The Parker House: One of Connecticut's Oldest Survivors

The one-and-a-half-story wood-frame house at six eighty Middlesex Turnpike in Old Saybrook is believed to have been built in sixteen seventy-nine by Deacon William Parker, making it one of the oldest surviving houses in Connecticut. It features a gambrel roof in an early style rarely seen in surviving New England structures, and it remained in the Parker family continuously until the nineteen sixties, an almost unbroken chain of nearly three centuries in the same hands. Old Saybrook itself was the site of the original Saybrook Colony founded in sixteen thirty-five, one of the earliest English settlements in Connecticut, and it later served briefly as the location of the Collegiate School that would become Yale University before the school moved to New Haven in seventeen sixteen.

The Parker House was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-eight. Its plain gambrel profile on the Middlesex Turnpike, largely unchanged since the seventeenth century, makes it one of the most tangible colonial survivals on the Connecticut stretch of Route One.