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EAST WINDSOR
HERITAGE
Gc 974.602 Ea51p 1682207
M. L.
REYNOLDS HISTORICAL GENEALOGY COLLECTION
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01148 6823
East Windsor Heritage
Two Hundred Years Of Church and Community History
1752 - 1952
by
G. Stephen Potwin
First Congregational Church East Windsor, Connecticut
Copyright 1952 by Edna G. Potwin
Printed by the Journal Publishing Company, Rockville, Connecticut in a limited first edition of three hundred copies
1682207
CONTENTS
Page
Foreword
5
I.
The Seedling Church
9
II. The Planting of the Seedling 12
III.
Ministers
17
IV.
Creeds, Covenants and Confessions of Faith
26
V. The Meeting Houses 28
VI.
Ring in the Valiant Men and Free
35
VII.
Agriculture
39
VIII.
Industry
43
IX. Civil Functions 49
X. Transportation 52
Appendix 55
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Portrait by Bachrach
G. STEPHEN POTWIN
FOREWORD
George Stephen Potwin was by ancestry, environment, and education well fitted to write the history of his Connecticut heritage.
Born in East Windsor, August 25, 1893, the son of Arthur Edwards and Adella Bissell Potwin, he united in his person the various strains which made the men of colonial Connecticut. The Bissells, Ellsworths, and Os- borns of Old Windsor met in him with the Halls and Atwaters of the New Haven colony and with the Hills, the Jacksons, and the Huguenot crafts man of Boston, whose name he bore, to form that peculiar blend of farmer, tradesmen, and scholar which was characteristic of the towns of old Con- necticut.
He seldom spoke of his ancestry. It is doubtful if he ever thought much about it, but it explains him, in part. In an editorial tribute in The Courant, July 1952, the writer called him "the unerring spokesman for those of The Courant's readers who spring from a background identical with his."
As old Connecticut was in his blood, so his boyhood gave him the immediate experience of its ways. He got the feel of the land. With his childhood playmates, Oliver Barber and James English, he fished every stream in the Scantic parish from the days when a bent pin was the hook and a minnow the trophy to those of angling for trout in Ketch Brook. He knew every pasture and every hillside. He learned at first hand the pithy proverbs and the weather lore of the countryside. He knew the old mill and its dusty miller, and heard tales of the Civil War from the G.A.R. postmaster in his faded blue. He marched with the other children of the district school on Decoration Day, and went to Sunday School picnics and family reunions.
At home the two sisters who were nearest his age were his insepar- able companions. With them he lived a life of imagination and fancy; of the matching of keen wits also. They built a cabin, the "Shanty", by the pond in the pasture; they were gypsies and raided the pantry and the melon patch. With one sister, he forecast his future work in editing, and laboriously printing, a weekly paper to be distributed to the neighbors for a penny an issue.
At the family table he heard political issues and world affairs dis- cussed. His parents were people of education; books and the best of the current periodicals, including the St. Nicholas, molder of many a child's taste for reading, were part of the daily home life. An older brother and sisters were coming home from college, bringing their friends with them. Uncles, aunts, and cousins visited the ancestral homestead. In the little community of homes which clustered around the Scantic church visitors from England, or China, or Honolulu, or the far West were not infrequent.
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The streams which missionary zeal or business enterprise had sent out from the little village were not one-way currents. They returned, refertilizing the ancient soil. The life which Stephen Potwin knew as a boy was cir- cumscribed in area, but it was not provincial in thought. He was Connec- ticut typified, but Connecticut in her place in the nation and the world.
By the time he entered high school he had developed the qualities his friends of later years recall, the quiet, unostentatious courtesy, the dry wit, the logical mind, the rather cautious outlook, and a fighting spirit when aroused against injustice and wrong.
His education followed the pattern of the New England tradition. Four years of Latin and three of Greek in the Enfield, Conn., High School gave him a solid foundation for his work in college and for his future writing. In high school he broadened his acquaintance, came to know more intimately the cosmopolitan population of Connecticut's manufacturing towns, and made there lifelong friendships. He was president of his class, editor of the school paper, and an able member of the debating society, which, under the direction of Principal E. H. Parkman, equipped many an Enfield boy for effective participation in civic affairs.
