In 1915 the Litchfield Garden Club photographed the garden at Butternut Brook Farm for its lantern-slide survey with the Smithsonian, when the farm belonged to Mrs. John Dove. In 1948 it passed to Hans and Sonia Seherr-Thoss, he a grandson of Ambassador Henry White, she a granddaughter of Henry Phipps, Andrew Carnegie's partner, and by 1956 their Butternut Brook Jerseys ran 120 head and milked 66 cows in the gambrel barn below the house. The farm road still carries their name. At the center stands a c. 1780 center-hall colonial, recorded in the state historic resource inventory, its family room keeping an original beehive oven and chestnut floors, with five bedrooms, an attached one-bedroom apartment, and all three surveyed barns on 22 acres, offered for the first time in more than half a century.
