USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > History of Hartford County, Connecticut, 1633-1928, Volume II > Part 1
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the university of connecticut libraries
BOOK 974.62.8939H v.2 c. 1 BURPEE # HISTORY OF HARTFORD COUNTY CONNECTICUT 1633 -1928
3 9153 00055803 3
974.62/8939h/v.2.
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Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2013
http://archive.org/details/historyofhartfor02burp
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14
HISTORY
of
Hartford County CONNECTICUT
1633-1928
Being a Study of the Makers of the First Constitution and the Story of Their Lives, of Their Descendants and of All Who Have Come
BY CHARLES W. BURPEE
Volume II Illustrated
CHICAGO-HARTFORD-BOSTON THE S. J. CLARKE PUBLISHING COMPANY 1928
1928
XXXVII
NEW STRENGTH BUT RECORDS ENDING
LOSS OF LEADERS IN JOURNALISM, THE CHURCH AND IN MANY INSTI- TUTIONS -- MAINTAINING INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL FIBRE.
The last of the great works of Bishop Tierney already have been reviewed. The grief caused by his loss was softened by the coming of John J. Nilan. His appointment as bishop of the Dio- cese of Hartford was approved by the pope and the consecration services were held April 28, 1910. Among the thousands who attended were leading clergy from neighboring dioceses. The sermon was by Monsignor Lavelle of New York, rector of St. Patrick's Cathedral, and the consecrator was Archbishop O'Don- nell of Boston. He is the seventh bishop of this diocese, the others having been Bishops Tyler, O'Reilley, McFarland, Galberry (the first to be consecrated in Hartford), McMahon and Tierney (of New Britain and the only one to be raised from a parish in the diocese). Bishop Nilan is a native of Newburyport, Mass., where he was born in 1855. He studied at Nicolet College in Canada and was graduated at Notre Dame Seminary and ordained in 1878. He held pastorates at Abington, Boston and Amesbury, at which last named place he was permanent rector for seventeen years. At the time of his coming here there were 375,000 Catho- lics in the diocese, 350 priests and 1,253 nuns. There were eighty- two parochial schools for 3,500 children and many institutions. Rev. John G. Murray was chancellor.
Earlier in the decade, the House of the Good Shepherd had been built on Sisson Avenue, furthering the work of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, chartered three years prior to this, who already had safeguarded over a hundred abandoned women. Chancellor Murray made the address at the laying of the corner- stone in November, 1905.
The clergymen of all the churches joined in an effective cam- paign against vice in 1907. This work was further carried on in
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1912 by a commission appointed by Mayor Edward L. Smith, by order of the Common Council. The chairman was Dr. Ernest A. Wells and the vice chairman J. Gilbert Calhoun. President Luther and Prof. Gustav A. Kleene of Trinity, Morgan G. Bulkeley, Mayor Smith, Miss Martha J. Wilkinson, Mrs. Isaac W. Kings- bury, Walter S. Schutz and Drs. E. B. Hooker and Thomas F. Welch were among the other members. The findings of this com- mission, of notable membership, cannot be passed by without com- ment. Its investigations were conducted in secret and little pub- licity was given to the remarkable results, but the official records, studied from today's point of vantage, reveal that it was one of the most significant items in the history of the city and county. It deserves place in connection with the influence of the churches because of the fact that the clergy in 1897 and on, had the cour- age to lay vigorous hands upon evils which for more than thirty years had been productive only of controversy and had come to be tolerated by a sophistication that blinked the facts. The tremendous development of the "white slave" traffic and the cap- ture here of one of its New York ringleaders, with the aid of a woman detective, gave the cause of the clergymen such impetus that, with the police under Chief George M. Gunn ready to coöp- eràte, it needed only a fearless and judicious civic leader to save the community from being undermined.
One word must be interpolated here about such leader, who was at hand-Mayor Smith. A Hartford youth, endowed with a winning personality and the highest ideals, he had graduated from Yale in 1897 and from Yale Law School, working his way largely, and had won high rank among lawyers, in the office of Mayor Henney (of opposite political faith), when called to the mayoralty early in 1913. A democrat, he had received the sup- port of many republicans, as Henney previously had received the support of many democrats. To add the other main points in his promising career before it was cut short by death in 1923-he became judge of the Court of Common Pleas and later, in the World war period, United States district attorney. Only under his kind of leadership could the men and women whose names are given here have consented to serve on the Vice Commission.
