USA > Connecticut > Colonial Days And Ways: As Gathered from Family Papers > Part 2
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sengers and the animals which were essential to life and agriculture in the new land, while " Mayflower tea-pots " became a laughing-stock when it was re- membered that tea did not come into use in Great Britain until many years after the landing of the Pilgrims.
After this there set in a reaction, and now the pendulum has swung almost as far the other way. While it is true that fine furnishings were the ex- ception in the colonies as long as they continued to be such, it is untrue that there were not many families well supplied with all the comforts and luxuries that were usual in families of similar rank in old England. There is now in the possession of a descendant of the original owner, and in perfect preservation, a handsomely inlaid mahogany side- board of the sort known as Chippendale, which was imported by a Connecticut farmer in 1737, at a cost, including that of transportation, of thirty-nine pounds fifteen shillings sterling, as witnessed by the time-yellowed receipted bill of the maker, which is still preserved. This cannot have been an isolated instance, yet we are now asked to believe that the stern conditions in the first half-century in the colonies prevailed until after the colonial period had passed by.
The second error is as great as the first. The colonial stage of our existence was one of continual advancement. The colonists were of different races, of different social grades, of differing stages
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of intellectual growth, of varying degrees of wealth ; hence they cannot be judged by inflexible stan- dards, and colonial life should be carefully studied, almost as scholars study the history of ancient Nineveh and Babylon. From the scanty fragments of a long-neglected past we may gather our alpha- bet and learn to construct our sentences aright.
CHAPTER II
THE CONTENTS OF AN ANCIENT GARRET
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CHAPTER II.
THE CONTENTS OF AN ANCIENT GARRET.
Sharon, Connecticut. When and how the Town- ship was Settled. The Old House: how it was Constructed; who Lived in it; the Papers it Contained.
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T 0 0 HE beautiful village of Sharon, ly- ing picturesquely along one of the broad natural terraces which form the western slopes of the southern spurs of the Berkshire Hills, was not one of the earliest settlements of Connecticut. A few stragglers, mostly from the banks of the Hudson River, had reared their temporary homes in this vicinity from time to time, but these had for the most part faded away when the township was laid out, in 1733, and it was not until several years after this that there were enough inhabitants to justify an application to the Assembly for an act of incorporation. Hence it would hardly be expected that papers relating to the very earliest colonial periods should be found here. But the first settlers of Sharon were not fresh immigrants from the Old World; they were all, or nearly all, descended from the pioneer colonists of New England, and naturally brought with them some of the relics and records that their parents and grandparents had accumulated.
In Sharon, among several fine houses of late
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colonial dates, is one in which, during more than a hundred and thirty years, six generations of one family have lived quiet and happy but full and not uninteresting lives.
In the wide and lofty garrets of this house are stored many thousands of letters and other papers such as generations of cultivated and undestructive persons would naturally accumulate around them. Some of these papers are packed in oaken chests which had brought household plenishings " across the water " in the early days of the seventeenth century ; some are in other chests of cherry wood, which were probably made in this country in the first decades of the colonial period; some are in the hair-covered, brass-nailed, and round-topped trunks of a later day ; some are discovered packed in bandboxes which may once have contained elaborate periwigs, or immense and costly Leghorn bonnets; and again we find papers, valuable or useless, as the case may be, tucked away under the eaves in old baskets of Indian make, or in open pine-wood boxes, and even in barrels.
Some years ago, Mrs. E. P. Terhune (Marion Harland) visited this old house, and in her valuable and altogether charming book concerning "Some Colonial Homesteads and their Stories" has men- tioned the old garret and its papers. She says :
" We climb the stairs to the great garret. A large, round window, like an eye, is set in a gable ; the roof slopes above a vast space, where the towns-
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people used to congregate for dance and speech- making and church ' entertainments ' before a pub- lic hall was built; . .. and in the middle of the dusky spaciousness, a long, long table over which is cast a white cloth. . . . Family papers! . Hampers, corded boxes, and trunks full of them ! The hopes, the dreads, the loves, the lives of nine generations of one blood and name." But the last clause is hardly correct. The nine generations who are represented here are of several names and even of differing nationalities; but the blood of them all is mingled in the veins of their descen- dants, the present owners of the old house.
