USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > New Haven > A modern history of New Haven and eastern New Haven County, Vol. I > Part 2
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Massive gates, closed and chained at "curfew." we may well believe, led through this stoekade from the wild woods or marsh or meadows without. But he who entered for the first time noticed that the fencing habit was not limited to the outer wall. The early New Englanders had brought from across the sea the notion that "a man's honse is his castle" needed emphasis. Each of the eight private squares was set off from the streets by five-foot palings. There was some economy and lighter substance in these barriers, for they were of split logs and a little less dense, perhaps, in their formation, but they served effectually the purposes of protection and privacy. Moreover, as fast as each householder
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A MODERN HISTORY OF NEW HAVEN
was able to define the limits of his private "lot," he marked it by an unmis- takable rail fenee. We may well believe that there was much more thought, for a good many of those early years, of keeping the bounds than there was of keeping the lawns.
Only the central square, which we eall "The Green," which they called the "Market Place," was unfenced. Its idea, of course, was from the Old World Market Place. But there is said to have been an interesting reason why the early fathers of New Haven devoted a ninth of their eity to that open space for whose preservation we praise them now. Davenport himself, it seems, was a Millenarian, and such was his positive leadership that many of his followers must have shared whatever belief he had. That is, he expected not only the second coming of Christ, but the arrival of "a thousand of his saints" with him. Obviously, there must be some place where the thousand, plus the much less than a thousand of dwellers in New Haven, could conveniently gather. If that was their idea in making the Market Place so large, they safely exceeded their requirements, for New Haven in its twenty-eighth decade has often seen several times ten thousand people gathered on the lower half of the Green.
This old Market Place, inevitably, was the heart of the life of those early days, as it is destined to be for many generations afterward, and may still be in generations yet ahead of us. As near to the exact center of it as they could guess, John Davenport hastened to erect his first Meeting House, the direct ancestor of the stately Center Church of today. There was little of stateliness or even of architecture about that first edifiee. It was uncomely without and barren within. Its frame, rough-hewn from some of the very trees, no doubt, which had been cleared from the forest of the forming Market Place to make room for it, was as roughly covered with uneven boards, that barely kept out the rain and snow and not as successfully the eold. Its hipped roof rose sharply from its four square sides to a point in the eenter. which was surmounted by the square watehman's turret from which the town drummer beat the call to worship. Above that it rose to a blunt steeple. Within were the raised pulpit and sounding board, and probably the hard, baekless, most uncomfortable oak-slab seats which we know the churches of that era had. But for years it was the most imposing building in the town, and always it and its successors have been the eenter of New Haven's religious life, performing, even for the large eity in which it dwells today, a distinet and acknowledged community serviee.
It was far from being "The Green" in those early days, that great central square. Not until more than a century later did it begin to assume that order which marks it today. When the first Meeting House was erected, the square to the northwest of it was still irregularly wooded. In the spot that had been cleared were still the straggling stumps of the trees, with leaf-strewn sand between. Most of the space between the Meeting House and Church Street- then "The Mill Highway"-was a swamp, crossed by two log causeways. The Meeting House was erected in 1639 or 1640, and the following year the first apparent move toward public education was made in the building of a school- house, to the northward midway between the house of worship and Elm Street.
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The only other building purpose to which the Market Place was put for several years was for a watchhouse, a "'gaol," and the necessary stocks and pillary, which stood in a group slightly northwest of the Meeting House. The burial ground, which became necessary even in that first year, was, as we notice from its his- toric remnant, directly in the rear of the church.
Dwelling houses, more or less pretentious, but all limited by the rude facili- ties of the time, grew apace with the public buildings. It seems likely that there were as many as forty-two buildings of various sorts as early as 1640. Governor Eaton's house, the most substantial in the colony, stood on the north side of Elm Street, a little above where Orange Street crosses it now. Mr. Davenport's was very near what is now the southeast corner of Elm and Orange. The other settlers had disposed themselves as their resonrees warranted, in buildings mostly around the Market Place side of the original nine squares, the extension being farther northward than in any other direction. There was considerable seaport activity, with the two landing places, one up George Street a "block" farther than the original landing on the creek bank, and the other on the East Creek near the corner of State and Chapel. There was a flour mill out near East Roek. There were clay pits, the primitive brickyards, out north State Street. There were many farms all around the edges. But these were daylight activities. It was several years before any but the pioneers who started new settlements "in the wilderness" made hold to build or spend their nights outside of the stockade.