With characteristic modesty Stephen chose Middlebury as his college, a small college suited to his tastes and one from which a cousin had re- cently graduated. At the end of his freshman year he transferred to Wil- liams because of the courses offered there in history and economics.
World War I broke out at the beginning of his senior year. Hence- forth a young man's future became insecure. The shadow of war hovered over every youth's plans. Stephen graduated in 1915, spent the following year at home on the farm and began reading law. But he did not wait for the draft.
"How can a fellow stay out of it", he said to a sister as they sat on the beach and saw a passenger steamer go by, "when there are creatures in the world who can sneak up under a boat like that and blow women and children to pieces?"
So he enlisted in the Thirteenth Field Artillery of the Fourth Division of the United States Army. After patrol duty on the Texas border the divi- sion was sent to France. There in the headquarters Company under Col. Smith, a veteran officer of the British army in the Boer War whom he greatly admired, he saw active service. He took part in the heavy fighting in and about the Argonne. Because of his keen sense of direction and of terrain he was often sent out at night on reconnaissance duty, a lone horse- man on the no man's land. Once his horse was shot out from under him. He rose through the grades of non-commissioned officers and then was sent to the French Artillery School at Saumur for training for commission as First Lieutenant. When he completed the course there, the war ended.
On his return to America in 1919 he decided to remain on the farm in East Windsor. He loved the land, and he hoped to inherit the family homestead. Moreover, a young man of his quiet, homeloving nature wants to settle down. In the spring of 1921 he married Miss Edna C. Gordon,
6
daughter of Mr. and Mrs. William W. Gordon of Hazardville, Conn. Readers of his column, From A Yankee Hearth know how happy the mar- riage was; the common interests in the growing home, the comradeship with the three daughters, the gentle humor that played over the little in- cidents of everyday life.
The young couple from the beginning took an active part in town af- fairs, Mrs. Potwin in the library, the grange, and the church; her husband in both church and town. In the thirty years of his public service Mr. Pot- win held nearly every office his fellowtownsmen could give, selectman, justice of the peace, republican committee member, delegate to conventions, chairmanships of the boards of education and finance, representative in the General Assembly of 1927 and of 1929. Outspoken, often fighting-mad, he worked for the interest of the town as a whole. He deplored the factional divisions due to the geographical separation of its two major villages. It was to insure an undivided loyalty of its future citizens to East Windsor that he fought for a union school. Of his love for the Church of which one great-great grandfather was a pastor, and for the township of which others were original landowners, this book is a testimonial.
As his family grew, Stephen felt the need of a larger income. He turned to his pen. In the Legislature he had served on the Committee on Education with Mr. Arthur Barnes of the Bristol Press. Through this asso- ciation he began his editorial work, first on the Farmington Valley Herald, then as editor of The Bristol Press. In 1943 he went to The Hartford Cour- ant where he wrote many of the editorials on government, politics, educa- tion, and economics, and had a bi-weekly column under his own signature.
In the years that he went up and down the Farmington Valley in the interests of the Herald and in his official work with his townsmen, he became more and more convinced of the hardheaded common sense of the Yankee farmer and workingman of whatever national origin. He believed in the small town. A conservative Liberal in politics, he was staunch in his loyalty to the town system and the principles of its founders. After his death in June 1952 tributes to his work came from many readers of his column and his editorials. They came from the Governor of the state and from the humble working woman who said, "The State of Connecticut have lost a frien' ".
Stephen would have prized no other eulogy more highly.
-ELIZABETH B. POTWIN
7
CHAPTER I
THE SEEDLING CHURCH
"This stake shall mark the site for your house of worship." So de- cided the second County Court Committee; and on this chosen site the North, or Sixth, Society in Windsor, Connecticut, laid the red sandstone foundation for its first Meeting House. The historic date was May 6, 1753, and the oaken stake was driven into the sandy knoll on Lieutenant Samuel Watson's lot, "about 36 rods near South from the new dwelling house of Mr. Daniel Clark", today the home of Mr. and Mrs. Julius Otka. Though the people on The Street, now the unromatic Route 5, had pro- tested that this site was "too far into the woods", it could be that that stake was driven hard by a pioneer path leading eastward to the sawmill on the Scantock River and, beyond that, to the high ground on which the Ells- worth, Bissell, Loomis and other families had already settled.
