USA > Connecticut > Fairfield County > New Canaan > Canaan parish, 1733-1933, being the story of the Congregational church of New Cannan, Connecticut > Part 6
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or two, according to the severity of the case. The candidate for pulpit honors would be confronted with a long list of questions concerning things about which neither questioner nor questioned had the faintest knowledge. Then, after a solemn powwow, the verdict would be given as to the soundness or unsoundness of the faith held by the applicant. .
Good men and true were these, having "the courage of their convictions," such as they were. Although the colors of the Consociation were "the deeply, darkly Calvinistic blue," yet beneath this severe exterior there were kindly impulses, sympathy, and a loyal sense of brotherhood. In running the gauntlet of this formidable array of sharp and bristling points of doctrine, the candidate came through unscathed.
STERN DOCTRINES
From the delightful surroundings of the present day services and activities of the church, it is a far cry to the olden time "New England Primer," the "Bay State Hymn Book," the Catechism puzzles, and the lengthy and learned sermons and dissertations. In place of today's interesting and helpful Sunday School "Quarterlies," there were tiny books with topics for the entire year, and long lists of questions. Special stress was laid upon the stern Calvinistic doctrines and on the importance of frequent periods for meditation and in- trospection. Hard religious nuts to crack, even for their elders, but somehow, these New England youngsters of former generations, managed to find the kernel of the nut and get from it sufficient nourishment for the souls' growth.
Judged by the standards of today, the music of this early church was rather primitive. But if the wood of the bass viola and violin was a bit warped, and if the later melodeon wheezed and whined and voices wandered far and wide from the "pitch," underneath it all, there rang true the spirit of sincere and devout worship.
In an early number of the New Canaan Messenger, there was a letter with reminiscences of the long ago. A certain Major S. was described as "a very pompous man interested in all musical and military events. He was a musician in the Revolution and a fine singer. He led the choir of the Congregational Church for many years. Each year, on the Sunday before the annual military training day on the old Parade Ground, he insisted on appearing in full regi- mentals and leading the choir, with his powerful bass voice battering the church walls and almost lifting the rafters from their moorings." What a treat this must have been for the small boys in the high backed pews, wriggling uneasily through the "firstly, secondly, thirdly" of the pulpit discourse, and impatiently awaiting the welcome "in conclusion."
A SMALL CONGREGATION
Another well authenticated story has come down to us, illustrating the workings of the stern New England conscience so exploited by writers and so
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fostered by the early church. During one of the worst snowstorms of the winter, with travel only possible by horseback, the minister fought his way through the huge drifts from the parsonage on Carter Street down break-neck Clapboard Hill to the church. Opening the door he literally blew in through a mist of snowflakes. He found O-ne, the old colored sexton, inside trying to coax a little warmth from the big wood stove.
"Nobody here, O-ne?"
"No Sir, 'less you calls me nobody."
"Very well, I fear I am somewhat late, but we will proceed with the services as usual."
Lessening his resemblance to Santa Claus by brushing the snow from beard and clothing, the parson tramped up the aisle and climbed the steep stairs into the lofty pulpit, and proceeded to deliver the sermon with as much fervor and action as if he had been addressing a "Yale Bowl" full of hearers.
The record of the steady growth of this church should serve to bolster up much of the timidity and gloomy foreboding of today's looking forward to the unknown and untried future. Christianity can never crash, as long as this vast array of churches of various denominations stand shoulder to shoulder, a mighty bulwark against the opposing forces of evil.
(Mrs. Demeritt had also prepared the following just recently, which was read: )
Felicitation and cordial greeting from the oldest member of the church to her religious Alma Mater, the white church on the hill. Although she may not have achieved the "summa," the "magna" or even the simple "cum laude," she feels that the good, however insignificant, she has been privileged to do in passing through life is largely due to the instructions and admonitions from the Sunday School and pulpit of the first and only Congregational Church of New Canaan.