Garrett J. Farrell, succeeding Chief Gunn that year, when the latter was incapacitated, was heartily in accord. It came about, by performance and by statistics, that Hartford was one
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of the first cities in America to prove the fallacies of the sophists in the "segregation" of the social evil ; dark splotches soon became harmonious with their developing business neighborhoods. The report recognized the possibilities of the moving picture-if sug- gestive films were avoided-in drawing youths from the streets at night and recommended among other things a state reforma- tory for women, preventive work by women with police powers, more opportunities for recreation-in parks and school and church buildings,-improvement in physical surroundings, like those on Gold and Charles streets, and, if evil recurred, the mark- ing of certain houses with the name of the owner if a law could be had to that end.
It has been said that this lasting benefit to the community originated with the churches. It also has been said that the churches were comparatively well prepared for the demands the new century was to make upon them. Of particular importance, therefore, is the mention of the organization in 1900 of the Hart- ford Federation of Churches. Prof. Edwin Knox Mitchell, spe- cifically of the Hartford Theological Seminary but always in the broad service of the community as well, reviewed the history of this movement in an article in 1917. He said that lack of co- operation had become apparent to all when the rapid growth of the city called for new methods in work for which the churches were not prepared. Intra-church spaces had been neglected and problems were multiplying. Ministers and churches were carry- ing on a kind of guerrilla warfare against the forms of evil. Protestantism was distraught and disintegrate. At the first meet- ing of a council, held in 1900, each of two-thirds of all the Protes- tant churches sent a minister and two lay delegates,-a number later increased to five when the federation included all the Protestant churches. The work since then had been a remarkable record of achievement; selfish rivalry disappeared and common welfare was promoted.
The 1900s closed important chapters in the history of the Courant and the Times; pens that had given each of them na- tional fame were laid aside. Alfred E. Burr died in January, 1900, Charles Dudley Warner in October. The lives of both men, as has been seen, were an integral part of the town's history. Widely divergent in their careers, both had highest journalistic instinct, both had the welfare of their fellowmen and their home
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town at heart, both were fearless in their convictions and each held the highest place on the paper he had helped build.
The story that has been given of the stirring days of 1839 would have been incomplete without the incident of Burr's declin- ing the lucrative but conditional offer from the Courant, where he was working, and walking into the office of the politically more congenial Times to put up his small savings and ask for a half interest in Judge Mitchell's paper. He was entering upon duties which would try his strong body and his firm will and tear his soul with controversies till it should be given him to hear from all men, without regard to political faith, that he had done well. His last days, though marred by pain, must have been days of gratifying contemplation. One of a large family, he was born in Hartford in 1815, the year his father saw his fortune in the East Indies shipping trade wiped out by the wars. He was only twelve when he found his life work in a newspaper office, setting type for the Courant, which already had seen men come and go for more than three score years. Before he reached voting age, he was foreman of the composing room. With positive character he set aside all that could be spared from aid of family and his own living, for he cherished an ambition, and lack of higher edu- cation must be atoned for. He did not envy a Whittier or a Niles; he could read and, like most good men of the type case, he could write lucid English; for the rest, he was practical. When as partner, in 1841, he embarked on the uncertain sea of a daily edition, he had a circulation of 300, eight employees including the staff, and a burly negro to furnish the power for pressing the paper on the flat forms of type, sheet by sheet. The people doted on political editorials; for forty-five years he was to furnish them. The Courant was a part of the town's sacred traditions; all felt proprietorship; but as politics warmed up, there were those who criticised editorial sentiments and looked to young Burr to voice theirs. His brother, Frank L. Burr, joined him as partner in 1855, and his it was to be to furnish the foil of nature topics so dear to his heart. The paper off the press, the local stalwarts of Mr. Burr's political faith made his office their rendezvous-men like Gideon Welles, who was an editorial writer till the slavery issue drove him to join in creating the republican party ; Henry C. Deming, who stood fast till he saw the soldiers marching away and then led a regiment of them, and William W. Eaton. That
(From miniature by Margaret Foote Hawley) CHARLES HOPKINS CLARK (1848-1926) Editor of the Courant
ALFRED E. BURR (1827-1900) Founder and Editor of the (daily) Hartford Times
JOHN ADDISON PORTER (1856-1900) Editor of the Evening Post
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the year after the war, Mr. Burr should be elected to the Leg- islature, as he had been in 1855, is significant that the passion of four years did not burn too deeply for men like him. Cabinet positions were offered him at different times but were refused. He did serve on local and state commissions. He evinced special interest in the Good Will Club for boys and whatever else he considered to be for public welfare. His benefactions were many.
