USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > New Haven > A modern history of New Haven and eastern New Haven County, Vol. I > Part 44
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The changes in industrial conditions of the recent decades, and especially the demand for brick workers, have served to alter the character of the town's popu- lation from the simplicity of the old stock. Yet North Haven's citizenship well holds its own. It has increasingly become a place of suburban residence, particu- larly in its center, and trains and trolleys at morning and night are filled with North Haveners whose work is elsewhere. The Hartford and the Air Line rail- . roads and the trolley serve these needs of the commuter, while the town's own natural attractiveness does the rest. Among the citizens who make the town today are descendants of the first settlers, though there is a mixture of other names. Col. Robert O. Eaton and Col. J. Richard North are conspicuous, the one in politics, the other in military and community service. Two physicians, Dr. R. B. Goodyear and Dr. C. S. Higgins, care for the people's health, while all the lawyers are men like Ward Church who have their practice in the city though their homes are in the town. Other "first citizens" are John H. Blakes- lee. Sheldon B. Thorpe, the town's careful historian. Hubert F. Potter, Milo N. Wooding and Charles E. Davis.
CHAPTER XLI
EAST HAVEN
"EAST FARMS, "ITS DEVELOPMENT, ITS GROWTH AND DIVISION AND ITS CHANGE TO THE AGRICULTURAL TOWN AND SUBURBAN SETTLEMENT WHICH IT IS TODAY
On the eastern side of the bay which makes New Haven harbor is a tract of land that might geographically be described as a peninsula. The waters which bound it on its western side are New Haven harbor and the broad mouth of the Quinnipiac River, which for almost two miles north of the harbor is an estuary. On its eastern side for three miles runs down Lake Saltonstall, a deep, substantial body of water, which is connected with the Sound over two miles farther down by what at its mouth is called Stony River. This is the peninsula, at the beginning greatly isolated from the New Haven settlement, now so closely connected that one gets hardly an impression of division, which was "East Farms" for the first century and a half of its existence, later East Haven.
Here we are in the region of shore towns, and a material part of the almost thirty square miles which originally formed East Haven is the familiar "salt meadow," whose erop is mosquitoes, shore birds and a sort of grass which the farmers formerly thought worth the expenditure of considerable time and labor. A large tract east and northeast of Morris Cove, another almost in the center of the old town's territory and still another along the upper banks and to the eastward of the river, is either salt or fresh marsh. For the rest, East Haven is rolling farm land, with a few heights that make it interesting. Chief of these is Pond Roeks, a range nearly four miles long which skirts the western shore of Lake Saltonstall, rising at its highest point to 240 feet.
The early settlers naturally overflowed to East Farms. To those less used to bridges than are we, the crossing of the Quinnipiac was not a difficulty. Yet the river did make a positive boundary, and it was inevitable that this should become a more or less distinct community from the first. It was found a land of the Indians. Its fair fields at the north had been their hunting grounds. "Fort Hill," which rises 360 feet at what was the center of the town, was so named because it was their place of defense. "Grave Hill," farther north, was their ancient burial ground. Over the old lake, doubtless. and through its outlet to the Sound, they drove their light canoes. Over the hills and - meadows and flats of the region they hunted, and on the shore they gathered the aboriginal oyster and clam.
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Friendly enough William Andrews and his associates found them when they came in 1639-for East Farms was well sprinkled with planters while yet the dwellers in the nine squares were timidly locking their stockade gates by night. The tract including East Farms had been acquired from the In- dians in fair bargain the year before, and they had no enmity for the white man. There were some 113 settlers in that first party. Names like William Andrews, Jasper Crayne, Thomas Gregson, William Tuttle, John Potter, Mat- thew Moulthrop, Matthias Ilitehcock, Edward Patterson, Thomas Morris and John Thompson led the list. Names like these are spread all over the town today, for East Haven's old stoek still holds its ground.
Evidently good reports of the land went back to New Haven or spread elsewhere, for a new party, almost as large as the first, followed to settle in 1644. Before that adventurous settlers had spread out, finding some of the shore points first, evidently. In the year of first settlement Thomas Gregson is reported at "Solitary Cove," now Morris Cove-it is anything but solitary now-and in 1644 he was allotted 133 acres there. He seems to have been the first man to bring his family to East Farms. Thomas Morris of the first party was not far behind him, however. He was a shipbnilder, and in 1671 built the old Morris house which still stands in good preservation at the Cove.