Two centuries of history have since unfolded their pageant of events about the spot marked by that oaken stake. In the surrounding community, seven generations of men have acted out their joyous and tragic destinies. As from the miraculous budding of Aaron's rod sprang the priestly tribe of Levi, so from that one historic stake has blossomed a progeny, children in number more than the stars above Scantic on a clear winter's night. Many of these descendants have long since followed the pioneer instinct Westward, so that now, two centuries later, the seed of the founders is scattered across the expanses of a great Continent. And some of them, true apostles of religion, have carried afar the teachings they here received, even to the Islands of the Pacific and beyond the China Sea.
The spiritual and economic development of this seedling church, since 1845 known as the First Congregational Church of East Windsor, is characteristic of early New England experience and, to a considerable degree, typical of the pioneers' westward march from the Atlantic sealine. And this Church (today only a few hours' drive from that coast) likewise sprang from a westward migration, that of the Massachusetts Bay Colonies, to flourish as one more oak amidst the sheltering forest of religion beneath which churches, states, and educational institutions have since blossomed and grown to fruition. But even before the persecuted Pilgrims found sanctuary and religious freedom at Plymouth, or the Puritans were estab- lished at Salem, Charlestown and Dorchester, the seed of this seedling church had been planted in Old England.
Macaulay wrote that, in the early Seventeenth Century, "every corner of the (British) nation was subjected to a constant and minute inspection. Every little colony of Separatists was tracked out and broken up. Even the devotions of private families could not escape the vigilance of spies. And the tribunals afforded no protection to the subject against the civil and ecclesiastical tyranny of that period." Here, then, was the parentage
9
of New England Protestantism. In his New England Chronology, Dr. Allen Bradford says of those daring souls who brought Protestantism to these shores that they were "sincere and experimental Christians, supported against all trials by a deep religious faith." At a later day, in 1802, Rev. David McClure, D. D., in his funeral sermon for the Reverend Thomas Potwine, first pastor of this seedling Church, then grown to maturity, characterized the deceased as "an experimental Christian"-that is, a Christian through experience rather than in theory.
It is to Dorchester on Massachusetts Bay that we trace our own clear line of ecclesiastical ancestry. Organized in Plymouth, England, under the leadership of Rev. John White, before the colonists sailed, the Dorches- ter Church became, after Plymouth and Salem, the third Separatist house of worship to be established in the New World. Moreover, Dr. Henry R. Stiles, in his Ancient Windsor, crediting Jabez H. Hayden as his source, maintains that the Church of Christ in Windsor, of which the First Congregational Church of East Windsor is a direct lineal granddaughter, was "the oldest Evangelical Church in America, and, excepting the South- wark Church, London, the oldest Congregational Church in the world." This distinction was gained when the Plymouth and Salem churches turned to Unitarianism, and the original Dorchester Church moved to Windsor. On this point the record is clear, and because of it we can lay claim to an ancient and honorable lineage. Indeed, many family names on our roll today graced the very first records, more than three centuries ago, of old Windsor, among them Allyn, Bissell, Ellsworth, Phelps, Stiles, and Watson. Truly a goodly heritage!
Besides this spiritual inheritance, there is also the heritage of the land. In the first decade of their settlement, the Plymouth Pilgrims, having heard of "the Great River", according to Governor Bradford "made several voyages to the Connecticut, and found it a fine place, but no great trade." In 1631, Wahguinnacut, a sachem of one of the many small and friendly Connecticut River tribes, visiting both the Plymouth and Bay colonies, asked the white men to establish settlements along the "Quonehticut" (Bradford's spelling was most likely derived phonetically from hearing his Indian visitor talk). But at that time neither colony was interested or able to undertake such an enterprise. Furthermore, the Sachem disclosed that, because of an impending war with the hostile Pequots, he would welcome the presence of English rifles. Obviously, neither Governor Bradford nor Governor Winthrop had any desire to fight the Indians' battles.
However, Wahguinnacut's visit had left its impression. For those men who had ventured and braved so much to come to the New World were willing to venture still further. In 1633, Plymouth Colony approach- ed the Bay colonies with the proposal of a joint enterprise, the prime object of which appears to have been the establishing of a trading post to head off further inroads by the Dutch, who were already occupying their post in Wethersfield. But negotiations to this end collapsed.
