A modern history of Windham county, Connecticut : a Windham county treasure book, Volume I, Part 39

Author: Lincoln, Allen B
Publication date: 1920
Publisher: Chicago : S. J. Clarke publ. co.
Number of Pages: 930

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There was a good deal of hostility between the private high school and the district school from which I had emerged early in 1863. Things came to a head one day in the early spring of that year when all the boys from the district school came up to destroy us of the so-called high school in a snow-ball fight. This was during Mr. Tingley's administration. Our foes came pouring up between Mr. White's house and Mr. Bard's house, and advanced bravely toward our much smaller group of larger boys who had gathered around the old meet- ing house. How well I remember the first shot! It was delivered from our side by "Eb" Thompson. If you wish to write him, address the Rev. Ebenezer Thompson, Sarasota, Fla. Thompson was not reverend at that time, though he

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was revered for his accuracy of markmanship and the range of his projectiles. That was the most glorious snow-ball fight that I ever had anything to do with. Late in the battle Gus Preston of the enemy fired a snow-ball which hit Mr. Tingley, an innocent spectator, squarely in the face. Tingley rushed at Gus, chased him down the street and caught him near the postoffice; brought him back, locked him up in our wood closet, and made us all go into school, dry our clothes, patch up our bruises, and get to work. After a while Gus was let out and he went back to his own school. These things had momentous consequences for me. The other school swore revenge, and as I happened to be the only boy who passed the district schoolhouse on my way to and from home, their project early took the form of a resolve to catch Flavel Luther and lock him up. I certainly had a picturesque and hectic time while this feud lasted, and I know how foxes feel when they are hunted. It happened that my father had put the lock on this school closet door, and so knew the combination; I carried a screw- driver sewed in my clothing with which to let myself out. But, pardon me the boastfulness of this statement, they never caught me.

The singing school was a feature of young life in Brooklyn in my time. I remember best a term when we were taught by "Jim" Kimball, scion of a very musical family. I still think he had one of the finest voices that I ever listened . to. We practiced through the winter, and most pleasant gatherings they were. Hickory nuts and popcorn and candy during intermission, and going home with the girls afterward; though I personally never had nerve enough at this time to ask a girl if I might see her home. The adventure seemed too perilous for me to undertake. Poor Jim, he died most tragically through some railway accident.

In 1866 the baseball craze struck Brooklyn and raged with great violence. It attracted the attention of the returning soldiers, and indeed of all the men in town under forty years of age. The Brooklyn club was organized. Two or three balls were purchased. Bats were made and the diamond laid out in the fair-ground. Later the practice was transferred to a lovely field on Mr. Wit- ter's farm. What glorious times we had there! I remember a few of the players in this first Brooklyn team: Eugene Fuller, catcher; Jim Kimball, pitcher ; and Bob White, first base. There were a number of French-Canadians on the team, and one colored man, commonly known as "Quackenbush." I haven't the least idea whether that was his real name. The Windham County Agricultural Society offered this year a silver ball to the champion baseball team in the county, and we decided to win it, but we didn't. Our first game was with the Putnam team. At the end of three innings I think the score was 55 to 44 in favor of Putnam, and we said they could have their old ball and quit. I say "We," but I wasn't on the team. I believe the Willimantic team finally won the trophy. [See account of this in Willimantic .- Ed.]

Speaking of the fair: This three or four-day celebration was really a great event, both for old and young. The exhibition of farm and garden products, of fine stock, and of trotting horses, never failed to command the interest of anybody that could get to Brooklyn and raise the price of a ticket or crawl under the fence-both customs were prevalent. My early tendency toward a sporting life has brought it about that I remember the horses better than I do anything else in connection with these fairs. Here are some of the names: Pathfinder, Hickory Jack, Gray Eagle, Rob Roy, Black Hawk, Kate Bailey ; and one glorious year we had Ethan Allen with his running mate, Socks.

