USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > Farmington > Farmington papers > Part 14
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ifie God, or Some Brief Sermon Notes. . . . By the Rev- erend Mr. John Bailey, Sometime Preacher and Prisoner of Christ at Limerick in Ireland, and now Pastor to the Church of Christ in Watertown in New England." It was a farewell sermon to his flock in which he speaks of the power which " thrust me from poor Limerick," and of the time " when I was in prison and my public liberty gone." It is a long lament, more interesting to his dear friends than it can possibly be to us. The next treasure noted in the library was a Commentary on Faith, but I find so many books to which this abbreviated title would be appropriate that we will pass on to the next, which is " How to walk with God, or Early Piety exemplified in the Life and Death of Mr. Nathaniel Mather, who having become at the age of nineteen an instance of more than common Learning and Virtue, changed Earth for Heaven, Oct. 16, 1688." Whereto are added .. . . " A Walk with
God." Samuel Mather, in the opening address to the Reader, writes " am his younger brother and son of In- crease Mather, the well-known teacher of a church in Bos- ton and rector of Harvard College in New England." The youthful subject of this memoir lived before the days of athletic exercises for students, spent his days and the larger part of his nights over his books, entered college at the age of twelve, and, before many months, " had accurately gone over all the Old Testament in Hebrew, as well as the New in Greek, besides going through all the Liberal Sciences." His biographer says "While he thus devoured books, it came to pass that books devoured him. His weak body would not bear the toils and hours, which he used himself unto." The extracts from his diary are a record of pious introspection in which he worked himself. up to the usual test of piety, that he was willing to be
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eternally damned if God so decreed. As for the accom- panying discourse, " The Walk of Holy and Happy Men," we have not time this evening for an extended walk with the Mathers, though we need not fear being wearied with any commonplace conversation by the way, for they had always something fresh to talk of and a vigorous way of saying it. Books like this, describing saints who were good, but rarely anything else, are not much in vogue at present. Forty years ago there were a number in our Sunday-school library which had been handed down from generation to generation because they were in such superb condition, and they were in this condition because no one read them. Famous books they had been in their day, - The Dairy- man's Daughter, The Young Cottager, and others. Thack- eray continually alludes to such under the title of his sup- posed contract, " The Washerwoman of Finchley Common." You remember how Becky Sharp thanks Lady Southdown for that precious work " which she had read with the great- est profit," and asked about its gifted author. A youthful saint, or prig, if you choose so to call him, may be an in- finitely more useful member of the community than a brute, but most readers now prefer an account of the brute.
The next book on the list was considered by the ap- praisers to have the highest commercial value of any, and was inventoried at five shillings and four pence. It was certainly the most famous book of that time. "The Won- ders of the Invisible World. . .. Published by the special command of his Excellency the Governour of the Massa- chusetts Bay in New England." This book was written in October, 1692, by the Rev. Cotton Mather at the re- quest of Gov. Sir William Phipps in explanation and jus- tification of the witchcraft trials at Salem. Up to the 22d of September nineteen persons had been hanged and
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one pressed to death for refusing to plead. The jails of Salem and the surrounding towns were full of the accused, and complaints against the highest persons in the land were beginning to be made. In this book Cotton Mather repeats the great need of caution as to the character of evidence which the ministers of Boston had already urged in their return of June 15th, a due regard to which might have saved all the disgraceful tragedies which followed. Nev- ertheless it did not occur to Mather, or indeed to any be- liever in the Word of God before the advent of the higher criticism, that there could be any doubt of the existence of witchcraft. His first proposition is, "That there is a Devil, is a thing doubted by none but such as are under the influence of the Devil. For any to deny the being of a Devil must be from an ignorance or profaneness worse than diabolical." In explanation of the sudden inroad of witchcraft, he says, " The New Englanders are a people of God settled in those, which were once the Devil's terri- tories; and it may easily be supposed that the Devil was exceedingly disturbed when he perceived such a people here accomplishing the promise made of old. . . . An army of Devils is horribly broke in upon the place which is the center and, after a sort, the first born of our English settlements; and the houses of the good people there are filled with the doleful shrieks of their children and servants tormented by invisible hands, with tortures altogether preternatural." He quotes scriptural authority that the number of evil spirits let loose on a single sufferer is a legion, and informs us " that a legion consisted of twelve thousand five hundred people." To prove the existence and terrible power of witchcraft, and to justify the recent extreme measures for its destruction, he cites numerous instances from all times and lands and concludes with that