One of the finest school buildings, in the South District, bears Mr. Burr's name. His brother, whose health had compelled him to retire from active duties, survived him less than a month. His daughter Ella married Dr. James McManus and her bequests, including a sum for a memorial to the editor, endeared her memory to many of the city's institutions. His daughter, Frances Ellen, a writer of ability, vigorously espoused the cause of woman suffrage. To his son, Willie O. Burr, fell the task of maintaining the newspaper standard that had been set. How well he was to attest his inheritance time was to show.
Mr. Warner was cosmopolitan. Though happiest with his talented wife in their woods-embowered home on Nook Farm, sur- rounded by their friends and their remembrances of friends in many parts of the world, and as interested with the editorial affairs of the Courant as he was with the affairs of his publishers and of his editorial desk at Harper's, he indulged his taste for travel in this country and abroad. He was always sure of a wel- come from the literary and scientific men, whether in the Occi- dent, on the Continent or in England, "Susie" (Leigh), his wife, his constant companion. He was an international figure. With his associate proprietors of the Courant, Senator Joseph R. Haw- ley, Charles Hopkins Clark, Arthur L. Goodrich and Frank S. Carey, a corporation had been formed in 1890 of which he was president. His literary work and his connection with the paper as matters of biography have already been told. His large gray eyes, set deeply in softened leonine features-softened still more by his silvering hair and beard as the years went by-looked far beyond ordinary horizons from the time of his boyhood in Plain- field and Charlemont, Mass., to the last of his seventy-one years. They penetrated sham but nothing he saw could disturb the equi- librium which native humor maintained; he held up his pictures, painted with rare art, not as irritants but as interpretations which were welcomed by his thousands of readers. And aside
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from his essays, editorials and novels was his leadership in study- ing the problems of social science, including that of the negro race and of penal institutions. He left the more abstruse political subjects in the competent hands of Hawley and Clark, but they looked to him for his observations from the very close side-lines. What with General Hawley's hour approaching, the mantle of the great journal they had brought to new fame fell upon the broad shoulders of Mr. Clark. For a long time, trained to the work, he had been the locally active one of the trio. Somewhat trenchant in punctuating his ideas in public, like Mr. Warner he had the gift of humor and a wit that always sparkled.
Mr. Clark (1848-1926), son of Ezra Clark, had degrees of A. B. and A. M. at Yale and L. H. D. at Trinity. Immediately on leaving college he became a member of the Courant staff and was editor-in-chief from 1900 till his death. In addition to being president and director of the Courant Company he was director in insurance companies and the Collins Company. He was a member of the Constitutional Convention and a director of the State Reformatory, the public library and the Associated Press and a trustee of the Wadsworth Atheneum and the Watkinson Library. By his energy as well as his personality he exercised much influence in the republican party and in all civic affairs.
The year of General Hawley's death, 1905, died another of the old Courant group, Thomas Mills Day. The handicap of deaf- ness had taken him out of ordinary activities since he laid down the task of editor and proprietor after his able conduct of affairs throughout the Civil war period. His ancestry alone, going back to the founding, would have kept him true to Hartford tradition. His father was state secretary, judge of the County Court and reporter of the Supreme Court in the years from 1810 to 1835. At Yale, in the class of 1837, his honors were many; at his death he was the oldest living member of the society of Skull and Bones. He practiced law till deafness interfered. His con- trol of the Courant began in 1855 at an hour of political con- fusion and rancor when a man was needed who should have the inspiration that had carried the ancient publication through periods of stress since long before there was a nation. He was an aid on the staff of Governor Holly in 1857 and a wise coun- selor in private as in public for the men who were rallying for
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the Union. One of his sisters was the mother of Prof. Thomas Day Seymour of Yale, another the mother of James P. Andrews of Hartford, for many years reporter of the Supreme Court. Of his children, one daughter married Secretary of the Navy C. J. Bonaparte; Thomas Mills Day (second) is a lawyer; Arthur P. Day is chairman of the board of the Hartford-Connecticut Trust Company.