During all the years that these old papers were accumulating they were carefully dusted once or twice a year, but not always replaced in their va- rious receptacles with the reverential care which they deserved. Indeed, it is known that during the dozen years or so which succeeded 1845, ser- vants who had neglected to provide kindlings for the fires were occasionally permitted to use the garret's store of papers for their purpose. Not- withstanding this culpable carelessness, great quan- tities still remained at the time that my interest in them was first aroused, now a great many years ago. From these papers the larger part of the materials for the following chapters has been culled, though some of the things that are here related are on the authority of family traditions, notes of which I began taking when I was eleven years old, as I
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heard them narrated by parents, grandparents, and great-uncles and -aunts. These notes I continued to take at intervals for about eighteen years, by the end of which time many of the beloved narrators had gone to rejoin those whom they had held in such faithful and affectionate remembrance. Whenever anything is told on the authority of traditions only, it is thus expressly stated; but most of the information is from the abundant store of written sources.
The house in which the before-mentioned papers had been preserved is a fine specimen of the best period of our colonial architecture. The part which is now a capacious wing, running back from the main structure, was the first to be erected, and was reared on the foundations of a still earlier building. This first portion of the new home was completed about 1765 and was in itself a spacious dwelling. The cellars and kitchen were in its basement, and a very large dining-hall, with two other good-sized rooms, were on its first floor. These were flanked by piazzas (or rather stoeps) on the north and south sides. The wing's bedrooms were on the second floor, with windows in the long, sloping roof, whose peak was filled by a garret of good dimensions.
In this broad and comfortable dwelling, the owner, Simeon Smith, M.D., lived with his family while the very much larger main house was in the process of construction. And a slow process it was
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in those laborious days! Just when the wing was begun we do not know, but as it is of the same well-cut stone as the main house, which was not finished until some time during the Revolutionary War, we may hardly credit it with consuming much less than three years. There were then no steam-drills to assist in cutting the finely fitted stones. Water-power sawmills existed in this region at the time, and such planks as were used in the building were mostly sawed by them; but all the heavy timbers - and very heavy they are - appear to have been hewn with the carpenter's broadax, while the matchings of the floor-boards were all cut by hand.
The walls of both the wing and the main house were very solidly built of deftly fitted stones, laid with a fine regard for shape and color, and are from sixteen inches to two feet in thickness. The windows are surrounded by ornamental settings of red brick, which are of an unusually large size. The rear wall of the main house was built up against the exterior of the western gable of the wing, and the two walls thus joined are fifty-two inches thick where a large doorway connects the two structures. It is said that the foundations of the main house were begun before the completion of the walls of the wing, and were allowed to stand through the frosts of several successive winters " so that they might be well settled." The whole work was under the direction of a Genoese archi-
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tect, who is stated to have been a political exile, and who brought some of his countrymen as assis- tants. The mortar he used is to-day as firm as the stone it cements, and is the admiration of modern architects and masons. I have often heard my grandfather say that his great-uncle, for whom the house was built, had told him that the Genoese was so jealous lest some one should discover the secret of this mortar that he set guards and took other precautions to keep away all intruders while he was mixing it. Probably the secret of its en- during quality is in the fact that very finely pow- dered stone and brick were used in the place of sand. With the purely manual labor of those days, this alone would have made the building a slow affair.
The foundations being considered sufficiently settled, the superstructure of the main building be- gan to rise in 1773, and was roofed and its walls plastered by the opening of the campaign of 1775. From this time onward there was little thought to bestow upon so personal a matter as the building of a dwelling-house. Country-building was a much more important business.