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of Ann Cole of Hartford, the famous "She runs to her rock " case. The picture is a dreary and monotonous one. A single story like that of Goodman Brown dressed up with all the marvelous skill of Hawthorne is attractive reading, but this long list of endless deviltries, repeated over and over again with the same ever recurring incidents, wearies one. They were copied by the wretched children concerned in the delusion, from well-known English cases, without the invention of any new machinery to relieve the monotony. We read of writing in the devil's book with one's own blood, which the devil tells Faust is a very pe- culiar fluid, of crooked pins as an article of diet, of toads and all manner of reptiles which when thrust in the fire explode and reveal themselves in their true form, some badly singed old beldame, of private marks left by devils on the persons of their victims that they may know their own, and of all the villainous machinery of witchcraft, never rising to the level of the Walpurgis Night in Faust, but more suggestive of a college freshman society initia- tion of forty years ago. One of the commissioners on his journey to Salem advised whipping the devil out of the afflicted, a procedure which would probably have ended Salem witchcraft then and there. There is, however, a growing belief among the investigators of the unknown if not the unknowable, that the fraud practiced by a few children does not adequately explain the mystery, and the English Society for Psychical Research in its attempt at a scientific proof of a future life is accumulating a new collection of the Wonders of the Invisible World. In har- mony with this line of research comes a hypothesis thrown out by the latest biographer of Cotton Mather. Briefly stated, his notion is, that before man was evolved from the lower forms of animal life, he was possessed of more
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than the five senses. These have descended to other ani- mals as instincts, and vestiges of them may still appear under abnormal conditions in man, and, surviving from an age void of the normal sense, suggest the delusions which form the stock in trade of the necromancer, the witch, and the medium. However this may be, it is fair to the memory of the men of Salem to quote the language of one of the latest and most thorough students of the delusion, Mr. William Frederick Poole. He says: "No nation, no age, no form of religion or irreligion, may claim an im- munity from this superstition. The Reformers were as zealous in the matter as the Catholics. It is estimated that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries two hundred thousand persons were executed, mostly burned, in Europe, Germany furnishing one-half the victims, and England thirty thousand. . . . The Familiar Letters of James Howell, who, after the restoration of Charles II, was Histori- ographer Royal, gives a frightful picture of the extent of the delusion in England. Under date of February 3, 1646, he writes, 'We have multitudes of witches among us; for in Essex and Suffolk there were above two hun- dred indicted within these two years, and above the one- half of them executed. I speak it with horror. God guard us from the Devil.' "
The next book on the list is entitled " Some account of the Holy Life and Death of Mr. Henry Gearing, late citizen of London; Who departed this life January 4th, 1693-4, Aged 61, . . . By John Shower. Boston, 1705." A book so popular that another edition was called for and issued in 1720. Mr. Gearing seems to have been one of the excellent persons classed by Burns as the " unco guid, or the rigidly righteous." He was the son of a mercer in Lechlade in Gloucestershire " of extraordinary prudence
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and piety," and his relatives are enumerated with much genealogical completeness. There is the usual diary in which the subject enters his daily communings with his soul, but whether for his own profit, or for that of pos- terity or lest the recording angel should forget, is left to conjecture. The book is dedicated to the widow and chil- dren by their afflicted friend and servant in the Gospel John Shower, who tells them " An ordinary Hell will not be punishment enough for the children of such parents if you miscarry, and fall short of Heaven."
The title of the next book sufficiently indicates its char- acter, the great number read, and one of the curious cus- toms of the times. It is named "The Great Concern; or, A serious warning to a timely and thorough preparation for death, with helps and directions in order thereto. By Edward Pearse. .. . Recommended as proper to be given at funerals. The twenty-second edition. Boston in New England. . . . 1711." Eleven chapters and a last letter. 118 pages. The custom of giving books at funerals as a reminder of the deceased, was much like that also in vogue of distributing funeral rings duly inscribed, and was so common that Judge Sewell used to extend the custom also to weddings and records in his diary gifts of elegantly bound psalm books to the happy pair, accompanying his gifts with much excellent advice.
