Oliver Ellsworth Homestead
Near Hartford, Connecticut
Just outside Windsor, Connecticut, a white clapboard farmhouse sits on a gentle rise where one of the more consequential careers in early American law was lived out. Oliver Ellsworth built this home in seventeen eighty-one and called it Elmwood. He was a Connecticut delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and he and Roger Sherman proposed the Connecticut Compromise, the great bargain that created a Senate with equal state representation and a House proportioned by population.
Without that deal, the Constitution might not have been ratified. Ellsworth also proposed calling the new government the United States, served as the country's third Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and died at Elmwood in eighteen oh seven. The house still stands and is open for tours.