In the early summer of 1775, the widowed Mrs. Samuel Smith, formerly of Suffield, Connecticut, and then living with her youngest son, Simeon, saw her second son, the Rev. Cotton Mather Smith, depart as chaplain to Colonel Hinman's regiment, in General Schuyler's army at Ticon-
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deroga, where he remained until incapacitated for further duty by the camp-fever. A year later the old lady bade a Spartan mother's God-speed to her son, Dr. Simeon Smith, who, as captain of a company of Sharon men, equipped largely at his own expense, joined the troops under General Washington's immediate command, enduring all the hardships and misfortunes of the Long Island campaign. What was house-building compared to such work as this-even the erection of a house originally intended to have been one of the finest in New England ? Its owner worked for and believed in better days to come, and did not relinquish his plans ; but they were necessarily slow in fulfilment, and the main house, though occupied in 1777 and onward, was not fully finished until after the peace, and even then not entirely in consonance with the original designs.
From this date onward until about 1830 the great garret, which spreads over the entire main house, was frequently used as a substitute for a public hall. In it school exhibitions and exami- nations were held twice yearly, and for every form of village entertainment which was esteemed to be too high in its aims to be fittingly placed in the tavern, or too secular for the church, the lofty and spacious garret was generously offered. Dec- orated with evergreens and home-made flags, it made a pleasing and commodious place for social gatherings.
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Probably even at this time papers had begun to accumulate in the spaces under the steep slopes of the hipped roof between the dormer-windows along the sides and ends of the old garret ; for, in 1788, Dr. Smith, writing from Vermont, requests his nephew to "Look in the big cedar chest which Mother brought from Suffield, and which stands at the very south end of my big Garret, and you will find there the deeds of the Judge Badcock farm which I wish to have sent to me by some safe hand."
The mass of papers remaining here include many thousands of letters, several diaries, a great number of legal documents of both public and private natures, as well as piles of antiquated led- gers, bound, for the most part, in a sort of undressed leather, and big enough to have required an entire sheepskin for each tome. This mass of unassorted papers spreads over all the years, from the landings of the earlier immigrants in Massachusetts and Connecticut, down to near the middle of the pres- ent century. Naturally, the number of documents that have survived from the hundred years begin- ning with 1636 is not as large as we would wish ; but from about 1730 the number began to increase, and from 1754 onward the material - though often leaving gaps just where they are most unwelcome - is remarkably abundant.
From these sources I have drawn what I believe to be, though incomplete, yet, as far as they ex-
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tend, faithful pictures of the home life of the better class of persons in several places and periods of our colonial existence.
Such information as we may gather from town and church records is invaluable in its way; but from such sources we need not expect to get any but the scantiest glimpses of the home life. We now have daily newspapers and society journals to chronicle public and private events, and they cer- tainly tell a great deal about the daily life of all classes among us ; yet if, two centuries hence, these things should be the only testimony that had sur- vived, can we conceive that our homes might be justly pictured from them ? Or should we fare any better if judged by the records of the law- courts ? Yet these would be riches compared with the meager sources which have come to us from colonial days. Concerning the homes and home life of the colonists our best materials must come from the comparatively few traditions that were committed to paper long enough ago to be granted a measure of authenticity, and from the relatively few contemporary family papers which have escaped from the inevitable losses by fires, removals, and - worst of all -the destruction by the Gallios who " cared for none of these things," until a tardily awakened interest in our ancestry has caused many of the heedless transgressors to remember and shudder at the bonfires fed by such unprized but now priceless material.
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This little book relates what I have patiently gleaned concerning the home life of a few fairly representative families in the colonies of New York and Connecticut. These families were ori- ginally of several nationalities - English, Dutch, Scotch, and French Huguenots; yet, in the course of generations, all became related. Papers once belonging to or concerning each one of them, some of them unknown to each other even by name until long years after the papers were written, and some of them never so known, have long been lying side by side in the silent garret, and the descendants of the writers of most of the diaries and correspondence may now be found scattered from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to the Gulf.
