USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > New Haven > A modern history of New Haven and eastern New Haven County, Vol. I > Part 45
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The roll of honor of that party has been many times, but not too many times, recorded. These are the twenty-five names at the foot of that noble covenant :
Robert Kitchel, John Bishop, Franeis Bushnell, William Chittenden, William Leete, Thomas Jones, John Jordan, William Stone, John Hoadley, John Stone, William Plane, Richard Gutridge, John Housego, William Dudley, John Par- mely, John Mepham, Henry Whitfield, Thomas Norton. Abraham Cruttenden, Francis Chatfield, William Hall, Thomas Naish, Henry Kingnoth, Henry Donde, Thomas Cooke.
There are in Guilford and Madison today abundant fruits of that founding. At least eighteen of the twenty-five names are prominently represented in the two towns, though such names as Seward, Scranton, Hubbard, Bartlett, Chalker, Fowler, Benton, Evarts, Stevens and Blachley or Blatchley, found in the free- men's list of 1650, are even more plentiful. It will be found that most of the others are on the early tombstones. Those who signed that covenant were faith- ful, so far as Providence permitted.
"They love their land because it is their own," wrote Guilford's poet years afterward. The Guilford part of his Connecticut, at least, owned its land by right of purchase. For we have the definite record of purchase from the Indians of all the territory included in Guilford and Madison, the payment being in that same seemingly negligible eoin which Shaumpishuh and Montowese accepted so readily. It was the eoin which the Indians loved, and there is no reason to doubt that Whitfield and his fellows, as did Davenport and Eaton, paid the asked price.
On such a foundation stands a town high in honor among those of Conneeti. eut. Laid on a church foundation, its history, from the beginning until now, is in no small measure the history of its churches. There was not in Guilford so conspicuously as in New Ifaven the stern rule of the church, but its govern- ment was, for the first hundred years of its existence, as truly a theocracy. It sensibly followed the leadership of Pastor Whitfield, for it was a wise one. He preached the word of truth ; he showed good politieal and business acumen. He was a man of substance. lle gave Guilford in that first year an institution which has made for it as much fame, the country over, as anything in its posses- sion. It was he who built the famous "Old Stone House," commonly known in the histories as "the oldest house now standing in the United States." Halfway down the street leading from the green to the sea, row near the railroad station, it has stood for the better part of three centuries, and bids fair to stand for as many more without impairment.
But Pastor Whitfield, having given the colony a start of twelve years, felt
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OLD STONE HOUSE, GUILFORD
Erected in 1639, now the Henry Whitfield House, State Museum. The oldest stone house now standing in the United States.
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COMFORT STARR HOUSE, GUILFORD
Main part purchased by him in 1694 from the heirs of llenry Kingsnorth, twenty-second signer Plantation Covenant, by whom it was doubtless built as early as 1645. Second oldest house in Guilford.
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impelled to visit the land of his origin. For some reason or other he did not return. The people found for his place the Rev. John Higginson, Harvard grad- uate, son of one of the second party of settlers. Ile was a man of power and good leadership, but he came to a difficult succession. His pastorate was termi- nated after eight years. Then came Rev. Joseph Eliot. second son of John Eliot, the sainted "apostle to the Indians." It seems to have been through him that the Eliot line came to Guilford, and it has ever since been prominent there. Mr. Eliot served the people well and led them wisely for thirty years, dying in 1694.
For seventy-five years after that Rev. Thomas Ruggles, father and son of the same name. occupied the Whitfield pulpit. Those were momentous years for the church in many ways. Mr. Ruggles the elder worked with the people for thirty-three years. till he yielded to physical infirmity in 1728. Mr. Ruggles the younger had a pastorate of forty-two years, but it was not all a peaceful time, as we shall see. The Rev. Amos Fowler came to the assistance of Mr. Rng- gles before his death, and continued with the church until 1800. After him came Rev. Aaron Dutton, and lived to see substantial beginning of the split over abolition. Then there were forty years of shorter pastorates, until we find Rev. Frank Iludson Taylor with the church in 1880, continuing for three years. Rev. Edmund March Vittum. from 1884 to 1888, is well remembered, being fol- lowed for a year by Rev. Charles II. McIntosh as stated supply. Rev. Frederick E. Snow eame in 1891, and has remained for twenty-seven years.