The advantages of what is now East Haven as a suburban residence seem to have been early discovered. Perhaps there was prophecy in the purchase, following Rev. Samuel Eaton, who had fifty acres there in 1640, by Rev. John Davenport in 1649 of a farm of 600 acres at Dragon Point, which he ran as a country place called the "Davenport Farm," and employed Alling Ball as his farmer.
The most distinguished "country residence" in East Farms came later, prob- ably as late as 1700, when Governor Gurdon Saltonstall built on the heights overlooking the lake one of the finest houses in Connecticut. There he lived for the remainder of his life, and his residence there rescued that fine body of water from the obloquy of being longer called "Furnace Pond."
The impressive allotments of land did not tend. perhaps, to the early in- crease of East Haven's population beyond a certain point. For in 1754, much over a century after the first settlement, there were only sixty-one fam- ilies there. The "Farms" had sought parish privileges in 1677, but did not get them until 1680. There was strength enough to secure incorporation as a town in 1785, and shortly after that, the enumerators said, East Haven had 1.025 people.
That town, it should be remembered, was all and a little more of the peninsula heretofore described. It had the populous east shore of the Quin- nipiac and the harbor, all the way from Cedar Hill to what we call Light- house Point. It took in Morris Cove and Fair Haven East as those sections grew np. This explains why it increased until in 1855 it had 2,000 people, then 3.057 in 1880. Meanwhile, it had become an awkwardly divided com- munity. There was the Village of East Haven, southwest of the point of Lake Vol. 1-24
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Saltonstall. There was the strictly agricultural northern area, comprising most of the town's land. There were the seaside communities of Morris Cove and South End. And there was the near-city on the eastern shore of the Quinnipiae.
This last produced trouble, largely financial. Bridging the Quinnipiac was no small task, and was not attempted, at the point where it was needed most, till 1877. By 1650 there were ferries across the river near its mouth, and from Fair Haven to Fair Haven East the town operated a ferry for some years after the Ferry Street bridge was built lower down. But necessity com- pelled the Grand Avenue bridge in 1877, and the $60,000 it eost was a pretty heavy load for a town with a grand list of only $2,190.220. By the time it was done, East Haven had a bonded debt of $100,000. The owners of mod- erately paying farm lands, getting little benefit from these costly improvements which the east bank of the river thought it must have. vigorously protested.
That is a part of the story which ended in 1881 in the setting off to New Haven of nearly half the territory of East Haven. The new line ran from a point in the North Haven boundary east of "the ridge" southwest to Fort Hale park, then southerly to the Morris Creek on the Cove meadows, which it follows to the Sound. The event has proved that the division is more natural than that which the Quinnipiac made. for the annexed area, now New Haven's Fourteenth and Fifteenth wards, is now substantially built up, except the northeastern corner. As a consideration, in part, for this annexation, New HIaven assumed the whole of East llaven's bonded debt of $100.000.
This left East Haven with a population of 955. In the course of thirty- seven years it has without artificial aid more than doubled its number, and is now back where it was in 1855, having today not far from 2,000 people. It has a property list much larger than its total when the separation eame, though it has formed a new debt as great as the first cost of the Grand Avenue bridge. Apparently it is well content with its size and status, being a substantial, prosperous town, whose history, though great, is not all behind it.
Much of that history centers around "the Old Stone Church." which stands near the center of the town, the ancient church of the fathers. The scattered early settlers were not able to support a church, and must have worshipped in New Haven for fifty or sixty years. The first definite record we find of worship in East Haven was the ministration of Rev. Jacob Hemingway. who began to preach to the people in 1704. This must have been in the planters' honses, for the church was not officially organized until seven years later, and not before 1711 was its first building erected. The size of this indicates a congregation of modest requirements. It was only twenty by sixteen feet. Its appointments without and within were equally primitive, no doubt. Either it was inadequate from the start or the congregation grew more rapidly than was expected, for it was used only eight years. It was replaced in 1719 by a larger building, about which we are told little. It served the people, however, for fifty-five years.
