USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > Farmington > An historical address delivered at the opening of the village library of Farmington, Conn., September 30th, 1890 > Part 8
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I have spoken at some length in my last paper of this very worthy man and of his honorable service all through the revolutionary war. He was a Puritan of the Puritans, of the strictest integrity, kindly of heart, precise in man- ner, and with a countenance grave, not to say solemn, as became a deacon of the olden time. It is related that a small boy once sent to his store, was so overpowered by
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the gravity of his demeanor, that instead of asking for a pair of H and L hinges, he demanded of the horrified deacon a pair of archangels. He was the first postmaster of Farmington. On the 22d of July, 1799, he advertises in the Connecticut Courant :
"Information. A post-office is established at Farmington for public accommodation. Samuel Richards, D. P. Master."
The post-office was in the front hall of his house, and the half dozen letters that sometimes accumulated were fastened against the wall by tapes crossing each other in a diamond pattern. Five years later he records in his diary, " Kept the post-office, the proceeds of which were forty dollars, the one-half of which I gave to Horace Cowles for assisting me." The year after he obtained this lucrative office, instead of recording as heretofore the "continuation of distress in my temporal concerns," he deplores "my unthankfulness to God for his great good- ness to me. He is now trying me by prosperity."
Immediately to the south stands a house which, before it was modernized by the late Mr. Leonard Winship, I remember as an old red, dilapidated structure, built by I know not whom. During the Revolution it was owned by Nehemiah Street, who, as I told you at the opening of this library, was fined along with many of the young people of the village, because, being assembled at his house, they refused to disperse until after nine o'clock at night. Mr. Street was frequently in similar trouble until disgusted with Puritan ways, he converted his goods into money and sought the freedom of the far West. Poor Nehemiah ! He soon found something worse than : New England justice. Having invested his money in a drove of cattle, he sold them at Niagara Falls for six hun- dred pounds and fell in with a certain James Gale of Goshen, N. Y., who during the war commanded a plunder-
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ing party on Long Island. This treacherous companion followed him from Niagara, and watching his opportunity while Mr. Street was bending over a spring of water by the roadside, struck him from behind with a tomahawk, and all the troubles of Nehemiah were ended.
The land to the south once belonged to Rev. Samuel Hooker and remained in the family for four generations. Here stands the house where Major Hooker lived and died, and where, under a great elm tree in front, most genial of story-tellers, he was wont to sit of a summer evening and entertain his youthful friends. On this locality lived his father, Roger, and his grandfather, John. The latter was an assistant, a judge of the Superior Court and a man of note in the colony. Deacon Edward Hooker states that John Hooker and the Rev. Samuel Whitman were the only men in town that were saluted with the title of Mr. Others were known as Goodman or Gaffer. Mr. Whitman, the minister, he says, would always wait on the meeting-house steps for Mr. Hooker to come up and enter the house with him on Sabbath morning and share with him the respectful salutation of the people.
Passing over the site where once stood the store of Samuel Smith, we come to the brick building erected in 1791 by Reuben S. Norton for a store, and which has since been used for divers purposes - store, tailor's shop, tenement house, post-office, church, groggery, and now, much enlarged, for a savings bank. Where my house stands, there stood, until I removed it in 1872, the very old house of Solomon Whitman. At the northeast corner was a square addition in which Miss Nancy Whitman presided over the post-office. I remember calling on the way from school and sceing through the small delivery window a huge dining-table covered with methodically- arranged letters and papers, and Miss Nancy, with gold- rimmed spectacles, bending over them. By this little
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window, on a high shelf, to be out of reach of mischievous boys, stood a big dinner bell to call the postmistress, when necessary, from regions remote. Sometimes an advent- urous youth, by climbing on the back of a comrade, suc- ceeded in getting hold of the bell, but I never knew the same boy to repeat the offense. The next buildings are modern, so let us hurry on past the drug store built some- where between 1813 and 1818 by Elijah and Gad Cowles, and past the brick schoolhouse of Miss Porter, built by Major Cowles as a hotel to accommodate the vast con- course of travelers about to come to the village by the Farmington canal. Next comes a house built by Capt. Judah Woodruff for Thomas Hart Hooker in 1768, and very soon passing with the mill property into the posses- sion of the Demings. It was said during the days of fugitive slave laws to have been an important station on the underground railroad. It is best known to most of us as the residence of