The early buildings of the church were on the green, the first, in 1643, being at the start as bare and eheerless as a barn. It was improved by degrees. They partly plastered it in 1668, and later enlarged it with a gallery. A porch was built in 1673. But going to church was an all-day task in those days, and even with those improvements, the people needed a place where they could get warm at noon. So the first "Sabbath Day house" was built in 1696. In 1713 this ancient edifice was replaced by another on the green south of the schoolhouse. In 1725 it acquired a steeple, and shortly afterward a bell. As completed, it was a strange looking building with three-story effect, angular and lacking in beauty as we deem it, but with a sort of quaint dignity. When the people built again in 1830 they abandoned the green for a commanding site on its north side, and erected their present beautiful and convenient building.
The Congregational Church at North Guilford was established in 1725, five years after this part of the town had been made a separate society. Meanwhile, East Guilford had been made a separate society, and had established its church. So this was for a time the third church in Guilford. but when East Guilford was made Madison in 1826, this became the second. It has had a useful but hardly eventful history. Its first pastor was Rev. Samuel Russell, son of that Samuel Russell who had so large a part in the history of Branford and Yale. For twenty-one years he led church and community, and that was probably the long- est pastorate the church has had. Nearly twenty-five men have led it in the 160 years since. among whom we find the honored North Branford name of
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Rev. Fosdick Harrison. It has been the living center of a fine old community, for North Guilford in its isolation has depended greatly on its church. For eight years, from 1903 to 1911, Rev. E. P. Ayer was its pastor. The present minister is Rev. Henry Schlosser.
The time of Rev. Thomas Ruggles, Jr., with the First Church was starred by an unseemly, and it seems to us unnecessary strife which caused two churches to grow where one had grown before, but not to edification. It was a family squabble. There was a minority in the First Church not content to settle young Thomas Ruggles in his father's pulpit. It seems to have been headed by Cap- tain Andrew Ward, who thought his son Edmund better fitted for the position, and slighted because he did not get it. This was in 1729. The upshot of it was an attempt to establish what, had it lived, would have been the Fourth Church. It was a long struggle, lasting all but eighteen years of a century, and covering the time of three pastors after Rev. Edmund Ward. It was ended in 1811 by the disappearance of the Fourth Church.
It was a real division, on a very positive question, which formed the Third Church in 1843. One hundred and twenty-three members who believed slavery should be abolished for principle's sake broke loved ties and assumed the burden of a new church, and put up a building on the west side of the green, calling Rev. David Root to be their pastor. Following him in succession were Rev. Richard Manning Chipman, Rev. George Ingersoll Wood. Rev. George Mills Boynton and Rev. George Wallace Banks, whose long pastorate closed in 1905. Since then Rev. Warren D. Bigelow, and for the past few years Rev. Herbert D. Deetz as supply, have served the church. It has always been a live and pro- gressive institution. Its edifice, built in 1844, was remodeled in 1862, and its ehapel added in 1879.
Guilford's Protestant Episcopal Church, whose noble gothie granite edifice stands on the east side of the green, one of the fine pieces of architecture in the town, dates from 1743. For several years after that, however, it was no more than the gathering at Nathaniel Johnson's house from week to week of a few who preferred that form of worship. Later Rev. Ebenezer Punderson led them, and after him Rev. Bela Hubbard, a native of Guilford, was their reetor. Abont 1751 their first building was set up, to be replaced by their present edifiee in 1836. The most notable period in this church's history has been the quarter century from 1881 to 1906, in which Rev. William Given Andrews, teacher, his- torian, distinguished citizen, ministered to it. Since him the rectors have been F. R. Sanford, 1907 to 1909, and Rev. E. L. Wells, from 1909 to 1916.
St. John's Episcopal Church at North Guilford, established in 1748, has found moderate support in a community not tending to grow, and containing no more people than a single church might serve. For the past few years it has joined forces with Zion Church of North Branford, the two being served by temporary rectors.
For about sixty years following 1808 Guilford had a Baptist Church, due
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FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, GUILFORD
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town from Madison and the east, continuing to New Haven by way of North Branford. There is a branch line from Guilford green to Stony Creek.
That green is more than ever in these days the pride of Guilford. It is to the town what New Haven's green is to that city. It also has in its time had on it two church buildings, four schoolhouses and a hay scales, but now it is clear of them all. In size it is about 66 by 29 rods, and contains nearly twelve aeres.