Soon after that abortive attempt to organize a joint expendition, the Plymouth Colony, deciding to act on its own, did send forth a ship; and on September 26, 1633, a trading house was erected south of the Farming-
10
ton River's conjunction with the Connecticut (below present-day Windsor). But even before this Plymouth enterprise, the Massachusetts Bay men had not been idle. Some of their scouts, having explored the new country, returned with good reports: the meadows were broad and fertile, the Indians friendly, even eager to welcome white settlers. It was not however, until 1635 that the citizens of Dorchester, Newton, and Water- town secured permission from the General Court (at that time still the name of the Massachusetts legislative body) to remove to Connecticut. From Newton (now Cambridge) the Hooker party went forth to settle Harford: But we are chiefly concerned with the Dorchester migration and settlement on the west bank of the Great River.
In their first serious attempt at colonization, that fall of 1635, the Dorchester colonists came through the wilderness. The goods essential to carry them through the winter were to arrive by ship, but by late Novem- ber the River had frozen over. And in those days there were no icebreakers to smash a channel for winter shipping on the Connecticut. This premature hindrance to the coming of their supplies placed the little band in dire jeopardy. Some settlers went down the River to locate the ships; others returned overland to the Bay; only a few remained. These last, fighting to survive that rugged winter, tended the few cattle they had driven with them, and even resorted to eating acorns. Their experience paralleling that of the earlies Pilgrims at Plymouth, these Dorchester Puritans, conse- crated as they were to the cause of religious freedom, in fortitude and resourcefulness matched their spiritual brethern of Old Plymouth.
Undaunted by the misfortunes of this first venture, in the spring of 1636 other companies set out for the Great River. It may be that one of these, coming through the wilderness in May, gave the name of Mayluck to the brook they followed as far as the Connecticut. (The Mayluck is today known as the Namerick; and at one time, when that part of Town Street was known as Prior's District, the stream was called Prior's Brook.) This migration was crowned with success, and in 1637, an agreement hav- ing been reached with the Plymouth post settlers on the River, the Dorches- terites were firmly established in Windsor. To obtain a meager living, they overcame many hardships: severe winters, floods, and all the normal obstacles athwart the path of pioneers.
On friendly terms with their neighbors in Hartford and Wethersfield, in 1639 the Windsor colonists joined them in writing the Fundamental Orders, the World's first written constitution. Moreover, in a government- al innovation very close to the hearts of folk in the small towns of New England, the Windsorites first instituted the office of selectman, generally attribued to the Dorchester pioneers before they left the Bay Colony.
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CHAPTER II
THE PLANTING OF THE SEEDLING
The colonists were not only driven to endure the rigors of pioneer life by a burning desire for religious freedom; they were also the victims of economic forces. In fact, some authorities contend that the fear of a shortage of tillable land was a contributing factor to the Connecticut migration. This is understandable despite the fact that the emigrants were comparatively few in number. Cleared land and timberland were the chief sources of their means for supporting life. Nowadays a farm may consist of 20 acres intensively tilled; three centuries ago 200 acres werc inadequate. It thus came about that the Windsor settlement had not been long established before its inhabitants began looking across the Great River with a view to increasing their holdings and income. Moreover, as their families grew to maturity and expanded, more land, that mainspring of countless historical migrations, became an economic necessity.
As early as 1640, according to ancient land records, "three-mile" lots were set off east of the River. Beginning north, at Saltonstall Park -- now for the most part the village of Warehouse Point-and continuing just south of the Podunk River, the frontage on the "Conctecotte" was divided into lots of varying width, most of them running three miles deep,
In this Barn, May, 1754, was ordained the Church's first minister.
12
In the immediate vicinity of Scantic, that three-mile limit is today marked by the highway running south past the residence of James N. Lasbury, Sr. And many of the north and south boundaries of our present-day farms ar: parts of these original west-east lines. Indeed, these old boundaries, together with the venerable graves, their headstones facing east, are about the only landmarks in this parish having any regard for a cardinal point of the compass. A graphic illustration of the extent of those old land- holdings is afforded when we realize that not only was Samuel Watson's lot the site of the oaken stake "for your house of worship", but a year later, in 1754,-the meeting house having not yet been completed-the ordination of the Reverend Thomas Potwine was held in Lieutenant Samuel W'atson's new barn, then located on Town Street, on land which is today the property of the Daly Brothers.