the late Samuel Deming, Esq., for many years a trial justice of the town, who fearlessly executed the law, whether his barns were burned, or whatever happened. We did not suffer from that curse of society, a lax administration of justice. The house next north of the post-office, now owned by Mr. Chauncey Deming, is said by the historian of the " Hart Family" to have belonged to Deacon John Hart, son of Capt. John, and if so, must be about 150 years old. The land was in the Hart family for five generations. Near the site of the post-office stood the house of Sergeant John Hart, son of Deacon Stephen, the immigrant, in which he with his family were burned on the night of Saturday, December 15, 1666, eight persons in all, only one son, afterward known as Capt. John, escaped, he being ab- sent at their farm in Nod, now Avon. From this point southward to the road down to the new cemetery, all the houses were destroyed by the great fire of July 21,
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1864, including the long yellow house, just north of the present parsonage, which was the home of Rev. Timothy Pitkin during his sixty years' residence in our village. In my last paper I spoke of him as a patriot in the War of Independence. Of his high character and fervid elo- quence as pastor and preacher, we have the testimony of Dr. Porter in his "Half-Century Discourse." Professor Olmsted says of him : "Do you not see him coming in at yonder door, habited in his flowing blue cloak, with his snow-white wig and tri-cornered hat of the olden time ? Do you not see him wending his way through the aisle to the pulpit, bowing on either side with the dignity and grace of the old nobility of Connecticut?" Immediately south of the road to the new cemetery stands the brick house built by Dr. Porter in 1808, the year of his mar- riage. We need not linger in our hasty progress to speak . of the manifold virtues of one too well known to us all, and personally to many of us to need any eulogies here. The next house, now the residence of Mr. Rowe, was built by the Rev. Joseph Washburn on a lot purchased by him for that purpose in 1796. This healer of dissen- sions and much-loved pastor, after a settlement of eleven years, while seeking a mild southern climate in his failing health, died on the voyage on Christmas day, 1805, and was buried at sea. A few years later his house became the home of this library under the care of Deacon Elijah Porter. The large brick house on the top of the hill, with its imposing Roman facade looking southward, was built by Gen. George Cowles. The house on the corner. long the residence of Zenas Cowles, and now owned by Lieut .- Commander Cowles of the U. S. Navy, of a style of architecture much superior to all houses of the vil- lage of that time and perhaps of any time, is said to have been designed by an officer of Burgoyne's army sent here as a prisoner of war. The house next north of it
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was bought by the late Richard Cowles in 1810, and must have been built by its former owner and occupant, Coral Case, or by his father, John Case.
But it is high time that we crossed the street and com- menced our return. Nearly opposite the last-mentioned house stood the dwelling of the Rev. Samuel Hooker, second minister of Farmington, of whom I have formerly spoken. On this site, and probably in the same house, lived Roger Newton, his brother-in-law and the first pastor of this church. On the 13th of October, 1652, he stood up with six other Christian men, and they known in New England phraseology as the "Seven Pillars of the Church," seeking no authority from any intermediary church, consociation, bishop, priest, or earthly hierarch, but deriving their powers from the Word of God alone, as they understood it, declared themselves to be the First Church of Christ in Farmington. Probably during the . pastorate of Mr. Newton there was no meeting-house. The Fast Day service of December, 1666, we know was held at the house of Sergeant John Hart, two days before the fire, and there is a carefully transmitted tradition, that the services of the Sabbath were held on the west side of the main street a little south of the Meadow Lane, and, therefore, probably at the house owned by Mrs. Sarah Wilson, sister of Rev. Samuel Hooker, where now stands the house of T. H. and L. C. Root. We hear of no meeting-house until 1672, when the record called the New Book begins, the "ould book" having been worn out and lost, and with it all account of the erection of the first house. In September, 1657, Mr. Newton was dis- missed from this church and went to Boston to take ship for England. What befel him by the way is narrated by John Hull, mint-master of Boston, he who coined the famous pinc-tree shillings. After waiting on shipboard at Nantasket Roads six or eight days for a favorable
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wind, the commissioners of the colonies and the Rev. John Norton sent for him, desiring a conference before his departure. The captain of the vessel and his associ- ates, of a race always superstitious, thinking this divine another Jonah and the cause of their detention, hurried him on shore, and, the wind immediately turning fair, sailed on their way without him. He remained in Boston several weeks, preaching for Rev. John Norton on the 17th of October. After this date, we lose sight of him until his settlement in Milford on the 22d of August, 1660.
