the road were among his customers. The sisters’ dislike of humans, especially men, led to their conducting business through the use of signs. When they needed supplies, they wrote an order and placed it on their back porch with a blue flag in the yard as a signal to the grocer to get the grocery list. The food was placed on the porch steps, and one of the eccentric sisters would come out to take it into the house.

Too romantic to be acceptable is another story concerning one of the sisters. She had a lust for a handsome young husband in the Revolutionary War. Supposedly, the husband was captured by Native Americans and many long years later escaped to search the house for his wife. He found the two sisters dead in each other’s arms in an empty house.

Collins is noted for being something of a practical joker but had the tables turned on him by one of his patrons. On one occasion, a traveler had a meal for which he complained of the charge, saying that it was only “pork and beans.” However, he settled the bill and went on his way. A few days later, Collins received a letter for which, as was usual in those days, he paid 25 cents in postage. Inside, without a signature, was a simple message: “Pork and Beans.” This happened a second time, but when a third letter arrived, Collins finally refused to accept it.

After 30 years of seeming prosperity, people thought that Collins was a wealthy man, ready to retire from business. To the surprise of all, he went into bankruptcy which was caused in large part by his three sons, Oscar, Orville and Sheldon. They were adverse to working, and spent their father’s money on sports, women and strong toddy. Collins was forced to retire and died a poor man.

Source
Naugatuck Historical Society Newsletter
Volume 13, Issue 2
March–April 2008

The Collins Hotel – Part III: The End
By Sandra Clark

Ten years after Ahira Collins retired in bankruptcy, Straitsville experienced another boom; a pocket book factory and a knife shop operated there. A foundry, too, was established and was backed with New Haven money. For 10 more years Straitsville was in better financial conditions, but the arrival of the Naugatuck Railroad brought about a sudden demise of Straitsville. New Haven capitalists refused to furnish the money for a railroad terminus, so tracks were not laid through Straitsville. Bridgeport capitalists approached Eban Tuttle’s malleable iron company (now heard as the Eastern Malleable Iron Works in Union City) for iron to build a railroad, and Salem Bridge forced the road south.

Back in Straitsville, Robert Rentz tried to start another boom. He opened a sheaer factory and a shoe blacking factory on Beacon Brook. The operations lasted only a short time, and the once lively village soon became deserted.

Meanwhile, Merritt Wooding bought the Collins Hotel from the town of Bethany which held the mortgage in 1854. When Merritt died, the hotel became the property of Thomas Wooding. A Mr. Beach and his son, relatives of Wooding, occupied the house. Because of Mrs. Thomas Wooding’s fondness for the Collins Hotel (she worked as the hotel housekeeper during this period of ownership) the Collins Hotel was kept in good repair.

During this time the interior was changed to make it suitable for social living. The original space for the Collins general store was transformed into two parlors with folding doors between them. Dances were held here and attended by people from miles around.

A ladies room remained behind the hotel’s dance parlor for women awaiting the coach. Small bedrooms existed upstairs and were heated by a large fireplace in the hall. The downstairs contained a bar, a dining room, and an L-shaped kitchen with four brick back ovens and three stone chimneys.

The Collins Hotel and surrounding properties on New Haven Road and Hotch Hill became the properties of the town of Naugatuck until it was purchased by Welsford Clark and his wife, Mildred. Mr. and Mrs. Clark transformed the hotel into apartments, each with its own entrance. The Clarks lived there until they built a home nearby facing New Haven Road.

(This writer remembers the hotel’s sloped floors on which she played with some of the children who lived in the apartments during the 1940s.)

Interest in preserving the Collins Hotel is evident from an application to the National Register of Historic Places at a time when it was still owned by Mildred Clark. But inclusion on the State Register of Historic Places includes a July 1975 letter from the Connecticut Historical Commission. The Naugatuck Historical Society and its president, Mrs. Wooding, knew the history and significance of the building and “tried everything under the sun” to preserve the building, but the cost of dismantling, moving and re-erection was too much for the Old Sturbridge Village, Yale University and the Deerborn Museum.

Believing it necessary to remove the building from the site, Mrs. Clark contracted to have the building demolished. Under false promises, unknown parties removed valuable detailing. The respectable Naugatuck Valley Building and Wrecking did the final dismantling in 1975.

Source
Naugatuck Historical Society Newsletter
Volume 13, Issue 3
May-June 2008