The next book was a copy of the New Testament, and this was followed by " A book on Numbers." There were two commentaries on this book of the Pentateuch in com- mon use at that time, but which was the favorite of Mr. Gridley is not very important for us to know. Next comes a Law Book. This was without doubt one of the copies of the " Whole body of laws now in force in the colony," which the General Court at its May Session of the previous
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year ordered printed and distributed by the towns to the several inhabitants, as they shall see cause. With the ex- ception of an entry of 18 pence as the value of several books and pieces of books not named, one more book closes the list. This was a catechism valued at 4 pence, probably · the one entitled " A short Catechism drawn out of the Word of God by Samuel Stone, Minister of the Word at Hartford on Connecticut. Boston in New England. Printed by Samuel Green, for John Wadsworth of Farm- ington. 1684." It must have been written more than twenty years previously, for Mr. Stone died in 1663. The catechism in previous use can be found on our records, and one of our pastors informs us that it was ascribed to Rev. Thomas Hooker, but does not give his authority. Why Deacon Wadsworth so much preferred this compilation as to be at the expense of publishing it, is a matter of conjecture. If a printed book was to be preferred to one in manuscript, the Westminster Shorter Catechism printed in Boston in 1691 might have sufficed, but the worthy men of that day were very precise about their doctrines. Per- sonal friendship for Mr. Stone can hardly account for the preference. Some of his prominent antagonists in the great quarrel in Hartford had removed to Hadley four years before his death, and came thence to this town just before, or during, the Indian atrocities of King Philip's War. Many of our prominent men would not, therefore, have been likely to be personal friends of Mr. Stone. Of this catechism only two copies are known to exist, one bought by the Lenox Library at a cost of one hundred dollars and one by the Watkinson Library at Hartford for sixty dol- lars. Of the nice shades of difference in the doctrines in- culcated in its eighty-one questions and answers, none but a skilled theologian could give an intelligent account, and
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no audience but one drilled from childhood in subtle meta- physical niceties, as our fathers were, need attempt to listen.
Such is a very brief and inadequate account of the library of a village blacksmith of this town in the year 1712, but probably as lengthy as you care for. Let us not think too lightly of the somber taste of its collector. Apart from religious works very few books could be had even in England. Before 1712 Addison and Pope had published almost nothing. The great novelists were yet to appear. The poetry of Dryden and Milton was indeed available and was probably read by our ancestors as much as by us. Dramatic literature was almost the only secular kind ob- tainable, but the New Englander had not yet learned to distinguish between the plays of Shakespeare and those which pleased the licentious court of the merry monarch. The first settlers and their children after them were more- over too much occupied with turning the forest into fertile fields, defending their homes from the torch of the savage and organizing expeditions against their northern neigh- bors, who urged the savages on, to have much time for literary culture. Let us not criticise them too sharply, but rather be grateful for their lives of self-denial which made our larger store of knowledge possible.
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AN HISTORICAL ADDRESS DELIVERED AT
THE ANNUAL MEETING
of the
VILLAGE LIBRARY COMPANY
OF FARMINGTON, CONNECTICUT
September 11, 1901
by Julius Gay
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THE TUNXIS INDIANS
delivered at the annual meeting of the Village Library Company of Farmington September 11, 1901
The Tunxis Indians, who once occupied the broad meadows and forests surrounding our village, first came within the range of our ancestors' knowledge about the year 1640. Already in January, 1639, the inhabitants of the three river towns, in the westward march of empire, before they were hardly settled on the Connecticut, moved the court for some enlargement of their accommodations. A committee was therefore appointed to " view those parts by Vnxus Sepus which may be suitable for those purposes and make report of their doings to the court which is ad- journed for that end to the 20th of February at 10 of the clock in the morning." The depth of a New England win- ter did not prove an attractive time for exploring an un- known forest buried beneath the snow, and when the court was duly opened it was informed that " our neighbors of Wethersfield, in regard the weather hath not hitherto suited for the viewing of Vnxus Sepus, . , intimated their willingness to defer the issue of the business." In December, 1645, the court "ordered that the Plantation called Tunxis shall be called Farmington." So in the year 1645 the settlement had been made long enough to be called a plantation, and two years earlier, in 1643, Stephen Hart had recorded the purchase of land on the west side of the river from a previous owner.