Crossing the road formerly known as " the highway leading to the old mill place," and a century later as " Hatter's Lane," we come to the house next south of the old cemetery, owned and probably built by John Mix. He was commonly known as Squire Mix, a graduate of Yale, an officer of the Revolution, ten years Judge of Probate, thirty-two years town clerk, and twenty-six years a representative to the General Assembly. He was, as I am told by those who knew him well, tall in stature, dressed as a gentleman of the time, with silver knee- buckles, formal in manner, of quick temper, punctilious, very hospitable, a good neighbor, a member of no church, and bound by no creed, and in politics a federalist. In his latter days, when old age and total blindness shut him out from the busy world, when the political party of his active days had passed away, and new men who hated the names of Washington and Hamilton filled all the old familiar places in the town, the State, and the nation, he is said to have sometimes longed for a judicious use of the thunderbolts of the Almighty. Here, too, for much of his life lived his son Ebenezer Mix, universally known as Captain Eb., who made voyages to China and brought back to the merchant princes of the town, tea, spices, silks, china tea-sets, marked with the names of wealthy purchasers, and all the luxuries of the Orient.
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Passing the house adjoining the burying-ground on the north, the home of this library and of Deacon Elijah Porter until his marriage in 1812, we come to the house built by Mr. Asahel Wadsworth, and which was reported unfinished in 1781 when the General Assembly, dissatis- fied with its treatment by the inn-keepers of Hartford, proposed to finish their winter session elsewhere, and re- quested the selectmen of Farmington to report what accommodation could be obtained here. The next house, from which the stage coach goes its daily rounds, was once the residence of Mr. Asa Andrews, and after 1826, of his son-in-law, the late Deacon Simeon Hart. In the brick shop next north, Mr. Andrews made japanned tin ware. He was the maker of those chandeliers, com- pounds of wood and tin, that long hung from the meeting- house ceiling. Crossing the street formerly known as the Little Back Lane, we come to the house built by Asa Andrews on land bought in 1804, and where Deacon Sim- eon Hart for many years kept his well-known school. About twenty rods south, on the east side of that street, we come to the gambrel-roofed house built by Hon. Timothy Pitkin, LL.D., on a lot bought by him in 1788. Ile was a son of the Rev. Timothy Pitkin, a graduate of Yale, a lawyer by profession, five times speaker of the Legislature, a member of Congress from 1806 to 1820, and the author of a " Political and Civil History of the United States," of great value as a book of reference. Next south is the gambrel-roofed house formerly the home of Capt. Selah Porter, and immediately beyond this once stood the house of Deacon Martin Bull and of his father before him.
Returning to the late residence of Deacon Simeon Hart, and crossing the now vacant lot where once flour- ished the famous inn of Amos Cowles, we reach the house with Ionie columns built by the late Major Timothy
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Cowles. Chauncey Jerome, in his " History of the Amer- ican Clock Business," says, under date of 1815 :
"Imoved to the town of Farmington and went to work for Capt. Selah Porter for twenty dollars per month. We built a house for Major Timothy Cowles, which was then the best one in Farmington."
The meeting-house next on our way need not detain us. He who would attempt to add to the graphic and exhaust- ive history by President Porter would be presumptuous indeed. The next house of brick was built by Gad Cowles within the century, and the three-story house of Dr. Wheeler on the corner, by Jonathan Cowles in 1799.
Crossing the road up the mountain, we find-on the corner the square house with the pyramidal roof and the chimney in the center owned and occupied by the Rev. Samuel Whitman during his ministry. Parts, if not the whole, of the building are much older than its well-pre- served walls would indicate. Tradition says the kitchen was built out of the remains of the old meeting-house. and the Rev. William S. Porter, who knew more about the history of the town than any man who has ever lived or is likely to live, says that the house, probably the front. was built by Cuff Freeman, a colored man of considerable wealth, of course after the death of Mr. Whitman.
Leaving the main street and ascending the hill to the east, we come at the dividing line between the grounds about Miss Porter's schoolhouse and the late residence of Rev. T. K. Fessenden to the site of the house of Col. Noadiah Hooker, known as the " Old Red College " dur- ing the days when his son, Deacon Edward, there fitted Southern young men for college. Commander Edward Hooker of the United States Navy sends me a plan of the old house, which he of course well remembers. He says. "the part marked kitchen was floored with smooth, flat mountain stones, and had a big door at the eastern end.