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Another source of interest during all my boyhood, and I presume later, grew from the fact that Brooklyn was the county town in these days. Court was in session I think four times a year. The judge and the lawyers swarmed in the hotels and everybody knocked off work in order to "tend court." Dis- tinguished members of the county bar that I recall were Governor Cleveland, John J. Penrose of Central Village, Johnson of Putnam, Graves of Danielson, besides Tyler of Brooklyn. The clerk of the court was Uriel Fuller, commonly called "Square" Fuller. Judge Waite often came up from Norwich and once Charles O'Connor addressed a jury in the old court house. I couldn't get in to hear him, small though I was, and so I went up and sat on the steps and listened. As I remember the occasion, I might have stayed at home half-a-mile . away and have heard him.

In the court house were two rooms assigned to some kind of an association which maintained what was called the town library, and also a reading room where newspapers and periodicals were on file. Among the many admirable opportunities which my father offered me I value none more than a member- ship which entitled me to take two books at a time from this library. I wonder what has become of them all? The boys were technically allowed the privileges of the reading room, but practically they proved to be a nuisance and we were chased out frequently ; mainly because we could not help giggling at a vener- able old gentleman who always whispered to himself when he was reading. It tickled us immensely, but the old gentleman enjoyed doing it, I suppose.

I want to tell a little more about baseball. After the collapse of the Brook- lyn Club the boys from fifteen to eighteen years of age organized the "Active Junior" Baseball Club, of which I was permitted to be a member. We had several very enjoyable seasons, practicing and playing our matches on the fair- ground diamond. How I wish I could see those boys again. Ed Bard, our first catcher, and Frank Weaver died some time ago; but so far as I know, the rest of them are still living. Grant me space for names that I remember- here they are: Gus Preston, Frank Weaver, Ed Bard, Dave King, Al Martin, Charlie Bard, Hen Allen, Lew Kimball, John Bard, Charlie Tripp. There were many others in the club. I have named the "first string" boys only. We were highly successful, and won a rosewood bat which is still preserved in the Brooklyn library.

It was as a baseball player that I really took my leave in Brooklyn, in the fall of 1867, when on a Saturday afternoon in mid-September we had two or three lively hours of play. I can see now the landscape as I turned my back . on the old fair-ground, the sun setting among the western hills, while I crossed the fields toward the old home. It was my last day as a boy. Monday I went to college and Brooklyn was no longer my town; and yet it is my town and always will be.

BROOKLYN AT THE TURNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

By George F. Genung

The first few years of the twentieth century, from about 1900 to the out- break of the Great war, marked a sort of crisis in the economic and social life of the town ; not such a sudden and tragic crisis as war precipitates, but a more gradual fitting to new relations and possibilities, such as the slow decay of

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remunerative farming interest and the gradual outliving of the town's char- acter and prestige as the aristocratic county seat had rendered inevitable.

There is little that is dramatic about such a crisis, and little that those who lived through it would count worthy of being chronicled as an epoch ; and yet, diminutive as it would appear in a great public history, that brief period enclosed a real though minor turning-point in the social development of the town.

Farms once productive and prosperous, and starting-points of cultured and successful urban careers, were passing into the hands of a climbing proletariat, as their ambitious heirs left them to be sold or deserted by the outworn parents. Church Street, the neighborhood of Old Trinity, and early the very center of church piety and culture, preserved from oblivion the old Trinity building with its churchyard, and the Putnam Elms as a lovely and beneficent but unre- munerative summer resort; but the dwindling American inhabitants had fol- lowed the church to the neighborhood of New Trinity in the village, or scat- tered to the ends of the earth. Bush Hill, the feminine survivors of whose glory as Dyer Hill had moved to the village, was for a time kept ap in exclusive but unproductive grandeur by a wealthy widow from the city, and then, at her death, abandoned to a caretaker. Allen Hill, once, co-ordinate with the village in wealth and culture, shared in the Celtic decay, though for a time kept on the map through the purchase of its principal farm by an enterprising and philanthropic woman of culture, followed by the erection of a neighborhood social hall. But the malady that infected all the outlying agricultural life of the town was that of economic creeping sickness.

The first outstanding change was the centralizing of the public schools. As the district groups of children grew too small to maintain a teaching force the school team took up the task and daily transported the children to the graded Center School, while the outlying schoolhouses were left to unsightly decay. This centralizing was for the town an educational advantage, as the graded training in larger groups had a superior civilizing effect on the young.

