Ezra Stiles House

This third Clarke Street gambrel takes its name from its most famous occupant. Built to serve as the rectory for Second Congregational “forever,” this broad, five-bay, two-and-one-half-story house was home to the learned reverend briefly (1775–1776) while he served as minister of the church. He had previously served for thirty years as librarian of the Redwood, where he wrote his Ecclesiastical History of New England and North America and investigated fields as disparate as Abyssinian geography, astronomy, and silkworm cultivation, while also drafting an important map of Newport (1758). As pastor he, like the Reverend Samuel Hopkins of Newport's First Congregational Church on nearby Mill Street, inveighed against slavery. He left Newport during the Revolution to become president of Yale College. The Greek Revival porch (1834) of his onetime parsonage must have been added to harmonize with the first renovations to the church.