The career of John Addison Porter, another newspaper man, in 1900, was pathetic. When he came to Hartford in 1888, bought control of the Evening Post and became its editor, it was with an honest ambition to fulfill his boyhood dream to secure a public career. His mother-he was born in New Haven in 1850 -was the daughter of the founder of Sheffield Scientific School of Yale and his father, who also bore the name of John Addison Porter, was the first dean of that institution. He was graduated at Yale in 1878, studied law and was literary editor of the New York Observer when he secured a position in Washington as sec- retary to his uncle, Congressman William Walter Phelps of New Jersey. After that he came here, paid the large price for the newspaper and set out to win prestige both for the paper and him- self. Having made a rural home in Pomfret, he was sent to the Legislature from that town, was chosen delegate to the conven- tion that named Mckinley for President, worked zealously for his election and frankly said he would like an appointment to a for- eign post. Mr. Mckinley instead induced him to accept the posi- tion of private secretary at the White House. Mr. Porter had the qualities of birth, education, physique and polish to gain his heart's desire but he lacked the practical. His campaigns for gubernatorial nomination, like his paper, had been costly fail- ures; making much of his position in Washington, the goal of his ' ambition seemed near. At the moment of greatest endeavor his rugged constitution succumbed to disease.
One who had pursued the path of learning purely for itself and had gained rich reward was Thomas R. Pynchon, who died in New Haven in 1904. His ancestry included the founders of All Souls College at Oxford and William Pynchon, who founded Springfield. Doctor Pynchon, who was born in New Haven in 1823, came to Hartford in 1836 under the care of John Smyth Rogers, who built the house on Farmington Avenue afterwards
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owned by Senator Dixon. Studying with Professor Rogers at the same time were John Williams, afterwards bishop of Connecticut, and James R. Bayley, who became archbishop of Baltimore. On completing his course at Trinity, he remained four years as in- structor. Then he turned to the Episcopal ministry in which he was rector in Boston and other Massachusetts cities, winning his degrees of D. D. and LL. D., till in 1856 he returned to Trinity to serve as a professor and to pursue his studies, especially in geology. In 1874, on the death of Abner Johnson, the president, Doctor Pynchon was the choice of the trustees for that position. Much responsibility devolved upon him at the time of the change of location from the site of the present Capitol to Vernon Street, when reorganization was necessitated. In 1883 he relinquished these duties to continue till his death as professor of moral philosophy.
Clergyman, writer and editor, beloved by all veterans and in- spirational in religious training, Henry Clay Trumbull died in 1903. He was born on Stonington in 1830, son of Gurdon Trum- bull, whose children included Gurdon Trumbull of Hartford and Annie Trumbull Slosson of New York. He won the honorary degree of M. A. at Yale and degrees at other colleges. While a clerk in the railroad office at Hartford, City Missionary David Hawley interested him in mission work; he became a missionary in the Sunday school field, studied for the ministry and had been ordained when he accepted the chaplaincy of the Tenth Connecti- cut Volunteers. For several months he underwent the hardships of prison life. Maj. Henry W. Camp, of whom mention has been made, was his intimate friend, and among Mr. Trumbull's pub- lished works there is none more impressive than the "Knightly Soldier," the story of the career of that brave Hartford youth and great Yale oarsman. Resuming his Sunday school work, Chaplain Trumbull was made editor of the Sunday School Times, in which position he was succeeded by his son, Charles G. Trum- bull, shortly before his death.