More decisive in the slow process of the town's decline was the gradual diminution of rural financial strength. The substantial Brooklyn Savings Bank had taken its rise and grown on the accumulations of enterprising and well-to-do farmers in the west and north of the town and its neighboring agri- cultural districts. As farms passed into struggling alien hands these sources of bank business dwindled and dried up. The bank found its body of custom- ers shifting to the manufacturing and commercial neighborhoods, and its di- rectors and depositors consisting more and more of active and managing busi- ness men. For some years the stress toward moving the bank to Danielson had been felt, and this pressure, though resisted in several legislatures by the town, at length succeeded; and somewhere about 1910 the removal was made.

Meanwhile the center Village of Brooklyn was slowly assuming the barren role of laudator temporis acti, the poor self-respect of the proud who have seen better days. It was still one-third of a county-seat-it had the county jail. It had the churches and the de-court housed Town Hall; it had the intelligent and leisured citizens who, with their lawns and comfortable residences, passed in the estimation of surrounding villages as wealthy. These citizens were mostly old people, or mature women endowed with the savings of some old-

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time farm, just able to live in comfort, or in some cases a decent luxury, but not public spirited or aggressive in anything involving the raising and expend- iture of money.

One of the oldest citizens at this time was a notable exception to the general self-centered insouciance of the community. This was Mr. J. Sprague Bard, who in early life had started a thrifty gold-pen manufacture here, removed it to New York, developed it into a large commercial firm, and having returned to the old homestead at retiring age, was living and benefiting the town on his well-earned competence. His beautiful flower garden in full view of the street is still fragrant with blessed memories of cheer to church congregations and social gatherings and invalids, as well as of its refining influence on the public. A neat little country clubhouse, with ample stone fireplace and chimney, much valued for entertaining casual summer visitors on Saturday afternoons, was built on his grounds and maintained by him as much as by the members of the club. His chief beneficent interest, however, was the Public Library. This had been organized some years before our epoch, largely through his initiative and generosity, and was occupying and outgrowing a room in the Town Hall.

When the savings bank moved to Danielson the directors offered its brick building to the Library Committee at a reduced price. A subscription list was formed, of friends of the library at home and abroad, the great bulk of the money being given in equal shares by Mr. Bard and Mr. W. M. Isaacs, a wealthy New York summer resident of Brooklyn. A little more than enough to pay for the building was raised, the excess sum being sufficient to fit it up neatly and acceptably for a town library.

This refitting and the installation of the library in its new quarters was rendered possible within the corporation's means largely through the gratuitous service and watchful management of Rev. Dr. George F. Genung who, being drafted into the Library Association by Mr. Bard just at this juncture, was at once laden with the planning and execution of the work and with the librarian's office and responsibility. Through his management the library in its tastefully fitted habitat became an institution of which the town was proud, and as focus of the town's intellectual life is diffusing a priceless educational influence in all parts of the town and in Canterbury.

The nature of the crisis through which the village was passing in its serious and social life may be said to have been, on the part of its women, the enlarging of community interest from separate devotion to each one's own church affairs, in water-tight compartments, to a wider concern with things in which sectarian, earnest and worldly women could work together. With this discovery of fel- low interest and efficiency was awakened a new encouragement regarding the community's future, a moral transition from futile hopings for rescue from the general decay by infusion of new blood from outside, to a self-reliant, de- veloping of inherent possibilities, a resort to working instead of helpless wish- ing as a means of community welfare and progress.

Just a little previous to the movement which resulted in the new library, a wave was set in motion by Mrs. Genung which occasioned a considerable revolu- tion in the adult female social life of the community. Mrs. Genung, who was an enthusiast in women's missionary work, conceived the idea of opening a mission study class, around a long table in her front room, which women of every persuasion were invited to join. After a year or so of this studious mix-

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ing the awakened learners raised the question, "Why not organize a women's club?" The idea seemed feasible, especially as Brooklyn women had at last found a leader under whom as president they could harmoniously subordinate their personal prejudices. A flourishing and energetic Women's Club was formed, and it proved a growing and fruitful plant in the garden of community life.