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One of the distinctions of this church is that in its 207 years it has had but seven pastors, one of whom merely filled an interregnum as acting pastor. The briefest regular pastorate was of nine years. From that the range has been up to fifty-one. The first pastor, beginning his service seven years before the church was organized, remained until his death fifty years later. The second pastor was Rev. Nicholas Street, who was ordained in 1755, and remained until his death closed a remarkable service of fifty-one years. So long a pastorate, at a time when the town was in its formative period, had an incalculable in- fluence. Indeed. the power that has gone out from the old church in its two centuries is easily recognized but cannot be reekoned.
Following Mr. Street's came the comparatively brief pastorate of Rev. Saul Clark. He was installed in 1808, and after eight years he was dismissed, on his own request. East Haven had become much of a town in 1817, when Rev. Stephen Dodd came to this church. He was an able preacher, a firm advocate of temperance, a man of quiet power. He led the church and in great measure the people for twenty-nine years. He found time to give some little attention to historical research, and in 1824 published, under the title of the East Haven Register, some valuable facts of the town's history and genealogy. Fifth in the order came Rev. Daniel W. Havens, and rounded out an even thirty years -thirty years of constructive progress, closed in 1877 by his resignation. Fol- lowing that there were three years in which Rev. Joseph Tomlinson was acting pastor.
Thirty-eight years ago there came to this church and pulpit a man who was to cover the whole modern period in one remarkable pastorate, as dis- tinguished as any in its history. Rev. Daniel J. Clark was then a young man, just from Hartford Theological Seminary. It was his first charge. He has grown up with the old town in its modern time. Ile has seen its most important changes. He has grown into the hearts of the people through the devotion of his life to their service in the old church.
It is an old church, even as a lmilding. This edifiee of stone, though it has that appearance of healthy youth which symmetry of architecture gives. dates back nearly a century and a half to 1774. in the time of the second pastor. It was, when built, notable in the church architecture of Connecticut, in city or country. Now, a century and a half young, it stands out with all the dignity of old. a true symbol of the permanence and eternal youth of the ideals for which it stands. The chapel, or parish house, constructed of stone that as nearly as possible matches the church, was erected in 1874 as a "centennial chapel" to celebrate the church building's centenary. It well serves the com- munity's needs as a center of healthful activities in connection with the church's work.
The missionary spirit of old Trinity on the Green helped toward the estab- lishment. as it has helped in the maintenance, of a church of the Episcopal faith in East Haven. It is called Trinity there. Its pathway has not been all an easy one. From 1788 there were first neighborhood meetings conducted by
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a body of Church of England believers of which Samuel Tuttle was chairman and John Bird clerk. The building of a chapel was begun in 1789, but the work was interrupted by an untoward accident in raising the frame, and other delays following, was not completed until 1810. Meanwhile, it was used to some extent. Rev. Edward Blakeslee was the first rector, but his stay was brief, and in the next eighty years there were some twenty-five rectorates, interspersed, during the first part of the period, by seasons in which Rev. Dr. Hubbard came out from Trinity in New Haven to conduct the services. The chapel was enlarged in 1843 and 1845, and in 1867 was completed to sub- stantially its present form.
In the far northeast of the town there is a section which got its name from the Indian sagamore Foxon. On another line of main highway, six miles distant from the Village of East Haven, it has become a somewhat distinct center of the farming district. There was erected in 1877 a chapel for neighborhood gath- erings, and in 1893 a Congregational church was organized. It has but fifty- three members, and is in part a state mission church, but it holds a sort of frontier in the sturdy old pilgrim spirit. Rev. Charles Page has since 1894 been its pastor.
About 1914 there was established in the southwestern part of East Ilaven a Catholic parish, taking in the village and a part of the Morris Cove section. It has a substantial building, and is ministered to by Rev. Joseph Joyee, D. D.
East Haven has a good school equipment. By arrangement with New Haven, it has the advantage of the city's high school privileges. The costly system of small district schools has been in great measure abolished, and the town's 781 pupils are accommodated in two school buildings, one of one room and the other of six in the central portion of the town. The value of these build- ings is upwards of $20.000. The school committee in 1917 consisted of Samuel R. Chidsey. John D. Houston, Charles II. Stanton, Charles W. Granniss, John Scoville, Julius E. Brooks, Robert E. Hall, Minott C. Bradley and Grove J. Tuttle.
