USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Guilford > A history of Christ Episcopal Church in Guilford, Connecticut : an address delivered by the Rector, Rev. William G. Andrews, in September, 1894, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the parish > Part 6
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I Bailey's Trinity Ch., 32; Jouru. of Conu. Couv., 1882, pp. 157, 158.
2 Jour. of Conu. Couv., 1882, p. 158; MS. Diary of Bishop Seabury. For the last refer- ence I am indebted to the Rev. W. J. Seabury, D. D., of New York.
3 Bailey's Trinity Ch., 22-3, 32 ; Life of Seabury, 440.
4 Diary (by the kindness both of Dr. Seabury and of Dr. Hart, of Trinity College) ; Life of Seabury, 426, 440.
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place in which to exercise one of his chief episcopal functions. And, perhaps largely because it had no house of worship, the Killingworth congregation now disappears from our ecclesias- tical records even more suddenly than it had appeared. We hear no more of an Episcopal church there for eighty years, the Church of the Holy Advent, Clinton, being organized as a wholly new congregation, in 1874.
Mr. Butler is said to have assumed the rectorship of St. Michael's Church, Litchfield, which Mr. Baldwin relinquished in 1793, in June, 1794, but the record's of St. John's, North Guilford, show that he rendered clerical services there until Jan- uary, 1795. He was afterwards for many years the highly valued rector of St. Paul's Church, Troy, N. Y., and his son, the Rev. Dr. Clement M. Butler, became distinguished as a * scholar and professor.1
For the three following years, 1795, 1796 and 1797, all sources of information fail us, unless we apply to this period a family tra- dition which asserts that for a while only two men went to church, their families forming the congregation, and one of the two reading service .? As the parish showed some activity im- mediately before and immediately afterwards, these years may reasonably be regarded as the time when it reached the lowest point of depression. It would seem that there was a rallying of its energies at the close of the war, but that the difficulty of securing permanent clerical services, and the weakness, not to say the unpopularity, of the Church everywhere, discouraged its supporters here. But the parish could not die as long as there was even a single household whose members were weekly sum- moned by its head to worship in God's House. On the twenty- first of January, 1798, we find Dr. Hubbard spending a Sunday in Guilford, and three months later (April 23) Charles Collins and Thomas Powers were elected wardens. The same choice, the second name being put 'first, was repeated for many years, and Thomas Powers, the one man who, it is said, never even thought of allowing his children to renounce the worship and
I Sprague, Annals, v. 389-91 ; Gen. Conv. Jour., Reprint of Hawks and Perry, i. 175, 212. 2 Information given by Mrs. Daniel M. Prentice, a native of Guilford, and grand- daughter of Mr. Thomas Powers, one of those mentioned above.
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order of the historic church, was the chief officer of this parish, almost if not quite continuously, until two years before lie died, at the age of eighty, in 1822.1 But these facts show that others, who might have lost all hope, as good and faithful men have sometimes been forced to do, proved their essential fidelity by gathering again about the standard of the Prayer Book. What had been probably the darkest period of our history was 110W over.
On the sixteenth of May, 1798, it was voted that "Mr Friend Collens and Timo Johnson be a Committee with the Wardens to repair the publick Building belonging to" the con- gregation. If the phrase "publick Building" describes the church (and I do not know what else it can mean), it seems to show a somewhat secularized conception of things ecclesiastical, such as was common enough in those days. We wonder, too, whether the dilapidations of the war had gone so long unre- stored. If so, there had certainly seemed to be no help for it, and the present action exhibits the reviving courage and higher purpose of the people. At the beginning of the next year (1799) rates were levied by the parish, as the existing law per- mitted, and a committee was appointed, consisting of the two last named, "to consult with the other parishes Respecting a Minester." The " other parishes " were probably North Guil- ford and Branford, nothing more being heard of Killingworth. A word should be said here of those who may be called the second founders of the parish, though others entitled to mention must be passed by without notice. Thomas Powers, evidently at this period the leading man, was not of Guilford stock, hav- ing come here from Groton upwards of thirty years before. Charles Collins, his associate in the wardenship, was, it would seem, one of the younger children of Samuel Collins, the first clerk of the parish. Friend Collins was the grandson of Oliver Collins, the brother of Samuel, and his descendants remain among us. Timothy Johnson was, I suppose, the grandson of Captain Johnson by his son Nathaniel, and though a much younger man than the others, was 110w clerk, and a very com-
I Christ Ch. Rec. (old and new); Smith's Hist. of Guilford. IIO-
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petent one. The old families of the parish were therefore active and useful, while it was proving the value of new blood. No vestrymen had been elected at this date, the parish contenting itself, as at the beginning of its history, with churchwardens and clerk.
