USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > Farmington > Farmington town clerks and their times (1645-1940) > Part 10
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After the war, as the thoughts of the townspeople were turned to themselves and their local government again, it speedily grew upon them, that, as the country's independence had freed them from the parent country, they had attained their growth and might be free of their immediate mother town. Before 1700, families from the village had gone on to the Great Swamp and in October 1705, there was a grant of a distinct Society called the Great Swamp Society. This had been growing in great prosperous farms and large families, independent in mind and resources, with their churches and schools, and manufacturing and social life well established. In 1779 Berlin became an incor- porated town, the first to leave the original township. Today its town seal commemorates one of its earliest industries, that of the manufacture of tinware, and its resultant tin peddler, the forerunner of the Yankee peddler who was known through- out the length and breadth of the land.
Bristol and Southington soon followed the first child from the Farmington brood. In 1785 both towns became incorporated as separate from the home town. Both had established large and prosperous settlements, with their own churches, schools and industries. Each had its own committee for the laying out of highways and enforcement of the law. In 1750 the people in Nod both sides of the river were constituted a dis- tinct ecclesiastical society and parish by the name of North- ington Parish, building in 1754 their meeting house on the east side of the river. This burned in 1817, leaving only, as in a similar case in Berlin, a lonely graveyard to mark the site of the church. In the Northington cemetery lie the remains of the Rev. Booge, the first pastor there, as in Berlin's lonely
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cemetery the first pastor, the Rev. William Burnham, lies close to the site of his church.
West Woods in 1774 became the society of West Britain, and in 1806 was set apart from Bristol to become the town of Burlington. But at least these daughter-towns did not leave Farmington far-distant, as did those families who were again feeling the urge to go on to the west and north, to establish and develop new towns. John Mix wrote in his manuscript which he prepared for John Treadwell's history of the town: "There have emigrated from this town into other states between August 1783 and March 1802 inclusive, 147 families, which, allowing five to a family, will make the whole number 735, be- sides a number of unmarried persons of both sexes not belonging to those families, which I believe may be fairly estimated at 40 more. They are principally gone into the states of Vermont and New York, though some few to different parts of the Northwest Territory."
In 1905 Lippincott's Gazeteer listed thirty-two Farmingtons throughout the United States and, judging by the inquiries coming to the town clerk's offices in these later years, all of these Farmingtons were settled by Farmington emigrants. All are anxious to know more of early family life here, and ask of the condition of the records and the liklihood of finding information.
Julius Gay gives a vitally interesting list of many of those who succumbed to the urge to go on into another wilderness. He says :"One of the first companies followed the west bank of the Connecticut River as the easiest route. They sent in advance three pioneers in a boat to spy out the land, Captain Steel Smith, Joab Hoisington and Benjamin Bishop. Landing in a meadow just north of the present village of Windsor, Ver- mont, they cut down a tree and claimed the place by possession. They were soon followed by General Zebina Smith, Major Elisha Hawley, Captain Israel Curtiss, Deacon Hezekiah Thomson, Asahel Hoisington, and Elihu Newell, and later on by the Rev. John Richards. They did not carry their titles into the wilderness but acquired them there. A little west of Windsor Ira Langdon and Aaron North settled, farther west in Ludlow,
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Deacon Lee, and a little to the north, in Dummerstown, Samuel Orvis. A large number journeyed northward on the west side of the Green Mountain range, Benjamin Lewis, John Ford and Ambrose Collins stopped in West Stockbridge. Colonel Orsamus C. Merrill, successively printer, lawyer and member of Con- gress, went on to Bennington, Vermont, Oliver Woodruff and Thomas Porter to Tinmouth. In Castleton Nathaniel Hart taught a grammer school, Selah Gridley practiced medicine and wrote poetry, Chauncey Langdon became a judge of pro- bate and Ebenezer Langdon owned a grist mill, Cyrus Porter went to Middlebury, where William G. Hooker was a physician before he removed to New Haven, Connecticut.
"In Poultney lived and died Colonel James Hooker. In Bur- lington on Lake Champlain resided George Wadsworth and Farmington's ancient tanner and shoemaker, Gabriel Curtis. In Montpelier lived Timothy Merrill, lawyer and Colonel James H. Langdon, a wealthy merchant, who was previously one of the Farmington colony at Windsor. Along the New York state line and partly in Vermont are numerous descend- ants of the Farmington Hookers the names and virtues of whose ancestors are recorded in all the cemeteries around. Rev. Asabel Norton became pastor of the first church in Clinton and Seth Norton Professor of Languages in Hamilton College in the same place, which previously had been in charge of the Rev. Robert Porter, another native of Farmington and all three graduates of Yale." One might go on giving long lists of Farm- ington emigrants to the settlement of the wilderness.
One of the great stories of that West, though an oft-told tale, is that of the Connecticut men in the Wyoming Valley where for two hundred miles the Susquehanna River rises and falls with the seasons over one of the most beautiful and fertile val- leys in the country, lined with rolling hills, and deep with the rich coal deposits. With a truly royal gesture Charles II in 1662 gave to the Governor and Company of Connecticut all the land of a corresponding width with the state, extending to the Pacific Ocean. And in 1681, knowing little and caring less about the geographical layout of the vast country, he gave to William Penn the land now known as the State of Pennsyl-
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vania. In 1760 Connecticut men and their families started set- tling the Wyoming Valley and some of the most stirring epics of American history have come from this comparatively narrow region.