For a town of moderate size-Guilford had 3,001 people in 1910-it has sub- stantial banks. Its savings bank was founded in 1875, and since about 1894 Capt. Charles Griswold, who comes near to being first in the town's rank of citizens, has been 'its financial guardian, though E. II. Butler has for some years been its president. This bank has deposits of $715.138. and surplus of $40,000. Some time after its foundation the Guilford National Bank was established, but about 1916, for practical reasons, it was changed into the Guilford Trust Com- pany. Of this C. Stowe Spencer is president, and Captain Griswold is treasurer. It has $25,000 capital and $15,000 surplus.
The Guilford Free Library has since 1890 given the people good service. and in 1891 a convenient building was erected on Whitfield Street for its use. It has 2,400 volumes, and Miss Martha G. Cornell is its librarian.
After 250 years of life as a residence, under changing ownerships, the dis- tinguished Old Stone House came to its appropriate mission in 1899. The Legislature of that year ordained it a state museum, and provided for the appointment by the governor of a body of trustees for its management. It is preserved with regard to historical fitness within and without, and is a repos- itory for an increasing collection of the state's historieal relies and memorabilia. The present trustees are :
Frederick C. Norton. Bristol; C. Hadlai Hull, New London; Mrs. Godfrey Dunscombe, New Haven : Alice Bradford Bridgeman, Norfolk; George D. Sey- mour. New Ilaven ; Alfred E. Ilammer, Branford: Edward C. Seward. Guilford ; Rollin S. Woodruff, New Haven; the first selectman of Guilford, ex officio. The custodian of the museum is Mrs. Mary HI. Griswold of Guilford.
Guilford's newspapers, for all the town's age, have been confined to the modern period. Of several of varying value, one has survived. There was the Shore Line Sentinel. an exeellent weekly whose publication was begun in 1877, but somehow it did not pay. There were later the Guilford Item and the Guilford Echo, but they were not of the fit that survive. In 1894 the Shore Line Times, which the Rev. E. M. Jerome had founded in Fair Haven a few years earlier, was purchased by Charles H. Seholey and brought to Guilford. It was the double acquisition by the town of a good newspaper and a fine citizen. He has happily succeeded in filling, in just the way that suits the good old town and the region round about it, the space that the daily newspaper does not fill. and he is gaining the reward his meritorious serviee deserves.
Guilford has one of the oldest Masonie organizations in the state-St. Alhan's lodge, F. & A. M., instituted in 1771. With it is IIalleek chapter,
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FOUNDRY OF I. S. SPENCER'S SONS, INC .. GUILFORD
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THE GUILFORD TRUST COMPANY AND GUILFORD SAVINGS BANK Formerly the Guilford National Bank.
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Royal Arch Masons, 1888. Menunketnek lodge, 1. O. O. F., dates from 1880. Maida Rebekah lodge was instituted in 1895. Guilford also has lodges of the N. E. O. P. and the O. U. A. M., and the Royal Arcanum, and there are flourishing granges in Guilford and North Guilford.
One other institution makes Guilford famous throughout the state and be- yond. In 1860 the Guilford Agricultural Society was born, and for almost half a century it has held annually "the Guilford Fair." It is the great day of Guilford's year, the great annual for eastern New Haven county and the southern eentral part of the state. For not only are the fruits and products of the town and the region spread out for pride and emulation and instruction. but the people gather and revel in Old Home delight. It is a joy not to be missed.
First of all, Guilford is agricultural-has been from the beginning, will be. doubtless, to the end of the chapter. But it has manufactures that are of positive substance. The threads of their sources run back almost to the time of founding, and most of the early ones are memories only. The original mechanical industry, the old town mill, will see its third centenary less than thirty years hence, but gone are the tanneries, most of the sawmills, the fulling mills, which marked the way down to the middle of the last century. Along with those is gone the shipbuilding of which Guilford had not a little, and most of the boat building. Guilford's coasting trade, in which it led the shore towns at one time, is one of the traditions, and so. except for some efficient repair shops, is most of the carriage making of a former time.
But the iron foundry business has held and increased in Guilford, though not in number of plants, sinee the first foundry was established at Jones's Bridge in 1847. It lasted there only four years, and in 1851 was moved to Fair Street, where it has remained ever since. It was the Massup Foundry and Machine Shop then, but soon after the business was acquired by Israel Stowe Spencer, and in the Spencer family's hands it has since remained. As I. S. Spencer's Sons-now his grandsons, as a matter of faet-it still is on Fair Street, Guilford's principal industry, employing 100 men or more. still turning ont a variety of iron, brass and bronze eastings.