In the years 1799 and 1800 the Rev. Ashbel Baldwin, though now settled at Stratford, is believed to have disposed of some spare Sundays at Branford. And on the third of Deceni- ber, 1799, "this Society " directed its "Committee " (chosen in November, and perhaps corresponding to a vestry ), to engage Mr. Baldwin for ten Sundays of the next year. Our records do not inform us that the committee was successful, nor do those of Stratford help us. But as Mr. Baldwin almost at the close of his rectorship in the latter parish could give a third of his time to Trumbull (1821-2) it is highly probable that he gave a fifth of it to Guilford in the year 1800. Mr. Baldwin, so much in request in this neighborhood, was for years one of the most im- portant members of our Diocesan Convention, and was six times elected secretary of the House of Deputies in the General Con- vention. 1 He is still pleasantly remembered here by descend- ants of his wife's family.
On the twenty-second of December, 1800, a committee was appointed to meet committees from Branford and North Guil- ford "to agree with them in procuring Mr. Burgis to preach with us." Thus steps were taken which led to the first rector- ship of the present century, Mr. Nathan Bennett Burgess, rep- resented to-day among our communicants by his daughter, Mrs. William Bushnell of Madison, being ordained the following month, and serving the parish for the next five years .? Although it carries us a little beyond our limit, it is proper to say that Branford seems never actually to have formed a part of the cure of Mr. Burgess, and that the new "North Bristol Epis- copal Society," organized in July, 1800, promptly took its place. North Bristol (now North Madison) was then part of this town-
I Christ Ch. Rec .; Bailey's Trinity Ch., 32; Jour. Conn. Conv., 1822, p. 6; Sprague Annals, v. 352; Bishop White's Memoirs of the Protestant Episcopal Ch .. 2d ed., 43, 47, 50, 209, 216, 224. MS. notes in my copy of the Memoirs show that Mr. Baldwin disliked the drudgery of his office.
2 Christ Ch. Rec .; Jour. Conn. Conv., 1882, p. 161.
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Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn.
ship, and Episcopalians living there, and still farther east, in North Killingworth, had long been connected with St. John's parish. Before Mr. Burgess resigned there were large additions to the new congregation from North Killingworth, and what is now known as Emmanuel Church was built a little east of the Hammonassett (which forms the boundary), in 1804. That parish has therefore no historical connection with the earlier congregation at Killingworth (Clinton), though when the town was divided the northern portion took the ancient name, and the present Killingworth church has sometimes been confounded with that gathered by Bela Hubbard on the shore. 1
The numerical strength of this parish, at the close of our last period, can only be vaguely estimated. Three years later, on the first of January, 1804, a list of parishioners was begun, which contains eighty-seven names, but it is not probable that all were members of the congregation at one time. In the spring of 1807 (March or May), a few months before the Rev. David Baldwin began his long and faithful rectorship, the parish con- tained forty families ; in 1811 there were forty-eight, North Killingworth then having forty-nine. On the whole, taking into account the depressed condition of the church in the last decade of the eighteenth century, it seems a fair inference that it numbered much less than forty families in 1800, and that it rapidly gained strength under Mr. Burgess .?
The new names which appear during this period are nine ; Parmelee, Halleck, Handy, Lee, Ames (or Amis), Hoadley, Loyzell, Spencer and Loper. More than half of them have now disappeared, and many which have long been household words among us are absent from the records during the first half cen- tury. One individual name, foremost from the beginning, accompanies us almost to the close of our story. Captain Nathaniel Johnson, having passed his eighty-eighth birthday, laid aside a heavy load of age and misfortune on the twenty- ninth of June, 1793. He survived his associate, William Ward, by more than thirty years. Edmund Ward had died in 1779;
I Ibid .; Bailey's Trinity Ch., 32; Emmanuel Ch. Rec. (kindly communicated by Rev. W. C. Knowles, rector); St. John's Ch. Rec.
2 Christ Ch. Rec .; Journ. of Conn. Conv., 1811, Reprint, p. 65.
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Early History of Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn.
Samuel Collins in 1784 ; Dr. Samuel Johnson, at least as much concerned as any other native of Guilford in the task of laying foundations here, in 1772. Captain Johnson may have been, as it was fit that he should be, the last survivor of those whom higher hands had framed into this our spiritual house fifty years before.