BY MR. GARDNER HEATH
The first minister I remember was the Rev. Frederick Williams, who served here from 1854-1859. He was reserved. He never made enemies. I remember the election of Lincoln in 1861, and the day Fort Sumter was fired on. You have no idea of the excitement. Every schoolboy had a red, white and blue rosette, every bit of ribbon was sold. They took dressbraid and cut it up, and red, white and blue calico was cut and made into rosettes. When flag material gave out, they made them out of anything.
At the time of the Civil War there was no telegraph here. The mail would come by stage. A mail driver would come up from Darien and get up about 10 o'clock. A crowd was there to get the papers. He stopped in front of the postoffice, which was then where the Variety Store is now. Noah W. Hoyt was postmaster.
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Ralph Smith was the next minister-shortest ministry of any of the thir- teen. From 1860-1863. He was not very popular. He looked something like Abraham Lincoln. Raw boned. He lived in the present Ashwell House, then rented as a parsonage.
Mr. Swan was very good in Sunday School. He had Sunday School con- certs once a month on Sunday night. The. children would speak. He was the first to make much of Sunday School work. There was good attendance. He was the first to have Christmas entertainments. Did not have them in Church-he could not quite do that, and there was no lecture room then. So he held them upstairs in Armory Hall, and sometimes in the furniture storage place which is now the Veterans' Club, and was then also a singing school and lodge room."
(NOTE :- Emma W. Law Demeritt (Mrs. Chas. H.) and Gardner Heath whose recollections appear above, are the two oldest living members of the Congregational Church.)
GREETINGS
BY REV. AUGUSTUS H. BEARD, D.D.
FORMERLY MINISTER OF THE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH OF NORWALK, AT THIS TIME IN THE 101ST YEAR OF HIS AGE
My friends, it gives me great pleasure to be able to bring to you the hearty congratulations and greetings and felicitations of the Church of Norwalk upon the celebration of your history of two hundred years. You are celebrating the justification of your church life. What are those justifications? May I say in the first place that a church is justifying itself and its life when it communes together. The gospel of Christ comes to us personally. It speaks to each one individually as if he was the only person and yet one finds his benefit personally. It shows we are not only Christians, we are fellow Christians and we recognize this fact and come together for the worship of God and for instruction in his word; then we are meeting one of the justifications of church life. It is a great thing for people to come together just to meet as one in common sym- pathy, in one purpose and in one desire.
There is one other justification for your church life and that is when you are together in the worship, in the hymns of praise that you sing, in the prayers in which you together unite as one, in the listening as one person to the instruction of the Word. Then it is that a church is justifying its life; when it meets in sincere worship of God. Then our faith is enlarged, is rein- forced, augmented, when together we are worshiping the most high in His holy temple.
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Well, this has been going on here for two centuries and I say it is a justi- fying of the life and history of this church. Faith is justified, but that isn't all. Suppose we stopped there; then we haven't arrived. It is this gospel which we receive personally and enjoy collectively and develop together. It is then that it is diffused, it is carried away. It does not start in the church building; it does not stop here,-you meet it wherever you go. It goes where you go. The influence is as the stream from the light of the sun. It goes into the homes, it goes into the places of business, it goes even into your pleasures. Wherever you are carrying the influences which are created, reinforced, and developed here, into wherever you may go these influences are simply untraceable. You never know where these influences may go when you are justifying your Christian life in a Christian church.
So you have had your history and it has been a good one. May it go on continually, enlarge itself just as the sun shines upon the earth. Our Master says, "Ye are the light of the world, let your light so shine." Let it SHINE.
BY REV. WILLIAM H. MCCANCE
ASSOCIATE MINISTER, CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH OF STAMFORD
Friends of the First Congregational Church of New Canaan, it is a pleasure, a distinct pleasure, today to bring the greetings of the Parent Church in Stamford to you on the occasion of this 200th Anniversary. As one thinks back over the years, hears the singing of those old days and thinks of the difficulties of the time, one is strongly moved and warmed as he thinks of the courage and the great faith and the vision of the people. I think that the people that came out from Stamford to New Canaan probably thought of it as quite a long journey over here and it was their faith and their courage that founded the church. If they could see this company they would be more than pleased. They would be greatly thrilled that the faith of that little company could have borne such fruit. And so it has been through the years. The tree bearing fruit because the branches are rooted in Christ our Lord.