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and originally at each end, and my father used to say that when his father was a boy, they used to drive a yoke of oxen with a sled load of wood into one door and up to the big fireplace, then unload the wood upon the fire and drive the team out of the other door." Of the building of the house on the corner eastward, we have the most minute account from the time when in January, 1811, Capt. Luther Seymour drew the plan to the 25th of May, 1812, when Deacon Hooker took possession with his youthful bride. We even know the long list of those who helped raise the frame and of those who came too late for the raising but in time for the refreshments.
But we must hurry back to the main street, lest with the rich materials at hand for an account of this most interesting man, we detain you beyond all proper bounds. The next old house to the north, the home of Col. Martin Cowles, was built and occupied by John Porter in 1784. Opposite the Savings Bank, the south part of the long house once the residence of Reuben S. Norton, merchant, was built by his grandfather, Thomas Smith, Sen., and the north third, by Deacon Thomas Smith, son of the latter. The next house, long the residence of Horace Cowle.", Esq., was built by Samuel Smith, brother of the Deacon, in 1769, and is a good specimen of the style of houses erected by Capt. Judah Woodruff. The next old house, with the high brick basement, was built about 1797 by Capt. Luther Seymour, cabinet-maker and house- builder. Many choice pieces of old furniture in town. much prized by relic-hunters, were the work of his hand, but a large part of his work, thickly studded with brass nail heads, as was the fashion of the time, has been for- ·ever hidden from sight under the sods of the old burying- ground. Capt. Seymour was also librarian of one of the several libraries which divided the literary patronage of the village. The next house on a slight elevation stands
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on a lot bought in 1769 by John Thomson, third in descent of that name, conspicuous about town with his leathern jacket and his pronounced opinions on Continental paper money. Here lived three generations of his descendants. Passing the house owned by Dr. Thomson, and before him by Mr. James K. Camp, and two other buildings, we come to a house built or largely renewed in 1808 by Nathaniel Olmsted, goldsmith and clockmaker. Here for twenty years were made the tall clocks bearing his name, which still correctly measure time with their sol- emn beat. He removed to New Haven to be near his brother, Professor Denison Olmsted, and there died in 1860, most genial and loveable of men. His funeral dis- course was from the words, " Behold an Israelite indeed in whom is no guile." We will halt under the big elm tree, which overhangs the little house where Manin Curtis spent his life, long enough to say that his father, Sylvanus Curtis, in company with Phinehas Lewis in 1762, the year when Sylvanus was married, brought home from a swamp three elm trees. One was planted back of the Elm Tree Inn, one in front of the house of Mr. Curtis, and the third failed to live. The big elm tree is, therefore, 133 years old. On the corner eastward stands the house, much improved of late, built in 1786 and 1787 by Capt. Judah Woodruff for Major Peter Curtiss, an officer in the Rev- olutionary War, who removed to Granby in 1790, and was the first keeper of the reconstructed Newgate prison. leaving it in 1796 in declining health, and dying in 1797. Omitting the other houses on the west side of High street, for want of time and information, we come to the house lately owned by Selah Westcott, built by Major Samuel Dickinson on a lot bought by him in 1813. Major Dick- inson was a house-builder, and when the Farmington canal was opened, he commanded the first packet boat which sailed southward from our wharves on the 10th of
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November, 1828, on which a six-year-old boy, afterward a gallant U. S. naval officer in the late war, made his first voyage, sailing as far south as the old South Basin. He writes me : " Long live the memory of the old ' James Hill- house,' and her jolly Captain Dickinson, who was not only a royal canal boat captain, but a famous builder, whose work still stands before you in the 'Old Red Bridge,' one of the best and most substantially built bridges of Con- necticut." On the northeast corner of the intersection of High street with the road to New Britain, long stood the house of Capt. Joseph Porter, one of the three houses on the east side of High street, with much projecting upper stories and conspicuous pendants, built about 1700. This was moved some rods up the hill when Mr. Franklin Woodford built his new house, and was burned on the evening of January 15, 1886. So there remains but one of the three houses, the one bought by Rev. Samuel Whit- man for his son, Elnathan, in 1735, and is the same house sold by John Stanley, Sen., to Capt. Ebenezer Steel in 1720. Descending to the low ground on the north and rising again, we come to the gambrel-roofed house where lived Dr. Eli Todd from 1798 until his removal to Hart- ford in 1819. Of this eminent man you will find appreci- ative notices in the two addresses of President Porter and in the article on the Connecticut Retreat for the Insane by Dr. Stearns in the Memorial History of Hartford County. He will probably be longest remembered as the first superintendent of the Connecticut Retreat for the Insane in Hartford, where his system of minimum re- straint and kind treatment opened a new era for suffering humanity. At the northern end of High street, facing the road to the river, we make our last stop at the house of Mrs. Barney, built by Capt. Judah Woodruff about 1805 for Phinchas Lewis. Between this house and the place from which we set out, there stands no house, old or
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new, to detain us longer. Thanking you for the patience with which you have endured our long walk through the village streets, I am reminded that it is time we parted company with the old worthies whom we have called up- before us for the entertainment of an idle hour, remem- bering that in times gone by they were wont to hale before his Excellency the Governor such as, having assem- bled themselves together, refused to disperse until after nine of the clock.
