The Amos Eno House: A Manhattan Fortune's Summer Address

The Federal-style house along Hopmeadow Street in Simsbury carries a name that meant more in New York City than it ever did in Connecticut.

The house itself was built in eighteen twenty-two by Elisha Phelps, son of a local landowner, and became part of the broader Simsbury agricultural landscape that lined the Farmington River valley. Phelps was the father-in-law of Amos Eno, and the house came to the Eno family, among the most consequential real estate investors of nineteenth-century New York.

Amos Eno, born in Simsbury in eighteen ten, built his fortune in Manhattan real estate at a scale few individuals ever matched. He purchased the land at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street in New York City in the eighteen fifties, ultimately building the Fifth Avenue Hotel there in eighteen fifty-nine. That hotel became one of the defining institutions of Gilded Age New York: the first major American hotel with a passenger elevator, a gathering point for Republican Party leadership for decades, and the address from which Ulysses S. Grant and other politicians of the era conducted significant business. Eno eventually owned hundreds of Manhattan properties.

The house on Hopmeadow Street was the Eno family's summer residence, which Eno and his daughter Antoinette Wood enlarged. After her father's death, Antoinette Wood kept the house and had the firm of the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park, landscape the grounds.

The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-five. It sits as a quiet counterpart to the Manhattan career of a man who helped shape the physical fabric of New York, a reminder that the grand ambitions of the Gilded Age often had their roots, and sometimes their retreats, in towns like this one, along quiet New England rivers.