One of the first adopted activities of the club was village improvement. Wisely counselled at the beginning, the club resolved to center its work, not on mere inhibitions such as the banning of street waste-paper litter and the shutting up of immemorial short-cut footpaths across the Green, but on real constructive amendment. Devoting their newly-discovered teamwork talent to the histrionic stage, they raised money and presented the town with a fine large flag and pole fixed upon the peak of the Town Hall. This gift was soon followed by the erection of a tasteful village pumphouse on stone piers, which the tax-shy town was obliged to supplement with a much-needed cement plat- form and a new town pump. Mr. William Park, a well-to-do brass founder of Taunton and Boston, happening along at the psychological moment, while on a visit to Brooklyn, the refuge of his early boyhood, was aroused to enthusiasm by the women's example and contributed a bronze tablet, which fixes the date of the structure at 1911. Soon after, the husband of the club's president made the molds for a cement watering trough, and with the help of a congenial neigh- bor mechanic, husband of another club member, connected the trough with the central pump for the use of the equine public.

One unseemly effect of this praiseworthy village adornment, not realized until the deed was done, was that the town bulletin board, publisher of official notices and symbol of the majesty of government, was totally overshadowed behind a common-people's wellhouse. The amateur minister-mechanic soon had this anomaly on his mind, and at the next town meeting, with the aid of drafted designs, persuaded the town to empower him to build a new official bulletin on a stone pier harmonious with the nearby wellhouse, and surmounted by a five-way guide post pointing to Pomfret, Danielson, Norwich, Willimantic and Elliots, at the northeast corner of the Green.

The town was then just at the era of the introduction of electric lights. Supplied from the People's Light and Power Company of Danielson, several of the citizens had installed lights in their houses. The designer of the guide- post, whose original sketch called for an oil lantern, had the foresight to erect a hollow standard capable of wiring and supporting a future electric light. In due time, through the enterprise of Mr. Flagg, promoter for the Light and Power Company, a village street lighting association was formed, with Doctor Genung as treasurer and factotum, which installed street lights through the central part of the village, with a higher watt-power globe burner at the top of the guide-post as king light of the system.

On the part of the men this outburst of village improvement was received passively though not unkindly. Politically the town at large, annually oppressed by the waxing burden of schools, and roads and town poor, in the face of dimin- ishing farm-valuations, vibrated between dread of an increased town debt and. dogged resistance to a raise in the tax rate. Any expenditure affecting the vil- lage alone was sure to be voted down by outlying taxpayers. Good, law-abiding

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farmers, snug in bed at the chickens' hour, with no occasion for traversing lighted streets at night, counted village illumination no concern of theirs; and the voluntary street lighting association had to badger and outstay a whole administration of retrenching selectmen before it could get the town to main- tain even the one electric light at the top of its bulletin and guideboard.

Brooklyn's unique glory, its association with the illustrious Israel Putnam, artistically exhibited near the hotel by Connecticut's only outdoor equestrian statue, was enhanced and made a living memory by the organization, about the beginning of this century, of the Col. Daniel Putnam Association, composed of descendants of the famous general and his son Daniel, whose family allied the Putnam prestige closely to Old Trinity and the memory of Colonel Malbone. This association made it an object to memorialize all possible souvenirs of the general's life and exploits in or near the town, and to keep alive a mingled patriotic and all-saints' pride by biennial pilgrimages to Brooklyn, enlivened by social reunions and research literature. In 1918, the 200th anniversary of Putnam's birth, this association placed a bronze tablet on a boulder in front of the site of the Putnam tavern and the farm where he is reputed to have left his plough in the furrow to go to Boston and fight for independence.

Meanwhile the churches, long accounted from the worldly point of view as too many, were heroically maintaining regular services, with pitiably paid pas- tors and well-kept edifices, diminutive endowment funds and parsonages. They suffered not only from the decline of pew-holding support, but from the lack of children and young people, and from indolent paganism that is everywhere superseding the old Puritan sturdiness of belief. It was the stock proposal of wiseheads that they should unite, but these sapient advisers were mostly on- lookers who did not realize the force of denominational loyalty and the persist- ence of vested interests. Some church must give up its independent existence, but no one would volunteer to be the victim. A perceptible improvement in interchurch fellowship may be credited to the sociability and collaboration which founded and maintained the Women's Club. A very genial and benefi- cial social life, quite detached however from specific church sentiment, was fostered by the Brooklyn Grange, which at this epoch was one of the most successful institutions of its kind in the county.