The development of the years that followed is not, in the main, a part of a "modern history." Leaving that as a task well done by others, let us turn now to eertain beginnings which have significant prophecy of an important modern relation.
III
John Davenport did not conceive his ideal of church and state complete without the higher school to make a trinity. An Oxford scholar, with the best education that Old England could give, it was inevitable that he should include in his ambition for a New World paradise a strong and advanced school system. In 1637 at Boston he was one of the twelve leading men of the colony to estab- lish what later was to be Harvard College, under the authority of the General Court. Through that experience, the idea which he had took practical shape for the new state which he planned to found. It is probably that, when he took with him on his pilgrimage to Quinnipiac the young Ezekiel Cheever, and later when he established that able young educator in the cabin schoolhouse at Grove and Church streets, Davenport thought his college was beginning. It was another step of progress when he secured the ereetion, some six years later, of the school- house on the Market Place. It stood near the church for other reasons than convenience. It was to be in literal truth a church school. It was to supplement for six days, with a teacher in utter harmony with the preacher, the instruction of the Meeting House on the Sabbath day. It was to lead to a higher or collegiate
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school, which was, as it is easy to read in the history of the school that did come, first of all an institution for the training of men for the Congregational ministry.
But Ezekiel Cheever, excellent teacher that he was, had some educational ideas of his own, and they did not harmonize with Davenport's. IIe did not agree that all the classics worth knowing were bound up in the Bible, or that the chief end of man was to learn Calvinistie theology. So he parted company with John Davenport and New Haven in 1647, greatly to the loss of the latter and greatly to the advantage of Ipswich in the Massachusetts colony, and later to Cambridge and Boston, in which communities he continued his later remark- able educational eareer. John Davenport would have advaneed his college much faster if he had kept the brilliant Cheever, but he must have his way.
There is little to be said of the progress of John Davenport's educational plans in the remaining decade of his disheartening struggle in New Haven. His church-state republie was doomed to fail, and with it was inevitably bound up, as could easily be seen, his sort of college. But it is worthy to record that he planted in the minds of his associates of New Haven and the Connectieut colony the germ of a college in New Haven. That was just as much a part of the New Haven construction, it seems, as the Meeting House or the Market Place. In the years that followed, though it seemed almost certain that the college, when established, was to be elsewhere than in New Haven, perhaps far removed from it, there was in the subconscious mind of leaders like James Pierpont, successor to John Davenport in the old New Haven church, and the others who formed with him what fortunately was the majority in the control of the collegiate school's affairs, the thought that it was inseparable from New Haven. It was a naturally inseparable alliance, more of state and college than of state and church, which the plan of John Davenport involved. Yale became a part of New Haven. in fact, when the first pastor set the first teacher at work in his paternal- ized community, and then was formed a partnership which was to have, in today's era, a meaning that could not have been dreamed of then.
It was an even longer path to the goal than the years seem to make it. That was a strange battle of events and wits which took place from 1640 to 1716, when the collegiate school wavered between New Haven, Branford, Killing- worth, Saybrook, Wethersfield and Milford, and the story has been well told elsewhere. Early in the course of it came the downfall of that impossible Utopia which Davenport dreamed of at Quinnipiac. It was partly due to Davenport's lack of understanding of human nature, partly due to forces which he could not control. The stern God whom he preached had not set Ilis favor, it would seem, on the man-planned state. Probably Ile was not sufficiently consulted in its construction. The church, indeed, survived by reason of compulsion of all the support of the people, but the educational plans, as we have seen, went sadly agley, and the ship of state went on political and commercial rocks instead of into a fair harbor. The New Haven group, weakened by the readiness of many settlers to find a freer air elsewhere, simply could not stand alone, and the others, with little love in their hearts for the autoeraey of Davenport and
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Eaton, left it to its fate. That fate was to be absorbed in the larger Connecticut colony instead of remaining a colony in itself.