Concerning that original division of land east of the Great River, the Reverend Thomas Robbins, A. M., for twenty-one years pastor of our Mother Church in South Windsor, records in his Historical Review (1815) that not a single acre of land in the vast territory of Ancient Windsor was taken by force from the Indians. All was acquired by purchase and decd properly entered in the land records. To be sure, prices, even for 1636, do not today sound exorbitant: twenty cloth coats and fifteen fathoms of seawan (wampum) for a tract bounded roughly on the west by Quenticute (Connecticut) River, south by Potaecke (Podunk) Brook, north by "the river Scantock", and extending an undefined distance easterly into the wilderness. This particular tract comprised for the most part the present site of South Windsor and parts of the East Windsor and Ellington terrain. In 1671, much of this land was repurchased, and the east boundary set "by the hills beyond the pine plains", generally accepted as the hills cast of Ellington.
Two major purchases acquired that territory which today falls within the bounds of East Windsor (originally the North Society of Windsor). The first cleared the title to an carlier gift of land to the Dorchester immigrants. Tradition has it that one Indian chief was so overjoyed at the arrival of the white men that he gave them a certain frontage on the Great River to the depth of a day's walk into the wilderness. An undated affi. davit in the Windsor Land Records supposedly refers to this gift as "that land on the east of the Great River between Scantick and Namareck". In 1687, Toto, grandson of Nassacowen, who gave that tract, confirmed the gift, and the bounds were more particularly drawn. The north bound was "on John Stile's (deceased) lot, by south side of small brook that falls into Namerack, and becomes a part of it, thence runs east by south side of said brook to the head of the brook, thence easterly, varying a little to the south, till it runs over Scantick near where Goodman Bissell (built) a sawmill . " The small brook here mentioned flows today under Route 5 near the Lawrence tobacco farms. For his house and farm the Reverend Thomas Potwine purchased several acres of this Stiles three-mile lot, extending easterly, and those acres now constitute the northern part of my own farm.
Another large purchase extended north from Namareck to a tract, now a part of Warehouse Point, that had already been acquired at the foot of
13
Enfield Falls. Such land titles in this vicinity, resulting from honest transactions with the Scantick, Namerack and other Connecticut tribes, reputedly crafty and tricky but seldom warlike, may easily be traced to the original Indian owners. Though one Indian chief insisted on "reserv- ing only the privilege of hunting beaver in the river of the Scantock", that rodent builder has long since gone the way of all the redskins who once inhabited these lands, to their Happy Hunting Grounds.
In these days of ours, when to travel by horseback and ferry would be a distinct novelty, we must admit that the inhabitants of Windsor, East of the River, put it mildly when, as early as 1680, they complained to the General Court about the "inconvenience" of attending divine service in Windsor, West of the River. In 1691, they again petitioned the General Court for some relief through the settling of another minister to conduct services in their midst. But it was not until May 10, 1694, that the Court granted their petition, and East Windsor was set off from Windsor. The fact that the Bay Conoy legislature was thus called upon to authorize this basically ecclesiastical action well illustrates the close tie then exisiting be- tween Church and State. And that tie persisted, although with diminishing strength, until the Jeffersonian revolution resulted in Connecticut's Consti- tution of 1818, which still remains our fundamental charter of government. Prior to that date, paradoxically enough, those who had revolted against the established Church of England had in turn set up a state church of their own.
This division of the parish along the line of the Great River was not many years old when the procedure of expand and divide again came to the fore, and Ellington-known both as the Great Marsh and as Windsor Goshen-sought independence from the Edwards Church. Indeed, the Reverend Timothy Edwards presided over an almost territorial parish, comprising as it did all the present towns of South and East Windsor, and Ellington. The few settlers in the Great Marsh, and those on Irish Row, Melrose, traveled respectively eight and seven miles in order to attend Sabbath services. In 1735, the General Court again took favorable action, this time on behalf of the Ellington petitioners or, in the language of the Court, "the Great Marsh people". When, in 1786, the last legal link with Windsor was severed by the incorporation of Ellington as a separate town, the ties of blood and amity remained and, between many families in East Windsor and Ellington, have continued to this day.
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