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FARMINGTON SOLDIERS IN THE COLONIAL WARS
AN
HISTORICAL ADDRESS
DELIVERED AT THE
Annual Meeting
OF
THE VILLAGE LIBRARY COMPANY OF
FARMINGTON, CONN.
September 8, 1897
By JULIUS GAY
HARTFORD, CONN. Press of The Case, Lockwood & Brainard Company 1397
FARMINGTON SOLDIERS IN THE COLONIAL WARS
AN
HISTORICAL ADDRESS
DELIVERED AT THE
Annual Meeting
OF
THE VILLAGE LIBRARY COMPANY OF
FARMINGTON, CONN.
September 8, 1897
By JULIUS GAY
HARTFORD, CONN. Press of The Case, Lockwood & Brainard Company
1897
ADDRESS.
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Village Library Company of Farmington :
I propose this evening to give some account of Farm- ington soldiers in the wars preceding the Revolution, while the colony was still under the crown. In so doing I shall consider the men of this village only, leaving out of sight the vastly more numerous residents of the ancient town, which once extended from Simsbury on the north to Cheshire on the south, and from Wethers- field westward to what is now the town of Plymouth.
The first serious conflict in which the settlers of Con- necticut were engaged was the Pequot War. This oc- curred before our village had any existence, but several of the men who afterward settled Farmington, and who here lived and died, were in the fight. That we may realize the necessity and the justifiableness of the war, let us briefly recall the situation. In the river towns of Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield were only about 250 adult men, and in the fort at Saybrook twenty more, under the command of Lion Gardiner. In the south- eastern corner of the colony was the powerful tribe of the Pequots, under their sachem, Sassacus; further east the Narragansetts, under Miantonimo ; and to the north the Mohegans, under the friendly Uncas; while to the west were the dreaded Mohawks. An attempt by the Pequots to unite all the tribes and wipe out the whites at one blow failed. The Narragansetts hated the Pequots more fiercely than they did the Englishmen, and Uncas was always the friend of the whites.
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services and sufferings. So few remained here that we hardly realize that once, taking New England as a whole, they were as numerous and wealthy as the patriot party. We have no time to consider at length the causes of the war, but certain things we must bear in mind if we would at all understand the spirit of the times. The orators had much to say of taxation without representation, and stout Dr. Johnson replied in vigorous English that taxation was no tyranny. Other matters, however, less abstract, had gradually prepared the patriots to resist to the death this last imposition. The colonists were denied the right to manufacture for themselves almost all articles of neces- sity, but must import them from some Englishman whose sovereign had given him the monopoly. Their commerce was restricted to British ports. Even the agricultural products of the neighboring West Indies must first be shipped to England before they could be landed in Bos- ton. They were denied a market either for sale or pur- chase outside of the dominion of Great Britain. The British merchant could say, "You shall trade at my shop or starve, and you shall make nothing for yourselves." Their solemn charters were annulled, authority to elect their principal officers was denied them, and the right to assemble in town meeting abolished. Repeatedly his Majesty asked, in a long list of questions submitted to the General Assembly of Connecticut, where his dutiful sub- jects bought and sold, and what they presumed to manu- facture, and repeatedly he was shrewdly answered. So long as diplomacy and downright, wholesale smuggling availed, the crisis was averted, but when the wants of the British treasury, and especially of the East India Com- pany, demanded a rigorous enforcement of the laws, the situation became intolerable. To all this was added the threat of vigorous government by lords spiritual as well
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