In 1868 outside interests represented by J. W. Schermerhorn established a plant for the making of school furniture in what had been the old lock factory on Water Street. The business lasted only nine years, when the Guilford En- terprise Company took the factory and planned to make there a varied line of goods from vegetable ivory. That plan also was short lived. So were some other enterprises which succeeded it, but the original business seems to be con- tinned in a manner today by the O. D. Case Company, which makes school furniture supplies. The carriage making industry is represented in the Archi- bald Wheel Company, making carriage wheels.
Guilford tomatoes are almost as widely known as Guilford clams, because of the canning industry which was first set in motion in 1881 by the Sachem's Head Canning Company. There is also now the Knowles-Lombard Company
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in the same business, and together they keep the farmers in Guilford and the towns around raising tomatoes by the hundred tons for their increasing industry.
Leete's Island, named from Governor Leete and his descendants, and form- erly in part a corner of Stony Creek, is the home of one of the greatest granite quarrying industries in the country. successful through the enterprise of the late John Beattie, and continued by the Beattie Quarry Company. Liberty continues to enlighten the world from Bedloe's Island on an enduring founda- tion, for every stone in her pedestal came from the Beattie quarries. So did all the stone in scores of breakwaters and other substantial constructions all along the coast and inland, and the quarry, with its seemingly inexhaustible supply, keeps busy in its production hundreds of Guilford people.
So is the story of Guilford the story of men who for near three centuries have been faithful to the covenant of the Whitfield pilgrims, and have worked together. There have been some great individuals among them. From Gov- ernor Leete to Col. Samuel Hill, whose prominence was such that "like Sam Hill" has become a proverb in this and many lands, from JJohn Bishop down to the unseen makers of the town today. it has been a wonderful company. Some of its members have been incidentally mentioned. Guilford owes much to men like Whitfield, Ruggles, Andrews and Banks and Snow in her pulpits, to men like the Leetes, the Chittendens, the Spencers, the Nortons and the Sewards in her public affairs and industry, to the Griswolds, the Monroes and the Knowleses in her banking and trade. to Alvan Talcott and Gideon Perry Reynolds, to George H. Beebe and Redfield B. West in medicine, to H. Lynde Harrison and George E. Beers in the law, to the Parmelees and the Dudleys and the Fowlers and a host of others who around her borders have seen that seed time and harvest did not fail to do their perfeet work.
THE ACADIAN HOUSE, GUILFORD
Here several Acadian peasants from Grand Pre, Nova Scotia, were sheltered by the town, having been put ashore from British ships in 1755.
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THE "BLACK HOUSE," GUILFORD
Painted black in 1793, when the owner, Nicholas Loysel, a Frenchman, learned of the belleading of Louis XVI of France. Never repainted until recently.
CHAPTER XLIII
TWO SONS OF GUILFORD
FITZ-GREENE HALLECK, CONNECTICUT'S GREATEST POET. AND HIS WORK-WILLIAM IIENRY HARRISON MURRAY, PREACHER, WRITER, DISCOVERER OF THE ADIRONDACKS AND THE PERFECT HORSE.
The fine old town of Guilford, of which it has been said that "never was there a settlement formed of more rigid Puritans, and there is no town in New England where the peculiarities of that noble race have been more faithfully transmitted from father to son," has had in its three centuries a multitude of noteworthy sons and daughters, whose stories have, in.the main, been ably told. Two stand ont, however, as worthy of every opportunity of the historian, as well as having deserved more than has been given them. Both were men of genins. In one his native town avows on every occasion its pride, but proves it none too well. In the other, it seems, the place of his birth but meagerly confesses its pride, and seeks the while to hide it.
Fitz-Greene Halleck and William Henry Harrison Murray, born in different centuries but living and doing their work in the same century, seem never- theless, to the impression of the present dweller in Guilford, to have been "in two distant ages born." For the former had lived his life and done his work, and passed into a retirement whose modesty made it amount to obscurity, before the latter came into the public view. The "glory time" of the former was in the early decades of the nineteenth century; that of the latter was in the 'seventies and 'eighties, after the kindly poet had vanished from our mortal eyes. Strangely contrasting in many other ways they were; differing in merit and in the praise of men. Yet somehow the town of their birth laeked, and by that token lost, something of understanding of each of them in his time. It may, then, be permissible in the present writer, who has known one in the spirit. and the other somewhat in the flesh but more in the spirit, to record here at least a tribute of appreciation to each.