And so it is that the members of the parent church are proud of this church and I bring our greetings to you with the hope that the fellowship will develop through the years that are ahead.
There is one thing I could have wished; that is that the founders of the church had had the vision that would have put the pulpit down a little lower. I think it would have been less strain on the congregation and less strain on the minister, and the minister would have felt much closer to the congregation, at least judging from my experience just now.
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But it is a great thing to have a celebration like this, and to feel that the church is marching on through centuries and through difficult times, and we need faith today and we who are carrying the banner of faith need vision and courage.
Our prayer is that we will have the faith of this church as it goes forward from strength to strength.
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THE FIRST SIX MINISTERS 1733-1854
This address by Mr. Stephen B. Hoyt and those by Mrs. Tunney and Mr. St. John which follow, were delivered on Sunday Morning, August 12, 1933, in connection with the unveiling of a memorial tablet to the ministers of the church.
T T would be quite impossible for me to stand in this church at a Sunday morn- ing service and undertake to relate the story of two centuries of unbroken devotion and loyalty to the Congregational Church of Canaan Parish and New Canaan by her first six ministers, without acknowledging frankly my own unworthiness of the honor accorded me in the assignment of this task. For the story is essentially one of never-failing faithfulness, the wholesome nourish- ment from which the very bone and tissue of the church have formed and have thriven, and this same never-failing faithfulness is still here in abundance. There are many of you who represent this faithfulness in your church lives, and are eminently entitled to the privilege which has been accorded me on this occasion.
However, we approach the task of presenting the past ministers to you as the tablet bearing their names is unveiled, with the hope that what is related here this morning, may help these names to become more than just names; that they may be living men to us because we not only know and value what they did, but also because we feel acquainted with them as individuals. We shall try to tell you what they were like, where they lived, what some of their peculiar problems were, and how they met them.
As children, every member of your committee sat in this church, and at times when their wayward minds wandered from the service, the names of the several benefactors of the church (recorded on the tablets which then occu- pied the two spaces on either side of the organ gallery) attracted them, and invited the imagination to ruminate on their personalities. But alas, they remained only names. True, one could ask questions or read in the church records, but one never did. And so these good people were to most of us, just names.
The first ministers kept no records. Much of the written matter which existed then, was destroyed by fire in 1876 when William St. John's house burned. The historical addresses of former anniversaries were prepared by men who had access to more material than now remains, besides the privilege
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of talking to many who remembered the early days, or who could indulge in twice told tales. So the ground has been pretty well covered before, and there is little to be gleaned that is new.
Here are the brief facts as presented on former occasions: "John Eells, son of Samuel Eells of Milford; was baptized April 11, 1703; graduate of Yale 1724; began to preach here as a candidate February, 1732; received a call from the Society, March 7, 1733; was ordained as pastor of this church June 20, 1733; resigned his pastoral charge June 10, 1741; continued to reside in the parish until his death, October 15, 1785, in his 83rd year. His first wife, Anna, died May 8, 1736, in her 35th year. He married Abigal, daughter of Moses Comstock of Norwalk, 1737. She died in this place, 1789."
What did Mr. Eells do for the church that was outstanding and by which we may remember him particularly? We must think of him as a young man only 29 years old, eight years out of Yale College, and this was his first charge. He was here as a candidate for four months so that his youthful theology might be tried out, for those were the days when doctrine was the background of faith and we can easily imagine them as being very serious ones for Mr. Eells when he preached in that old meeting house to a small congregation of people who had already attended the churches of Norwalk and Stamford where they had lived before, critically listening for a slip in this theology. But he proved genuine and they accepted him.