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The place was known as Tunxis Sepus, Tunxis signify- ing crooked and Sepus a river, or the little river, in distinc- tion from the "Great River, the river of Connecticut." Dr. Trumbull translates the name as meaning " at the bend of the little river," for here the Farmington River turns abruptly northward and finds its way to the Connecticut at Windsor.
In 1642 we read of a grand conspiracy of the Narra- gansett Indians and of the tribes living at Hartford and . Middletown, and the General Court ordered preparations to be made " to defeat the plot of the Indians meeting about Tunxis." We hear nothing further of the plot, and on the 9th of April, 1650, the Indians of this vicinity execute a deed described as " A discovery in writing of such agree- ments as were made by the magistrates with the Indians of Tunxis Sepus concerning the lands and such things in refer- ence thereto as tend to settle peace in a way of truth and righteousness betwixt the English and them." It states that it is " taken for granted that the magistrates bought the whole country, to the Mohawk country, of Sequasson, the chief sachem." The document then proceeds in a ramb- ling, incoherent manner to stipulate that the Indians should surrender their land, reserving the "ground in place to- gether compassed about with a creek and trees and now also to be staked out, also one little slipe which is also to be staked out." The English were to plough up the land for the Indians, who were allowed to cut wood for fuel. Fish- ing, fowling, and hunting were to be enjoyed by the English and Indians alike. The deed was signed by Gov. Haynes on the part of the English and by Pethus and Ahamo on the part of the Indians. The consideration was the pro- tection afforded the Indians and the lucrative trade offered them in corn and furs. Nor was the consideration a small
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one. Before the coming of the English the tribe was be- tween two hostile and powerful enemies, the Pequots on the east and the Mohawks on the west. The brilliant cam- paign of Captain John Mason had indeed relieved them from the former, but from the Mohawks they were still wont to run in abject terror to the houses of their new friends. The signatures of Pethus and Ahamo to the deed are bits of picture writing not easily explainable. Indian signatures are often uncouth representations of their totems; that is, of the animals after which the clan, and sometimes the individual, was named. Pethus' signature is a mere scrawl, but Ahamo's elaborate drawing resembles nothing " in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth." We must remem- ber, however, that the record is only a copy of the original deed transcribed January 18, 1667, by William Lewis, Register, who may not have sufficiently admired Indian art and heraldry to have taken much pains with his copy.
The deed of 1650 remained in force twenty-three years, but all compacts, whether in the nature of treaties like that of Clayton and Bulwer, or of constitutions like that of Connecticut, do in time cease to meet all the requirements of new conditions. In 1673, the Indians having become dissatisfied, the town " gave them a meeting by a committee wherein they came to a friendly and final conclusion." The Indians released their right to a rectangular piece of land drawn out in diagram upon the deed that they might see definitely what they conveyed. The piece measured five miles north from Wepansock or Round Hill, three miles to the east, ten miles to the south, and eight miles to the west. " The town of Farmington freely giving to the Indians aforesaid two hundred acres of upland within the lands of their plantation, as also three pounds in other pay." In a
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postscript (so called) to this deed the Indians are confirmed in their possession of land in the Indian Neck. This deed was signed by twenty-one Indians and by five of their squaws. Squaws often signed deeds with their husbands.
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N. W. VIEW OF FARMINGTON FROM ROUND HILL.
They might be treated by them worse than beasts of bur- den; nevertheless, if descended from sachems or saga- mores, their right in the body politic and that of their chil- dren was respected. The salic law of old world nations did not hold with them. According to Parkman, among the Iroquois, the royal line followed the totem down the female line. If a Wolf warrior married a Hawk squaw, the children were Hawks and not Wolves, and a reputed son of the chief was sometimes set aside for the children of a sister, for a sister must necessarily be his kindred, and of the line royal.