Others of the bright dreams that came down the coast on board the old Hector had been shattered. New Haven has, as we have lived to see, commercial and industrial possibilities such as canny old Theophilus Eaton never from the highest pinnacle of his ambition looked down upon, but that was only the middle of the seventeenth century. The stream of trade to and from London continued to flow to and from Boston, as it had done before. The New Haven commercial aspirants, who had built a small fleet of ships for the foreign trade. were obliged to content themselves with eoasting to Boston or New Amsterdam, or occasional trips to the Bermudas or Barbadoes. If they had kept away from the region of New Amsterdam, they would have done better. That fated "Delaware" company was formed, and set up a trading post on Dutch territory. The Dutch promptly cleared these usurping Yankees out of their possessions, and the promoters of the Delaware company, in addition to having their scheme for wealth abruptly terminated, lost the £1,000 they put into it-which was a heavy disaster for New Haven in 1640.
It was the beginning of bad Inek, and it was the beginning of trouble with . the Dutch. The wonder is that the latter were so considerate as to refrain from coming up to New Haven and annexing "Rodenburgh" to New Amsterdam-a thing they might easily have done. Eaton and his associates purposed, however, to redeem their fortunes by a trading venture to England with the "Greate Shippe," but that went down at sea, and $5,000-about all the free capital that there was left in the colony-went down with it. After that they were very meek, and seem to have taken what Heaven-and hard work-sent them, keeping their feet on the ground.
But all this while, and even when, thirty years after he first sailed up the elay-banked ereek, disappointed John Davenport took his books and beliefs to Boston, burying his ambitions behind him, fate was laying the foundation for the better union that was to be. When in 1637 Theophilus Eaton joined his fortunes with his old playmate of the earlier days at Coventry for an exeursion to the New World, he long had been a prosperous merchant at London, and was married to his second wife. She had been the widow of David Yale of Denbigh -. shire, and by him had two sons, Thomas and David Yale. Both eame over on the Hector. The former was the father of Elilm Yale. There was also a daughter, who later married the Edward Hopkins of the original Davenport party. Hopkins lost his heart to Hartford before the New Haven settlement was made, however, and prospering greatly there, returned to London in 1654 . with a considerable fortune, which he seems to have added to later. He was the patron of the Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven. John Davenport had asked him to give his money for the college projeet instead, and had he done so, this might have been Hopkins instead of Yale College.
It was not until sixty-four years later that the son of Thomas Yale, Boston horn, London trained, made fabulously wealthy as an East India Company- protected plunderer in Old Madras, and later governor of the English trading
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post, Fort St. George, was moved by the strange intervention of Cotton Mather and the perfectly understandable urging of New Haven's London agent, Jeremiah Dummer, to part with a modiemm of his wealth for the struggling collegiate school. After a stormy sixteen years in exile, it had become safely settled in New Haven. In Elihu Yale's gift-small enough compensation for the immortal gain of giving name to the college-it is possible to see rather the fulfillment of fate's purpose than the great enrichment of Yale. The securing of funds which made possible the winning of their fight to bring the college to New Haven had not been the work of a minute. It was gradually that the campaign of Dummer and the others on the other side had led up to Elihu Yale. But looking back now, it is easy to receive the impression that the alliance of New Haven and Yale was predestined from the first.
CHAPTER II
THE MOTHER AND THE DAUGHTERS
THE PURCHASE OF THIE TRACT WHICH WAS TO MAKE NEW HAVEN COLONY AND THIE CREATION FROM IT OF THE DAUGHTER TOWNS-THE BLOOD, SOCIAL AND COMMER- CIAL RELATIONS AS DEVELOPED THROUGH THE YEARS
I
It must not be supposed that Pastor Davenport and Governor Eaton expected to make a state out of what is now ineluded in the territorial limits of New Haven. Very early in the progress of the settlement at Quinnipiac the process of expan- sion began. It continned until the land actually owned-as ownership went in those days-by the Davenport-Eaton Company, included, oddly enough, almost all but one seetion of that part of New Haven County with which the present history deals. This faet establishes without argument the proposition that New Haven is in a true sense the mother of all the towns ineluded in what we have called "eastern New Haven County."