In the earliest of these papers we find evidence of great privations heroically endured - not from hope of worldly advantage, but from the highest of motives. The gently born and bred, the con- scientious laborer, the strictest Puritan, the Scotch Presbyterian, the sturdy Dutch Calvinist, and the patient Huguenot were all alike upheld by their sturdy faith in God and righteousness. They made mistakes enough, all of them - the Puritan perhaps more than the rest, because he was Anglo- Saxon, and therefore could never imagine himself to be in the wrong about any matter, and, in the large generosity of his nature, was always ready to instruct less gifted mortals, who did not always
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appreciate his unasked services at the value he set upon them. But the errors of the Puritan, like the errors of most well intentioned persons, are but the defects of his qualities, and a vast deal too much has been made of them.
It is a law of nature that those who have had the hardest lives shall become the most rigid in character, and the New-Englanders have always had the fame of having fulfilled this natural law to an undue, even to an unnatural, extent, being harsh to cruelty to all who displeased them, including their own sons and daughters; but in this garret full of papers, mostly written by persons who were Calvinists of Calvinists, Puritans of the straitest sect, I am happy to state that I have found many evidences of kindnesses most tenderly bestowed and gratefully received, and of deeds of a large- minded tolerance and charity, as well as of tender and even demonstrative affection, including a good deal of jocose familiarity between parents and chil- dren. On the other hand, I have found record of but very few things that manifest intolerance or hard feelings; and these were all in the earlier years, when the harshness engendered by the persecutions from which the colonists had fled and by the ter- rors of the wilderness to which they had come had not had time to mellow into patience and forbear- ance. Neither (except in the papers relating to suits at law which had been conducted by or be- fore one of the ablest lawyers and judges of his
time, and with which none of the families or per- sons connected with those whose lives we picture had anything to do) is there aught to show malice, trickery, or disgrace of any sort. These family records are simple, but, thank God ! they are clean.
The material hardships of the new land were very great, but most severely felt were the trials of homesickness, the longing for a sight or a token of those who had been left in the homes beyond the sea, and the lack of facilities for the mental culture of their children. The determination to reduce the latter difficulty as soon as might be was evidenced in the early establishment of the two upper-grade schools which were ambitiously termed the colleges of Harvard and Yale, so called not because of what they were or could be at the start, but because of the high standing to which it was confidently hoped they would ultimately attain.
Rudimentary schools were defective in many ways, but the teachers did their best to make zeal atone for the lack of other essentials. The grand- children of the first immigrants appear to have suffered much more from the want of proper in- struction than did the preceding and the next fol- lowing generation, but never, from first to last, did they cease to set the highest value upon intellectual cultivation or fail of using every means in their power to secure for their children the advantages of a "polite education," a phrase which is repeated hundreds of times in these old letters. Spelling
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was evidently considered as a matter of the slight- est consequence by the first settlers as well as their successors. I have preserved the orthography of the originals in the papers from which I have quoted, in deference to the views of others rather than my own, because it seems to me to convey a wrong impression regarding the degree of cultiva- tion of the writers. English is even now the worst spelled language in the world, and in days not so very long past dictionaries were rare and costly, besides which they differed widely between them- selves.
Partly because I have lived so long in the com- panionship of the old papers, and partly because in my youth I listened with such an intense inter- est to the family traditions as they fell from the lips of wonderfully gifted narrators, whose words clothed the dead with life, bringing them before the eye and making their voices distinct to the ear, all the persons of whose simple ways of living I have tried to give glimpses seem as familiarly known to me as are the dear relatives through whom so much that concerned their ancestry was transmitted to me.
And why should it not be so ? The old letters are still pulsing with the inner life of those who have merely stepped beyond the curtain. Their loves, their fears, their hopes, their aspirations, their faiths, their daily occupations - did not these things form the real men and women ? And all these
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have heen faithfully preserved in the unaffected chronicles of fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, friends and lovers, who wrote for the limited circle of those whom they loved and who loved them; and prove them to be worthy of the love of those who came after them.