We must remember of Mr. Eells that his task was not that of a missionary; he came to a group of people who were already church members. Twenty-four church members called him, and of the twenty who joined the church during the first year of his ministry, nine had letters from other churches. We must think of him also, as having no serious financial problems, for the church was supported by taxes. Another thing that should help us to know Mr. Eells is the house in which he lived, still standing in good repair on Carter Street. This house and ten acres were settled upon him when he came. His memory has thriven largely in the community upon the tales of his eccentricities, so called. Many amusing and humorous stories have been handed down. We must remember that while this sense of humor was the cause of his retirement from the pastorate, it is not necessarily any reflection upon him either as a minister or a man. It was a stern age when the fathers of the church guarded its strictly regular and doctrinal interests jealously. Those of us who love to laugh will invest Mr. Eells with the order of our patron saint who has been a potent humanizing influence since the time of Job and still helps to keep us from taking ourselves too seriously.
"Rev. Robert Silliman, son of Robert Silliman, jr., of Fairfield, and brother of Judge Ebenezer Silliman of Fairfield; was baptized September 30, 1716; united with the church of Fairfield June 6, 1736; graduated from Yale College 1737; was licensed to preach by the Eastern Association of Fairfield County
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May 1, 1739; began to preach here as a candidate September, 1741; received a call from the Society December 17, 1741, and from the Church December 29, 1741; was ordained as Pastor of this church February 2, 1742; was dis- missed by mutual consent August 28, 1771; was afterwards settled in the Parish of Chester in Saybrook; died in Canaan, April 19, 1781, in his 66th year. In 1742 he married Anna, daughter of Rev. Samuel Cooke of Stratfield."
So reads the record concerning our second minister. What do we know of him to make him a living person to us? Like Mr. Eells, he was a young man, only 25 and this was his first charge. He was a single man and from our two centuries of close acquaintance with the Silliman family, we feel sure that he was a handsome man, which accounts for his having been spoken for by Miss Cooke of Stratfield, before he came to this outpost of civilization. Like Mr. Eells again, he left but meager records, but we know that his settlement did not include a home. He lived in a house no longer standing which is be- lieved to have stood slightly west of the present Episcopal Rectory where an ancient well has been the silent witness of the many changes which have taken place on this hill.
His ministry was an active one. One hundred and fifty-six persons joined the church, most of them by declaration, and two hundred and ninety by the baptismal or "half-way" plan. Six hundred and seven were baptized, which tells us that his parish was growing rapidly; in fact, so large had the member- ship become, that the meeting house was no longer adequate and plans were adopted for a new one.
Under Mr. Silliman this second house, of which we have a good picture in the vestibule, was built. We may think of him in connection with the erection of still another building about which little has been said. It appears that there was no fireplace in the first meeting-house. It must have been a trying ex- perience to sit through the long service in the first meeting-house during those cold winter Sundays. May we not, quite respectfully and reverently, if you will, pause a moment in our comfortable pews and look upon those names, John Eells and Robert Silliman, the only ministers who preached in that first meeting-house Sunday after Sunday throughout the long winters with no fire.
"Somebody," wrote my uncle, the Rev. James Seymour Hoyt, in his Historical Address upon the 150th anniversary, "came to meeting who was not frost proof. Consequently, a curious building was erected close by the meeting house. It was called the Society House, and its purpose was to serve as a waiting-room for worshippers until the hour of the meeting; usually designated as so many hours after sun-up, or so many hours before sun-down, for there were no clocks or watches. This building contained a fireplace so that physical man could be comfortable between services, since in service time, spiritual edification was considered almost synoymous with bodily discomfort."
Young Mr. Silliman then led the movement for a new church; doubtless he pointed out the needs of a rapidly growing community for a place where
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assemblies suitable to the interests of all could be held, for there was no other public room in the parish. Thirty years he served, and well, as the records of his labor testify. He continued a long life in the ministry of Connecticut and doubtless visited this place again in after years. His family name is closely interwoven in the history of the colony and the State, down to the present day.
"William Drummond, born and educated in Scotland; ordained there by the Presbytery of Ochterader, in the Synod of Perth and Stirling; began to preach here as a candidate in February, 1772; received a call from the Society March 9, 1772, and from the church June 25, 1772; was installed as pastor of this church July 15, 1772; was dismissed and desposed from the ministry May 27, 1777, and died the same year."
