Renée Zellweger's House

Renée Zellweger grew up in Katy, Texas, and broke out opposite Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire. She has won 2 Academy Awards, for Cold Mountain in 2004 and for playing Judy Garland in 2020.

The house went up around 1770 and its English-frame barn around 1790, built for farm use. A state-backed barn survey in January 2012 logged extensive renovations to both, and the barn now serves as recreation space.

The Quinebaug River, which the house overlooks, carried Connecticut's first textile mill. Rhode Island investors trading as the Pomfret Manufacturing Company raised its frame at Cargill Falls on July 4, 1807.

Zellweger's Pomfret retreat from 2004 to 2015. Town records put the November 2004 purchase under a trust, East Coast Group, at exactly the figure the press reported for her.

The sellers in 2004 had held it only since September 1999. Town records show Zellweger's trust let it go to a family trust in February 2015, below what it had paid.

When the place went back on the market in September 2014, she produced a brochure of her own, making the argument for the town. Pomfret, she wrote, is “the embodiment of the old fashioned American small town.”

The town's roll lists 3 buildings here and dates 2 of them to 1770: the clapboard main house, a smaller second dwelling, and a cedar-sided 1790 building it classes among clubs and lodges.