By the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, this area was Essex village center, where Ebenezer Hayden’s general store, the Pratt Smithy, a nearby bake house, and the Hill general store supplied the growing community. A hand-operated water pump across the street provided water for horses. Hayden bought the property in 1788 on land that had been part of the Pratt estate and opened a store selling goods from gin to axes, but the building was destroyed in the late 1820s after the Champlin House was built. Amelia Hayden, Ebenezer Hayden’s granddaughter, married Henry Lay Champlin of Lyme and in 1818 they built the Champlin House on property she inherited; Henry Champlin became a prominent Essex citizen and the first president of the Essex Savings Bank. After his death in 1859, the family remained there until 1890, when George A. Cheney of Comstock, Cheney & Co. bought the property and altered the house by adding a porch, stables, a greenhouse, and other outbuildings. The Pratt House was first built on this site in 1701 by John Pratt, Jr., grandson of Lieutenant William Pratt, one of Essex’s three original settlers; in 1732 John Jr. moved it back and enlarged it, and later 1700s additions gave it its present vernacular form. It stayed in Pratt family ownership until 1952, when it was deeded to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, which transferred it to the Essex Historical Society in 1985. The present brick Pratt Smithy was built in 1848 by Elias Pratt, replacing an earlier wooden building next door to the west. The Pratt blacksmith business began in 1678 when John Pratt, Sr. opened a shop in the present Old Saybrook area, later moved to Essex, and nine generations of the Pratt family continued the work, making household, farm, and shipyard iron goods and later specializing in horseshoeing. In 1938 the U.S. Postal Service recognized the Pratt Smithy on a First Day envelope celebrating the American entrepreneur and identified it as America’s oldest continuing family business.