To a generation bred on the heroic deeds of the revolutionary days, it is easy to account for these few sad words describing Mr. Drummond's brief ministry. The parish was still a church colony under the peculiar system of government that required unquestionable conformity of the church with the state. Obviously, a minister who was a royalist, as Mr. Drummond would naturally be, could not perform the duties of his office in justice to himself or his people. There is a decided element of sadness here, which we can never forget. A Drummond from Scotland where the name, associated with the life and work of that eminent scholar Henry Drummond, suggests a man of sterling parts which is more than justified by his record as a pastor here. Only five years he staid, yet the normal growth of the society continued and under him seventy-three new members were added, and one hundred and fifty-nine were baptized. His ministry was the last under which the so-called half-way covenant was used.
We record in this church paper something that has not been mentioned to our knowledge in connection with Mr. Drummond by any previous his- torian, namely that the Drummond family so long associated with this church, appearing first during the ministry of Rev. Theophilus Smith in 1845, were descended from a brother of Rev. William Drummond.
"Justus Mitchell, son of Reuben Mitchell of Woodbury, born 1754, graduated at Yale College 1776; was licensed to preach by the Litchfield County Association; began to preach here as a candidate 1782; received a call from the Society two months later, and was ordained in January, 1783. He died suddenly, February 24, 1806, in his 52nd year and the 23rd of his ministry."
Like Mr. Eells and Mr. Silliman, Mr. Mitchell was a young man from Connecticut, and a graduate of Yale. Twenty-nine years seems to have been about the age of these men who took over the responsibility of ministering to that generation which we think of as a stern, exacting race, determined in their commitment to the inexorable laws of their faith. We know that he married Martha, daughter of Rev. Josiah Sherman, who outlived him by twenty-five years, but that he was a single man when he came here is probable since the- record of Mrs. Mitchell's union with the church by the name "Patty" does
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not occur until six years after he came. This leads one to speculate on the question of how this young minister succeeded in remaining single, subjected to the weekly charms of the decorous maidens who must have listened to him preach every Sunday. Perhaps he had already become engaged to Miss Sherman, but one had to travel on horseback in those days to do his courting, and six years would suggest that Mr. Mitchell must have been a most patient and loyal suitor to Patty Sherman. His ministry covered an eventful period. The United States had been born and every community was experiencing growing pains. Mr. Mitchell's pre-eminent gift as an educator and organizer was a great blessing to this little parish which during his term reached a population of about 1,200.
A marked change in the affairs of the parish called for new adjustments on the part of the church. The town incorporated and became New Canaan, and the church was no longer supported by taxes. Mr. Mitchell was there- fore the first minister who had to face the financial problems of his charge in the same way all ministers since have been obliged to.
The church must now stand on its own feet and depend upon the more or less voluntary support of its members. Pews in the church had hitherto been free, but a system of rented pews was now adopted. Reorganization be .- came necessary, and among other items of this was the adoption of "A Con- fession of Faith and Covenant" which has come down to our day.
He started a school in which he taught boys who aimed to go to college. He prepared successfully for Yale a rather astonishing number of young men who became prominent in later life. Mr. Mitchell lived in the house on Haines Ridge, on the property of the Holmewood Inn, known to most of us as the old Dr. Richard's House. Here he kept his school and sowed the seed of the long unbroken line of educational expression which has ever been a prominent phase of New Canaan history. The academy was the outgrowth of Mr. Mitchell's school and never has there been a break in the long service of excellent private schools in New Canaan to this day.
When the corner stone of the lecture room was removed to permit the alterations now taking place, there was found within the granite block a copper box containing among other things a manuscript of a sermon of Rev. Justus Mitchell written in 1799. Every other item of printing, writing and photo- graphy was either completely obliterated or showed most decided evidence of the corruption of time with the exception of this old manuscript written on rag paper with a quill pen. This was in perfect condition. (A facsimile of one of the pages appears below.)
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