Chaplain Trumbull with his friend Chaplain Twichell spent many happy hours in the Nook Farm circle, which now was being broken into. John Hooker, joint owner with Francis Gillette of the farm when it was becoming the literary colony, had moved from the house he built-now the residence of George W. Merrow -and was living on Marshall Street near by when he died in
THE BEECHER FAMILY
Left to right-Standing: Thomas K., Elmira, New York, started first institutional church; William, wrote father's biography; Edward, Brooklyn; Charles, helped compile Plymouth Church hymnal; Henry Ward. Sitting: Mrs. John Hooker, Hartford, suffragist; Catharine, who had school in Hartford and promoted education in the west; Lyman; Mrs. Thomas C. Perkins, Hartford, who thought one member of the family should attend to domestic affairs; Harriet Beecher Stowe. Insert: James, who led a colored regiment in the Civil War. All the men were clergymen. Another son, George, was killed in a firearms accident in New Haven
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1901. He was in direct line from Founder Thomas Hooker and had certain of his qualities of determination and independence; also certain of those of the Daggett family of New Haven, of which his mother, wife of Edward Hooker of Farmington, was a member. On her side he was related to Gov. Roger S. Baldwin, Senator Hoar and William M. Evarts. From his birth in 1816 he was in a scholastic atmosphere and was entering Yale at six- teen when eye trouble caused him to take sea voyages instead, getting both his B. A. and M. A. later. In 1850 he was in the Legislature and the following year he removed his law office to Hartford where partnership was formed with Joseph R. Hawley. Eight years later he accepted appointment as a reporter of the Supreme Court, an office which he held till 1894 when he was succeeded by James P. Andrews. He declined appointment to the Supreme Court bench. He was trained in the Calvinistic creed but in his later years he became a student of spiritualistic phenomena.
He married in 1841 Isabella, the youngest of Rev. Dr. Lyman Beecher's distinguished family, his daughter by his second wife, Harriet Porter. She was half-sister of Henry Ward Beecher, of Mrs. Stowe and also of Mrs. Thomas C. Perkins of Hartford. It was while on a visit to Mrs. Perkins that she met Mr. Hooker. In their early days together she would sit knitting in his office while he read law to her. The incidents of her earliest days- she was born in 1822, in Litchfield-when her father was presi- dent of Lane University in Cincinnati and her brothers were studying there, left a strong impression upon her mind, repre- sented by a thirst for knowledge and a persistency of conviction. In her famous championship of women's rights, she fought ses- sion after session, or till victorious in 1887, to get the Legislature to pass the bill granting equal property rights to women. She was drawn into this cause when Anna Dickinson came here in 1861 to speak against slavery. She organized at her own expense a national convention at Chicago and the first international con- vention in 1884. Efforts to bring the subject before the Constitu- tional Convention of 1902 were unavailing. In 1892 she was a member of the Board of Lady Managers of the Columbian Expo- sition. Her children were Dr. Edward B. Hooker; Alice, wife of John C. Day, and Mary, wife of Henry E. Burton. She survived
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her husband twenty-one years. A year before he died a coinci- dence in the deaths of two of the Beecher family made a very deep impression upon the minds of Mr. and Mrs. Hooker. Mrs. Mary Beecher Perkins, living with her son, Charles E. Perkins, in Hartford, and Rev. Thomas K. Beecher, living in Elmira, N. Y., both died March 14. It was believed that Mrs. Perkins, in her last moments, was conscious of the coincidence.
Mrs. Perkins, who was ninety-four years old, had lived here since 1824, when she came to assist her sister Catherine in estab- lishing her widely known school. Her husband was one of the foremost members of the bar. Among her surviving children was the wife of Edward Everett Hale of Boston. She was a daughter of Lyman Beecher by his first wife, Roxana Foote, of Nut Plains, Guilford. Rev. Thomas K. Beecher was a son by Dr. Beecher's second wife. For two years after graduating at Illinois College, of which his brother Edward was president, he was principal of the Hartford Public High School, in its beginning. At his death he had been pastor of the Independence Congregational Church of Elmira since 1854, barring a term of service as chaplain in the war. Of the original Beecher family this left but two-Rev. Charles of Georgetown, Mass., who was not to survive long, and Isabella.
There is in this book a hitherto unpublished picture of Dr. Beecher and his children: Thomas K .; William, who edited his father's autobiography; Edward of Brooklyn, whose wife urged Harriet to write; Charles, the musician, who helped in the prep- aration of the Plymouth Hymn Book and did remarkable work in the West; Henry Ward; Isabella; James, who led a colored regi- ment in the war; Catherine, who, after conducting her school in Hartford, started the first great educational movement in Iowa and Illinois, writing to communities that if they would provide the buildings she would furnish the teachers; (Doctor Beecher himself) ; Mary-"the one member of the household who said she would occupy her time in purely domestic affairs," and Harriet.
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