This was not always the peaceful combination of suburban village and agri- cultural town it seems today. It appears to have been discovered that there was iron in the vicinity of "Great Pond" almost as soon as that there was virtue in the soil to raise crops. So the lake was early dubbed "Furnace Pond," from the iron works there. It was in 1655 that they were established, the earliest of any in the state. But the iron industry does not appear to have amounted to mneh, and presently was overshadowed by others which sought to utilize the water power From Stony River or from the Farm River which flows down from Foxon and empties into it. In 1680 a firm with famous names, Stephen Goodyear and John Winthrop, Jr., asked for the mill privilege at Saltonstall. Another attempt to manufacture iron was made there in 1692 by John Potter. Soon the place was monopolized by the town grist mill. Samuel Heminway being the miller. Further down, and later, there was a paper mill. James Donoghue, James Harper and others organized the Saltonstall Manufacturing Company
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in 1871. Still later, evidently in that same plant, were made heavy carriage and portable engine wheels. In the nature of a successor to this there was in the village later a shop run by steam power, and conducted by Stephen Bradley & Company.
So ends East Haven's manufacturing chapter, for virtually all of these things are of the past, and little trace remains. The town has nothing that may properly be called manufacturing. Yet it has the look of prosperity and thrift, and that is not an illusion. Its growing central streets have their houses oe- cupied by East Haveners-and they are loyal East Haveners, too, for there is a justified pride in the town-who have business or employment in the city, or perhaps have farming or business interests in East Haven. There is abiding evidence of good construction on the ancient foundations. The men of East Haven are substantial men, worthy holders of such names as Bradley and Thompson and Hosley and Tuttle and Seoville and Street. The town has in Dr. Charles W. Holbrook its beloved physician, and its legal needs are supplied by Attorneys Dwight W. Tuttle. Grove J. Tuttle and Alfred W. Andrews. A competent fire department. with H. B. Page as chief, protects the thickly built portion of the town.
East Haven has its green, of the true New England type, a central feature in its town layout, and well preserved. It gives that air of distinction and dignity which well represent the age and leisurely development of the com- munity.
Here is one of the finest of Connecticut shores, though it is not fully developed. At the southeast corner it holds the historic name of Momaugnin, with a summer hotel of the same name, and a little to the east is the Mans- field. There is a choice stretch of beach, and this is East Haven's principal summer resort. A branch trolley line connects it with the trolley which runs from New Haven through to Branford. South End has a beach as good and even more picturesque, though not so many have found it. These are the remnants of what was, before the division, the oyster raising and seaport town. The modified form of seashore activity shows change, but not decadence.
CHAPTER XLII
GUILFORD
THE INDEPENDENT ORIGIN YET NEW HAVEN AFFILIATION OF THE FOUNDERS, TIIE ESTABLISHMENT, DEVELOPMENT AND CONSTRUCTION OF THE PLANTATION OF MENUNKETUCK
The symmetrical boundary of southwestern Middlesex County would be that line which runs almost straight south from Lake Pistapaugh at the southeastern corner of Wallingford to the Sound. That instead this boundary is the Ham- monasset River involves some history which has a place all its own in New Haven County. Guilford is a curious paradox of an entity on the one hand, and an integral part of the New Haven distriet on the other. It was settled independently of New Haven; yet its inclusion, in such disregard of natural county lines, in the New Haven county, is sufficient proof of its identification with New Haven.
At least that much of origin is required for an adequate understanding of Guilford as it stands in the commonwealth today. It is a town with all the pride of independent pilgrim establishment. It has deep historie foundations that cannot be moved. Its makers of the old stoek predominate. Modern Guil- ford is a part of the melting pot, too. When they numbered its "men of war" in 1917 there was patronymie proof of a dozen widely different races in its eiti- zenship, but then and since there has been even stronger evidence of a community as united, as American, and soundly dependable as the Guilford that raised a regiment in the Revolution, that guarded well its coasts in 1812, that gave with unsparing sacrifice of its best manhood to save the Union in the '60s. All down the record of the years, from the little company which signed the "join ourselves together" covenant with Pastor Whitfield on the voyage to this land of promise, to the more than three thousand people of many origins who make the Guilford of today, the record is starred with sterling men and true women. Some have their names written in the world's halls of fame-and they are not a few. But the many have lived the even nobler unsung life of the country town. and made that the American field of honor.