CHAPTER III
A PIONEER PARSON
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CHAPTER III.
A PIONEER PASTOR.
Rev. Henry Smith of Wethersfield, Connecti- cut.
Troubles of a Wilderness Church.
Letter from Samuel Smith of Hadley, Massachu- setts, in 1698, describing Early Days in Wethers- field. The Minister's Will.
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I N New England the life of family, church, and town began together. The immigrants mostly came in families. Of bachelors there were a few ; but these, by wise forethought, were attached, at least temporarily, to some one of the families very soon after the landing, if not actually during the voyage. As the earliest colo- nists were almost wholly persons who came here through religious motives, such heads of families as were of the most social note were naturally among the most active in church matters, and therefore in those of the town; for during many years the church was practically the town also, the elders or deacons of the one usually being the selectmen of the other.
The church edifice could not be erected at as early a date as the houses; but in many cases the church had been organized even before the selec- tion of the town site, and the most commodious of the dwellings was used as a meeting-house as soon as it could afford a shelter from the weather. By prescriptive rights the ministers were the lead-
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ing citizens in each town. They were often, per- haps generally, men of gentle birth, and usually graduates of one of the leading universities - most frequently of Cambridge, that " nursery of Puritan- ism "; thus they were naturally the social as well as the spiritual leaders of their people. As eccle- siastics they seem to have deemed themselves, and to have been esteemed by their congregations, to be divine-right priests and Levites, with authority to declare and enforce the law of the Lord. Yet it is said that the title of Reverend was not used in New England until 1670; ministers before that time being called Mister, Pastor, Teacher, or Elder, save in a few instances where deceased ministers were spoken of as Reverend Elders. To their honor be it spoken that, notwithstanding their conceded superiority, there were very few of these ministers who did not bear themselves as servants under authority and strictly accountable to the Master whom they loyally served for the just ex- ercise of the power which he had delegated to them. They ruled their people, but it was with a father's despotism -as loving and as gentle as it was strong.
With a few exceptions, the rule of the pastors was, for more than a century, almost unquestioned, because it was in the main both wise and unselfish. In the family life of the colonial pastors we find the beginnings of all that is best in the history of our country : the charity that begins at home, but
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is not confined to family, church, or township; the warm affections, the sturdy honesty, the firm ad- herence to what is deemed to be right; the cou- rageous confession when a wrong is recognized, and, as speedily as may be, a contrite atonement made. It has been said of the half-century pastor- ate of a descendant of the pioneer pastor the faint traces of whose footsteps we are now about to fol- low,- and the words apply to many others,- that " The town's history from the day of the Pastor's installation might almost be said to be his biogra- phy, with a few foot notes of other things. . . . He was a kind of college in himself . . . sending out, like class after class, the influences, the growths and inspirations of his large nature upon the lives of the men and women of his flock."
Trumbull, in his history of Connecticut, having previously designated the chief settlers of Windsor and Hartford, names those of Wethersfield, giving Mr. Henry Smith as among the latter, and adds : " These were the civil and religious Fathers of a Colony that formed its free and happy constitution, they were its legislators and some of the chief pillars of the church and commonwealth, they .. . . employed their ability and their estates for the prosperity of the Colony."
Nearly half, if not more than half, of the stanch first settlers of Connecticut had left England after the opening of the eleven years of terror which be- gan with the prorogation of Parliament in 1629.
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During these years Archbishop Laud and the Earl of Strafford were held by the loyal-hearted among the people to be responsible for all the sins of their master, and doubtless some of the odium that the advisers received was richly merited; but Laud, at least, although a bigot and a fanatic, was both able and honest, while Charles had all the bigotry and the fanaticism, without the honesty, of him whom he made his tool.
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