The foreign element of the population, which is ominously permeating in- dustrial New England, had thus far left rural and Central Brooklyn pre- dominantly American. East Brooklyn and West Wauregan, by reason of their proximity to the Danielson and Wauregan mills, were copiously sprinkled with foreigners, mostly Canadian French; so that the town voting list, with its an- nual supplement of "To be Made," presented a sufficiently polyglot · appear- ance, and the tax-collector's notices were printed in English and French. These older immigrants, however, were becoming Americanized, so that they were be- ginning to fill responsible political offices, even in one instance representing the town in the Legislature. During the period that we are considering a noticeable immigration of Italians manifested itself in the western and central part of the town; coming, however, from other parts of America, where they had acquired a good command of conversational English and, with their nor- mally numerous children, making creditable records in the public schools, were well on the road to absorption in American life.

Vol. I-21

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HISTORY OF WINDHAM COUNTY DEACON BENJAMIN BROWN

A LIFE TYPICAL OF THE BEST THINGS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

One of the most interesting stories of Brooklyn life is carried in an account of the "life and times" of Deacon Benjamin Brown, who was born May 25, 1807, and died October 14, 1906, having attained the unusual age of ninety- nine years, four months and nineteen days. His life was typical of the old- time New England Yankee stock, now growing so scarce that it seems almost as if it were passing like the American Indian.

The first outstanding feature of the life of Deacon Benjamin Brown was that he was born in the identical house first occupied by Genl. Israel Putnam and from which that fearless warrior went forth to find the wolf, the den being about three miles away. The only remaining trace of the house today is the "cellar hole" on the lot east of the present residence of Arthur B. Lapsley who bought the farm in August, 1900.

Benjamin's grandfather, Nathaniel Cooper, bought this place in 1805, of Peter Schuyler Putnam, youngest son of the wolf-den hero, and where five generations of the family had lived and three generations were born there. The five generations were Nathaniel Cooper and family; Benjamin Brown, senior, and family whose wife was a daughter of Nathaniel Cooper; the chil- dren, Benjamin Brown, junior, two daughters and another son; and then the nine children of Benjamin Brown, junior, including Benjamin F. Brown, to whom more extended reference is made below.

The fifth generation was the family of a younger son of Benjamin Brown, Jr., John E. Brown whose children, three sons and a daughter, were all born there. This son staying with his father until the farm was sold in 1900.

Mrs. Theodore Dwight Pond, who celebrated with her husband the "golden wedding" in 1919, is a daughter of Deacon Brown. Mr. Pond is one of Brook- lyn's prominent men, a veteran of the Civil war and has held many offices of public trust. Mrs. Joseph K. Potter of Brooklyn is another daughter, and by request of the editor, she has contributed some of these facts concerning the very interesting life of her father.

One tradition states that the Putnam home stood admist dense woods, with no road, but only a path, leading there. Mrs. Potter states that as far back as her father knew, from talks with his grandfather Cooper, there was a high- way running right past the place, from north to south, from what is now called Pomfret to Brooklyn Village, three miles south of the farm. Brooklyn in early days was called Mortlake. The Putnam home and the farm buildings were on the east side of this highway. Mrs. Potter writes: "On the west side of my father's farm, quite a little back from the highway, was my father's wood land and in my day, there were tracts of woods between his and the wolf den, so that probably in General Putnam's day these woods were continuous form- ing a densely-wooded district on the west and northwest; but I have never heard that dense woods were near his house. The house where General Put- nam died (still standing) and the home of an older son, had no highway past, it then, not until many years later-only a path across the fields from the Putnam home. This house where the general died was on the southeast corner of the large tract of land owned by General Putnam."

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A modern history of Windham county, Connecticut : a Windham county treasure book, Volume I, Part 39

Author: Lincoln, Allen B Publication date: 1920 Publisher: Chicago : S. J. Clarke publ. co. Number of Pages: 930

Author: Lincoln, Allen B
Publication date: 1920
Publisher: Chicago : S. J. Clarke publ. co.
Number of Pages: 930