In closing this long narrative, defective in spite of its length, I need only say that the qualities which in a manner compelled the church to live, and to live on for five generations, when hos- tility and neglect combined with poverty and disappointment to crush its life, are present in vigor to-day, as the admirable achievement of the last few months has shown. We can trust them to endure, and to perpetuate the life which they have maintained, for five generations more, if they are still nourished by that fear of God, and that love for the ordinances of Christ, in which the life of this church began. It will still live, and still glorify God and bless men, only as it still bears the dew of its birth.
WILLIAM G. ANDREWS, D. D.
SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE.
Mr. Burgess seems to have held the rectorship until Sep- tember 1, 1805. He was born on the fourteenth of September, 1771, in that part of Woodbury which is now Washington. He continued to reside in Connecticut, where he served two or three parishes, until 1835. He was then transferred to the diocese of New York, and long officiated in that portion of it which is now Central New York. He died in Utica, February 20, 1854, at the age of eighty-two. "His end was calm and peaceful."
I am informed that Mr. David Baldwin began to serve the congregation in November, 1806. At that period candidates for orders were allowed to preach, as do Congregational licentiates, and though Mr. Baldwin was formally declared the choice of the parish for its minister on the twelfth of the following March, he was not ordained deacon until the first of September, 1807. He was a native of Litchfield, where he was born February 4, 1780, and he was the son of William Baldwin, a first cousin of the clergyman so often mentioned in the latter part of the address. His cure was the same as that of Mr. Burgess, including there- fore North Guilford and North Killingworth, then still some- times called North Bristol. In this cure Mr. Baldwin may be said to have remained throughout his ministry of half a century, since he held the last-named parish until 1858, when the infirm- ities of age compelled him to desist from pastoral work. He resigned the Guilford church, however, at Easter (March 30), 1834, immediately taking that at Branford, to which he gave a third of his time for the next four years. He relinquished North Guilford in 1851, but when he finally retired in 1858 he united
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the cure of Zion Church, North Branford, with that of Killing- worth. At this date, Bishop Williams, describing him as " The Senior Presbyter of the Diocese," said that he "carried with him into his retirement the affectionate veneration of his breth- ren, and the blessing of those to whom he had so long and so faithfully ministered." His home continued to be at Guilford, where in 1816 he had married Ruth, the daughter of Wyllis Elliot (a member of a family first named on our records in 1803), and where he died on the second of August, 1862. His connec- tion with this community, and in some sense with this congrega- tion, therefore lasted almost fifty-six years, throughout which he was to all men a model of Christian fidelity. And the members of his widely scattered flock, whom he never neglected in heat or cold, in sunshine or storm, though often exposed, as he went to and fro on horseback, to severe hardship, and to whom his house was open for unstinted hospitality, found in him a noble example of that unswerving devotion to pastoral duty which distinguished the early representatives of Connecticut church- manship.
From the first of July, 1834, until Easter Monday (April 21), 1835, the parish was under the care of a deacon, who was ordained at the former date, and who preached his first sermon in the old church on the Green, Lorenzo Thompson Bennett. For the first time this congregation now claimed the entire ser- vice of its minister. Mr. Bennett was temporarily separated from a people already warmly attached to him, by an invitation from Trinity Church, New Haven, of which he became assistant minister. Three short rectorships followed. On the nineteenth of May, 1835, the Rev. William Nassau Hawks was chosen rector, but the failure of his voice compelled him to resign in the following October. Mr. Hawks was a native of Newbern, North Carolina, and the brother of two distinguished clergymen, both of them, like himself, canonically connected for brief periods with this diocese. One was Francis Lister Hawks, very eminent for many years in New York. The other was Cicero Stephens Hawks, for nearly twenty-four years Bishop of Mis- souri. Mr. Hawks returned to his native state, where he was able after a while to resume his ministry. During the latter
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Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn.
