At the height of the Civil War, a benevolent Hartford textile magnate, Lawson C. Ives, built two small apartment houses on Hartford’s then-fashionable North Main Street. He did it as an actor of private charity to provide free, or at the most, very low-cost housing for up to two dozen indigent Hartford widows. The buildings came to be known, as they still are, as the Ives or Widow’s Homes.
Ives died in 1867, and his will deeded the homes to the care of two city Congregational churches. For a century, these churches, which eventually evolved into today’s Immanuel Congregational Church, conscientiously administered their affairs.