This ownership was not aequired in any irregular way. There was no seizure by force of the lands of the Indians, though the bargain seems to have been, as to its terms, one of those one-sided transactions which strike our business sense today as humerons. When the settlers came they found here a peaceable tribe of Indians, the remnant, at least, of the tribe of the Quinnipiacs. If Captain Adrian Blaek, Dutch trader, who found. and named "Rodenburgh" in 1614, had been minded to eome ashore and take possession, he might have shown less consideration for its nominal first owners than did the more diplomatic Theophi- lus Eaton. (Though for that matter, that worthy did not impoverish himself to give satisfaction, as we shall see.) The Quinnipiacs were minded to live peaceably with their white neighbors. Doubtless they were glad enough of the coming of courageous, well armed white men, whose residence might be expected to keep at a distance their old enemies, the Mohawks and Pequots. From what we can learn, the advent of the Davenport party, of whose 300 about fifty were adult males, probably well armed after the manner of the times, did have a salutary effeet on the warlike tribes who had eaused so much trouble to the settlers further north and east.
It probably was early in their first year in Quinnipiac that Governor Eaton and his associates drew up a very formal treaty of purchase, by which Moman-
11
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A MODERN HISTORY OF NEW HAVEN
guin, sachem of the Quinnipiacs, agreed to the best of his signatory ability to ensure to the settlers the right and fee simple to hold and possess and hand down the territory which is now the town of New Haven. There was much formal verbiage, but what seems to interest us most is the compensation agreed upon. There is supposed to have been in the possession of the members of the Davenport-Eaton party, when they landed in New Haven, wealth to the amount of some £36,000. The cash of that amount was not seriously depleted by this which the settlers agreed to turn over to the Quinnipiacs' treasury as compensa- tion for this land, and which, we suppose, was well and properly delivered :
Twelve coats of English trucking cloth.
Twelve alchemy spoons.
Twelve hatchets. Twelve hoes. Twenty-four knives. Four cases French knives and scissors.
We have no means of knowing just how much territory was included in this sale. Certainly it covered all that we know as New Haven, and probably much more to the north and west. Nor can we tell just how much cash this interesting lot of merchandise would have fetched on the market. It may be worth noticing that of the real estate thus transferred the Market Place alone, The Green as we now know it, is now estimated to have a market value of $3,500,000. But that was many years ago.
Theophilus Eaton looked ahead, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that he had a canny sense of the possible appreciation of real estate in such a great New World commercial metropolis as he proposed to create here. At any rate he must have known that the buying would never be any more favorable. Presently he found Sachem Montowese, son of Chief Sowheag, and his associate Sausennnek, who also had some land to sell. This second transaction was a triumph that put the first in the shade. Naturally, suburban land must go at lower rates. So the Eaton speculators acquired of Montowese, apparently with less documentary formality, a tract extending substantially ten miles northward from the original purchase. Eastward it extended for eight miles from the Quinnipiac River toward the great river of Connecticut, and westward of the Quinnipiac five miles toward the Hudson. And for this considerable tract of something like 130 square miles Eaton and his associates paid "eleven coats of trucking cloth and one coat of English cloth"-with the assorted hardware left ont.
This transaction was completed on December 11, 1638. By studying the territory thus acquired we may understand better how much of a state was created for New Haven, and how truly, in the course of resulting events, New Haven became the mother of the communities to the north and east, and in some measure to the west.
For in this tract we shall find Hamden, North Haven, East Haven, Wood- bridge, all but the western section of Orange, Wallingford, Cheshire and the
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lower part of Meriden, Branford and North Branford. This aeeounts for practically all of the county included in this group except Guilford, which, though settled independently, in a sense, was not less a daughter of New Haven. This had been purchased from Colonel George Fenwiek, a part of his acquisition from Uneas, the Mohegan saehem.