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Eight years afterward, Mesecope executes another deed confirming that of 1673, and again in 1683, becoming dis- satisfied with these not very well understood legal docu- ments, takes the town authorities with him, and in a busi- nesslike manner goes to the southern limit of the grant, marks a tree and builds a monument. In like manner he defines the eastern and western bounds, so that all men could see and understand, and then goes home and signs his heraldic device, a bow and arrow, to a long account of his day's work. His son Sassenakum, " in the presence and by the help of his father," adds his device, which may rep- resent the sun with its surrounding halo. The document was duly recorded and is the last deed we need con- sider. Peace was firmly established, and with few excep- tions the relations between the whites and Indians were from first to last friendly. For an account of one sad exception we must go back a little. John Hull, mint master of Boston, in his diary under date of April 23, 1657, says : " We received letters from Hartford, and . heard that at a town called Farmington, near Hartford, an Indian was so bold as to kill an English woman great with child, and likewise her maid, and sorely wounded a little child - all within their house - and then fired the house, which also fired some other barns or houses. The Indians, being apprehended, delivered up the murderer, who was brought to Hartford and (after he had his right hand cut off) was, with an axe, knocked on the head by the executioner." This story is worth a little study as illustrative of the manner in which much grave history is evolved. Given a few facts many years apart, a few traditions and a lively imagination and there results a story that shall go down through all time as authentic as the exploits of Old Testament heroes. Let us consider the facts and then the story. The General
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Court in April, 1657, takes notice of " a most horrid mur- der committed by some Indians at Farmington, and though Mesapano seems to be the principal actor, yet the acces- sories are not yet clearly discovered." Messengers were sent to the Norwootuck and the Pocumtuck Indians, that is, to those of Hadley and Deerfield, to deliver up Mesapano, which would suggest that those Indians rather than the Tunxis tribe were the guilty parties. The latter, however, had been duly warned against entertaining hostile Indians and were therefore held responsible for the murder and the firing of a house, and they " mutually agreed and obliged themselves to pay unto the General Court in October, or to their order, yearly, for the term of seven years, the full sum of eighty fathoms of wampum, well strung and mer- chantable." Nearly ten years afterward the house of John Hart takes fire one December night and all his family, save one son who was absent, were burned. We have several contemporary records of the disaster, but no sus- picion of foul play appeared. Putting together these stories separated by ten years of time we have full materials for the historic tale. The Indians surround the house of John Hart at midnight, murder the entire family, and burn the house over their remains. The town records perish in the flames, and the tribe pay a fine of eighty fathoms of wam- pum yearly thereafter. In point of fact the Indians did not murder John Hart or burn his house. No records were destroyed, and the court complained that the Indians did not pay the fine for their transgressions of ten years before. The murder of 1657 was probably the work of strange Indians and not of the friendly Tunxis tribe. The Indians living to the north within the jurisdiction of the Massa- chusetts Colony were for many years a menace to the whites and friendly Indians alike. There is a well-known tradition
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that about the year 1657 a marauding party from the north, seeking captives to hold for ransom, appeared at the Hart farm, one mile north of the present south line of Avon, and, proceeding thence southward, murdered a Mr. Scott at a place thenceforth known as Scott's Swamp. The earliest record of the tradition is that by Mr. Ezekiel Cowles, father of the late Egbert Cowles, Esq., which I give in his own words. He says: "Two Indians came to Old Farm, where a man by the name of Hart was hoeing corn. He had a gun. He would hoe along a little way and then move his gun a little, and then hoe again. He also had two dogs. The dogs were disturbed by the Indians and would run towards the woods. A partridge flew upon a tree near where he was hoeing. He shot at it and then loaded his gun before he moved. The Indians concluded they could not get him and went on upon the mountain until they came near the south part of the village and got something to eat, but found too many houses to attempt to take any prisoners. Went on. Saw Root's house on Great Plain. He was at prayers. The Indians heard him; thought there were many persons in the house. Dogs barked. They ran. Found Scott alone. Took him. He resisted. Halloed. They cut out his tongue and finally killed him." This atrocity also is attributed to stranger Indians. The differ- ences between the whites and the Tunxis tribe during this period were comparatively slight and appear mostly in the records of fines imposed on the whites for selling cider and strong drink to the Indians, and on the Indians for the con- sequences which naturally followed. The cases were all petty and a single example will sufficiently illustrate their nature. In 1654 " Papaqurrote is adjudged to pay unto Jackstraw six fathoms of wampum for his injurious pulling of his hair from his head by the roots." Now, if the In-
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