Geographieally, Guilford is a substantial town. As it stands today. it has an area somewhat in excess of forty-seven square miles, extending thirteen miles from the marshy point of Sachem's Head to the highland boundary of Durham. Across its widest part, from Moose Hill to where Neck River makes its farthest
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10
SECOND EDIF ICE ( IT)A -1550)
JE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL SOCIETY | OUILFORD, CONN. ESTABLISHED 1639
BY REY ' HENRY WHITFIELD.
"THREE DECKER' SILEFLE BUILT IN 1726 SITE - WITHIN GREIN IN CONN
"
MECHANISM OF OLD TOWN CLOCK BUILD BY EBENEZER PARMELEE ( IT27 -18)3)
AND PLACED IN FIRST CHURCH STEEPLE THE FIRST TOWN CLOCK IN NEW ENGLAND
PROBABLY IN UNITED STATES - -
OLD FIRST CHURCH BUILDING AND MECHANISM OF OLD TOWN CLOCK, GUILFORD
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eastward curve, it measures six miles. As Connectieut towns go, it is a land of large distanees. It is starred all over with place names, many of them suggest- ing history. It is a coast town lacking in beach, it has a fine harbor, once the home of many coasting vessels and the refuge of more, but seldom visited now by more important craft than idle pleasure boats. Mulberry Point and Sachem's Head tell of the times when the Indian roamed the marshes and the hills of old Menunketuck. Clapboard Hill and Moose Hill have their meanings of a past that most have now forgotten. Grim Totoket of Branford overlooks its north- ern boundary and farther eastward Bluff Head looks down on the interesting waters of Lake Quonnipang, one of the finest bodies of fresh water of the region.
Time was when Guilford had aeres in excess of any town in the state. For though by the beginning of the last century most of the two large towns had been parceled between their parishes, Guilford and East Guilford remained one politi- cal unit until 1826. I'p to that time the area of the town was over eighty-seven square miles. The towns of Guilford and Madison, which then was set off, are alike in one peculiarity. As standing since the division, each is a long, narrow territory stretching thirteen miles up from the sea to the deep woods of the north. Each has a south and a north "society," which form distinct communi- ties, having little but voting duties in common, with what amounts to a decided break in settlement between. In one way of looking at it, four towns have been made ont of the Menunketnek which the first settlers acquired from the Indians in 1639.
Guilford is ever loyal to its brethren. It makes no quarrel over the claim that its origin, its spirit and purpose, were identical with those of the founders of New Haven. So much the more reason, then, why Guilford's individual source should be so shown that he who runs may read. Religious intolerance, that same church bigotry that drove Cotton Mather and Thomas Hooker and John Davenport to the large room and free air of this New World, sent forth Henry Whitfield and his little company of independents. Henry Whitfield's house at Ockley in Surrey was a harbor for the persecuted by the zealous Arch- bishop Laud. If men like Mather and Hooker and Davenport were not his friends before, they were by the time they had come here, and their cause was common. Whitfield became a Congregationalist and an independent long before he resolved to follow his friends. They had gone, he was lonesome, and the light of the searchers of the archbishop was beginning to play on him. ITis friend Fenwick provided a way, and the Whitfield party came.
Two features of that coming will help to make clear the character of that migration and its relation to the other one two years earlier, which terminated at Quinnipiac. The first was the covenant which the twenty-five made and signed on shiphoard. It was a promise to "join ourselves together, to be helpful one to the other, not to desert or leave each other." Therein is revealed the charac- ter of the founders. It is a character which Guilford has never lost.
In the second place, these voyagers deliberately made for Quinnipiac. Theirs was the first ship to visit that harbor since the settlers came. It was the first
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ship to enter the mouth of the Quinnipiac estuary. And in their brief stay they named the city which was to be. For there is satisfactory evidence that Pastor Whitfield, or some other of the discerning in the party, looking about him on the broad bay which would hold a thousand ships safe from the storms, and landward over the goodly plain between the red rocks, ealled this a "Fayre Haven." From that to New Haven was natural and easy.
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