Though the settlers drove sharp bargains with the Indians in the matter of purchase, as it seems to us, they did not insist upon immediate possession. The thousand or so of the Quinnipiacs, and such of the Montowese braves and the Mohegans as the Mohawks and the Pequots had not driven out, were permitted to use the still unimproved land for happy hunting grounds pretty much as they pleased. It was this cordial agreement, which seems, at least as far as New HIaven and its district was concerned, to have existed until "the last of the Mohegans" passed on to meet the Great Spirit, that added greatly to the lore and legend of those early times, as well as helped to keep the family of whites united.
II
"Quinnipiac" seems to have suited the settlers well enough as a name for their new commonwealth for a year or two after their foundation. Just how the change came about we are not sure, but it was in 1639 that the Rev. Henry Whitfield, with his group of twenty-five pilgrims from Kent and Surrey counties in England, stopped at Quinnipiac to see his old neighbors before going on to Guilford. Perhaps he had not wholly decided where to go until he got their adviee. It is said that his ship was the first to enter the mouth of the Quin- nipiac itself, and that he was so impressed by the harbor that he ealled it "a Faire Ilaven." That name has stuck as applied to that locality. It seems not entirely clear how the settlement of John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton eame to be called New Haven, but so it was formally christened in the town court in' the following year.
It was in July of that same 1639 that the Rev. Henry Whitfield and his party arrived at Guilford, which they for a time called by its Indian name Menunketuck. Though in some degree of independent origin, they were willing to consider themselves a branch of the New Haven settlement. This Menunke- tuck extended eastward from what is now the West River to the Hammonassett, and northward to the present limits of the county. The Whitfield party, presently enlarged by later arrivals from England, soon spread to East Guilford, later Madison, and from there aeross the Hammonassett to Killingworth, now Clinton. In this way was created the relation of New Haven with the original home of Yale, for the Rev. Abraham Pierson and his group had a distinet af- filiation with the older settlement on the Quinnipiae. Menunketuck was renamed Guilford in 1643, and East Guilford became Madison in 1826.
But before this Abraham Pierson, father and son, turned up at Branford. Branford and North Branford were a part of the New Haven purehase from Montowese. It was in 1643 that a party of non-conformists from Wethersfield
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secured a grant of the Eaton purchase of Totoket, and the following year they were joined there by the Rev. Abraham Pierson the elder, who had come from Boston by way of Southampton, Long Island. It is possible that Pierson the younger, who was to be the first president of Yale, was born in Branford. From the first it was much of a New Haven community, being settled under the di- rection of Davenport's town. The elder Pierson was an associate of John Davenport, and shared his views on church and government. And Branford was to be the scene, as it turned out, of the actual foundation of the Collegiate school at the meeting of the ministers there in 1701. Abraham Pierson, though he was to have a sojourn in New Jersey meanwhile, was on his return to Con- necticut to shepherd the Killingworth church, to be the school's first reetor.
What was originally Wallingford occupied a considerable portion of the northern part of that tract procured from Montowese for the dozen precious coats. It was settled in 1669 in somewhat intimate relations with New Haven, being, as we are told, a village of the greater town. The following year it was named Wallingford, and made a town in its own right in 1672. Out of this section we have also Cheshire, which was settled as "West Farms" of Walling- ford, and the next new town to be created out of the section. Cheshire set up business for itself in May, 1780.
Woodbridge was a part of the original New Haven tract, such of it as was not inherited from Milford. It has from the first been a good deal of a "church- state" of its own, first being known as "the parish of Amity," and receiving its later name from the Rev. Benjamin Woodbridge, its first minister. Its relation with New Haven has been notably intimate. Its commanding hills were ever attractive to city dwellers who sought the heights, and for the past few decades Woodbridge has been increasingly favored as a suburban residence by the people of New Haven. Today its fine old farmhouses are interspersed with the considerably more pretentious homes of original Woodbridgeites who have expanded and come back, or of discriminating New Haveners who realize Woodbridge's beauty. health and blessing.
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