part of his life he was rector of Trinity Church, Columbus, Georgia. He died, as I infer, early in the year 1866. On the twenty-seventh of March, 1836, the Rev. Levi Hannaford Corson assumed the rectorship, which he seems to have retained until the nineteenth of March, 1838. Mr. Corson was ordained in this diocese in 1831, and had served the parish at Windham. While here he conducted a school, and I am told by one of his pupils, Mr. Henry Rogers, formerly of Stony Creek, and now of New Haven, that he furnished the design of the present church, adapting it from that of St. Thomas's Church, New York, of which Dr. F. L. Hawks was then rector, and which stood on the corner of Broadway and Houston street. The corner-stone of our church was laid during Mr. Corson's rectorship, June 24, 1836, and Mr. Bennett came from New Haven to deliver the address. Mr. Corson removed from Guilford to Branford, where he succeeded Mr. Baldwin, and where he remained about two years. He resided in the parish, as Mr. Baldwin had not done, and "the parish flourished under his ministry." About 1840 he was transferred to Western New York, and before 1856 to Michigan, where he continued his labors nearly thirty years longer, for the last ten years at Jonesville. He died February 23, 1884, in his eighty-third year. On the eighth of April, 1838, the Rev. Edward J. Darken, M. D., recently rector of Reading and Weston, took charge of the parish, of which he continued rector until the tenth of June, 1840. During his rectorship the new church was consecrated by Bishop Brownell, December 12, 1838. In accepting his resignation the vestry testified to the value of his " public ministrations." He remained for several years in Connecticut, though not in charge of a parish, and, if I mistake not, engaged in the practice of medicine. He contin- ued, however, to be a clergyman, and about 1844 was transferred to the diocese of Massachusetts, and almost immediately, as it would seem, to that of Illinois, thence going to England, of which country he is said to have been a native, and where he is supposed to have died.
On the twelfth of July, 1840, the Rev. L. T. Bennett was heartily welcomed back to this parish, and began his mem- orable rectorship of forty years. It was closed by his resigna-
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tion, due to his advanced age, on the anniversary of his settle- ment, July 12, 1880. He was still connected with the parish as rector-emeritus, and assisted at the celebration of the Holy Com- munion the day before his death, which occurred very suddenly on the second of September, 1889. He had then nearly com- pleted his eighty-fourth year, though apparently as vigorous in body as he was in mind. Including his service here during his diaconate, he had been a minister of this parish only about three weeks less than half a century, while his ministry and Mr. Bald- win's cover more than three-quarters of a century. In what belongs to outward progress the most noteworthy event of Dr. Bennett's rectorship was the erection, in 1872, at the cost of $5,000, of a new chancel, in which the altar, the symbol and chief instrument of worship, was raised to its proper place, and which, as containing the two divisions of sanctuary and choir, gave room for all parts of worship within its own limits. But a still better evidence of the worth of his services to the congrega- tion is the record of forty years of unbroken peace, accompanied by a growing diligence and zeal in all Christian labors. Of all that was admirable in Dr. Bennett's ministry it is impossible to speak here, but his Bishop's testimony, given at the Diocesan Convention of 1890, should be treasured in this parish : " Wherever he had served and wherever he was known, his memory is warmly cherished, and he is remembered with deep respect, as a godly man and a faithful and self-sacrificing 'min- ister of Christ.' As I stood by his grave on a calm, peaceful and bright day in September last-a day that was a fit emblem of his character and life-and committed his body to the earth to await its resurrection, there came to my mind the words of our Lord spoken of Nathaniel, 'An Israelite indeed in whom there was no guile.' " Dr. Bennett was born in Galway, Sara- toga county, New York, November 13, 1805, though of Con- necticut ancestry. His youth was spent in New Haven, under the pastoral care of Dr. Harry Croswell, of Trinity Church. He graduated at New Haven in 1825, and then received a commis- sion in the navy, in which he served six or seven years. He began his theological studies under Dr. Croswell while still a lieutenant, and thus he belonged to Connecticut, as a man and
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Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn.
a minister, as truly as in his pastoral life he belonged to Guil- ford. A superb altar, made in Italy, has very recently been presented as a memorial gift, by his daughter, Mrs. T. H. Bishop, to the church in which her father was trained and began his service in the priesthood, and of which she is herself a member.
The present rector took charge on the Sunday after Easter (April 24), 1881.
The parish now numbers (according to the report presented to the Bishop in June, 1894, ) one hundred and ten families, with one hundred and sixty-five (registered) communicants. It holds property which had yielded, during the year ending last Easter, $523.62, and the total amount of income and contribu- tions for that year was $2,299.08.
NOTE-The publisher is indebted to Miss Elizabeth M. Beardsley of New Haven for the engraving of Dr. Johnson. It was prepared for the late Dr. Beardsley's Life and Correspondence of Samuel Johnson, and was kindly forwarded by Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., of the Riverside Press, Cambridge. The cut of the present rector of Christ Church was loaned by the Rev. J. Frederick Sexton, of St. Peter's Church, Cheshire, editor of The Rector's Assistant (now The Connecticut Churchman), in which it first appeared.
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