Thomas Hicks, national artist, a painter of portraits who was better known to a generation to which he gave a likeness of its idol, Henry Ward Beeeher, left one painting which onght to be, and some day may be, the possession
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of the town of Guilford. It is the clear-cut, gentle, keenly intellectual yet kindly face of a "natural aristocrat." With it, in a hand whose grace and care betoken a school of penmanship as past as the old daguerreotype, goes well the chaste signature, "Fitz-Greene Halleck." The whole is a study of rare char- acter. One reads in it that charm which we eall "a gentleman of the old school."
There was no snobbishness in the insistenee of Fitz-Greene Halleck to his friend James Grant Wilson that "none but gentlemen were born in his native town of Guilford, their mechanics and laborers all being importations from New Haven and elsewhere." He meant it, and he meant it well, as a compli- ment to Guilford. How he loved Guilford, how he loved Connecticut as he saw it in the face of characteristic Guilford, is well told in his poem "Con- necticut."
And yet it was in New York, where he lived for thirty-seven years, where he did his main life work-or so he seemed to esteem it-where he made his fortune, where he wrote practically all his important poems, that he felt at home. IIe eredited New York with his inspiration. The credit really was due, it appears, to the association of such giants of American literature as William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Parker Willis and Edgar Allan Poe, all of whom were his contemporaries in New York, all of whom he must have known more or less intimately. Ont of New York he was out of his element. away from his literary stimulus, therefore virtually unproductive. It should be noticed. however, that some of his best work was done immediately after his return from Europe in 1822, so that to his experi- ence abroad may be attributed not a little of his inspiration.
Ilalleck was born in Guilford June 8, 1790, in a house on the east side of the green-not the Halleck house of his later residence there, better identified with him. The blood of the Pilgrim Fathers was in his veins. but an even better strain came from his descent, through his mother, from the sainted "Apostle to the Indians," Rev. John Eliot. It was good stock, and it did not deteriorate in his line, though in his direction it ended with him. His youth and his school brought out revelations of the man that was to be. When impulse ruled over prudence, he wrote poetry before he was ten. When frankness was stronger than modesty, he faneied himself a poet to be. It was in those early days that he drew up in an old writing book, with what we may imagine to have been some promise of the fine seript that made him so valuable-in an- other line -- in later years. an imaginary title-page: "The Poetical Works of Fitz-Greene Hallock." (That was two years before, for some reason which does not fully appear, he changed the spelling of his surname to Halleck.) Could this have been the same person who twenty-two years later published an edition containing four such poems as "Mareo Bozzaris," "Alnwick Castle." "Burns" and "Connecticut," with no mark whatever of the identity of the writer? Dr. Wilson, who says that "Connecticut" was written "in the fine okel mansion where Halleck resided for so many years" (the well known Halleck
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house at the southwest corner of the green), seems to imply that its writing was after Halleck permanently returned to live in Guilford, yet here it is in the edition of 1827.
This beautiful (one nice lady is on record as having called him "the brightest and sweetest looking boy 1 ever saw") and ambitious young school- boy, who began his education at six, completed it at fourteen. Yale college, toward which he could not possibly have been without inclination, was only sixteen miles away. Surely its treasures of literature and its depths of in- spiration must have been more to his liking than the groceries and hardware and drygoods in the general store of his kinsman, Andrew Eliot, yet to the latter place he went, without a murmur of which we have heard. Wealth was rare in the Guilford of those days, and Israel and Mary Halleck were plain people of plain fortunes. But he was in this store a "clerk" in the classic rather than the common meaning. The place was his business college, and toward business he must have had, judging from his adherence to the one main course all through his active life, fully as much of a bent as for literature. Ile could hardly have known, at the start, the truth that while literature might be fine as an amusement, the mercantile pursuit brought bread and butter. But he must have observed that all through his experience in New York. Per- haps the precocious boy had, after all, an "eye for the main chance." It was an instinet not unknown in Guilford. For the boy who entered Andrew Eliot's store at fifteen graduated from that store and from the town six years later. Perhaps we may read between the lines of this the generally suppressed fact that when he "became of age" he took the reins in his own hands, and drove in the way of his ambition.
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