I almost bought P. T. Barnum's house.
Seriously — when my family moved to Connecticut in 1994, we did a lot of house hunting in Bethel and nearby Newtown and Danbury. One of the houses on the market was a piss-yellow house at 55 Greenwood Avenue, which is the house Barnum was born in. Today it's a long and skinny; it used to have a large front portion, but it was destroyed in a fire in the 1840s. Barnum's mother lived there until her death in 1868. Today, the house only looks its age when you step inside — the ceilings are low, the stairs creak a lot, and the rooms are pretty tiny. We probably would have purchased the house if it hadn't been for the sorry state the house was in, and the fact that my growing sister and I would probably need a lot more space to run around in.
P. T. Barnum lived in Bethel for 24 years. During that time, he ran a country store, started a lottery, published the town's first newspaper, and spent two months in the Danbury jail on a libel conviction because of it. Even after he moved away in 1835, he visited Bethel often to see family and friends. In August of 1881, he presented the Town of Bethel with a large bronze fountain that he bought in Germany, which stood in the center of town for 42 years. The fountain depicts an 18-foot-tall triton blowing a conch shell, atop a large flower-like structure supported by several dolphins, and is quite ugly. Bethelites seemed to like the look of the fountain when it froze over, so it was allowed to do so every winter, which steadily led to its destruction. It fell into disrepair in the late 1910s, and was torn down on October 17, 1923. Interestingly enough, the pieces were sold to a junkyard in Danbury, located on Barnum Court.
Barnum's house is just a stone's throw from the center of Bethel, which now has a small patch of grass called P. T. Barnum Square. This strange triangle of green (called "the Green") had been a popular place for the less desirable demographic of teenagers to hang out, until it was named a state park and soliciting became illegal. It has a statue of a WWI soldier on a pedestal (commonly called "the Doughboy"), said to have inspired eightly lookalikes across the country, and a common target for vandalism. "P. T. Barnum Square" is also the name of the small collection of shops across the street from the Green, which includes Scoops (the best milkshakes in the tri-state area) and one of the three barbershops in town.
Barnum has said that, of all the many places he had traveled to, he "invariably cherished with the most affectionate remembrance the place of my birth."
References:
Me
Patrick Tierney Wild's Images of America: Bethel (Arcadia Publishing: 1996).