Settlers were allowed forty acres each there. The Indians were on the side of the British and constantly harrassed the Connecticut people. Later the Pennaites warred on the Connec- ticut men in their effort to drive them out and each group of settlers constantly appealed to their own Assembly for aid. During the Revolutionary War an urgent appeal to Washington was made, but delayed by lack of available soldiers until too late to prevent the massacre of July 3, 1778. Family tales are still told of those years. Among them is the locally famous one of Katherine Cole Gaylord, wife of Joseph Gaylord of Bristol who somehow escaped from the savages after learning of the killing of her husband, and walked the long distance through the forests, with her three children, to her father's home in Bristol. Her children and children's children have told of the strange wild beasts encountered and of the strange men met on the way, but altho foot sore and threadbare, this courageous woman brought her family through. She lived to be ninety-five years of age and see twenty-five descendants. She is buried in Burlington where a stone marks her grave. Her memory is also honored by the Bristol chapter of the Daughters of the Ameri- can Revolution, and fully preserved in the prize-winning story of her life written by Mrs. Adrian Muzzy of Bristol. Among other sufferers, Mervin Clark of East Farms district lost a valuable farm and house, barely escaping with the clothes he wore. The family of Deacon John Hurlburt, on their way to their Forty-Fort home, missed the massacre by two days, having been delayed on the way by the death of one of their children. Deacon Hurlburt, an ancestor of Frederick F. Hurl- burt of Farmington, bought eight hundred acres running from the banks of the Susquehanna river up into the hills where his family lived for three generations. He was buried in his own orchard there, but now the only vestige of the great farm is the green house-lot in front of great piles of coal slag rising hun- dreds of feet above the spot where the orchard stood. The Revo-
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lutionary Red Inn, famous for a hundred years, is gone and the peaceful cemetery in Hanover with its Revolutionary meeting- house is all that is left to look out over the Wyoming Valley, active now with its great coal-mining industry, continuing in its own way, the busy hum started nearly two hundred years ago.
Any account of the life of the town during these vital years is closely paralleled by an equally necessary story of the life of the church. The "Discourses" by Noah Porter, both father and son, at various intervals in the nineteenth century, are too well known and complete, to require any further word. The "meeting-house" had proved its name in those last stirring years. Now with a new atmosphere of peace, its dignity un- ruffled, its skirts immaculate, it was equally prepared for the era of prosperity which followed the years of adjustment.
Sure now of the freedom of the seas, and the promise of the wealth of the great and untapped West, Farmington was on a direct path from that West to the seven seas, with all it meant to be in touch with such resources. The homes built after the war, as well as those old ones with their ancient equipment, soon were filled with china, silks, silver, rugs and treasures from around the world, as merchants and farmers here at last learned how to dispose of their great surplus, and trade both east and west.
The war had interrupted for a few years the building and plans of Farmington citizens, but out of it all came a new Being, a new manner of living, a better way of life, and it is to be doubted that even Governor Treadwell, who dropped a tear at the passing of the old way of life, would have had it other- wise.
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John Mix Big.
1791-1823
IN the year of our Lord the one thousand seven hundred and ninety-first, ofthe Independenceof the United States the fifteenth, and of the incorporation of the Town of Farmington the one hundred and forty-sixth, Farmington, Mother of Towns had matured into a beautiful, poised and well-to-do woman of the world. Still clinging to her ample skirts, silk now, rather than the homespun of other years, were her two youngest daughters, Northington parish on the one hand and Plainville on the other. The three eldest daughters, now named Berlin, Southington and Bristol, were well brought up, trained, efficient and self- reliant in the ways of a parish and town, and already bringing in daughters of their own, for soon New Britain and Burlington were to leave their respective parents and be entirely on their own.
No better word picture of Farmington in the first full glory of its best, most exuberant years could be drawn than that by Noah Porter, D.D., President of Yale College, one of Farm- ington's most devoted and faithful sons: "The old meeting house began to rustle with silks and to be gay with ribbons. The lawyers wore silk and velvet breeches; broadcloth took the place of homespun for coat and overcoat, and courduroy displaced leather breeches and pantaloons. As the next century opened, pianos were heard in the best houses, thundering out the "Battle of Prague" as a tour de force, and the gayest of gigs and the most pretentious of phaetons rolled through the village. Houses were built with dancing-halls for evening gayety; and the most liberal hospitality, recommended by the best of cookery, was dispensed at sumptuous dinners and sup-
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pers. This period of active business and mercantile enterprise and the rapid accumulation of wealth extended from 1790 until about 1825. In 1802 Governor Treadwell records that a 'greater capital is employed in trade than in any inland town in the State.' The decline of this trade began with the opening of a more ready communication with Hartford, by the extension of the Litchfield and the Albany turnpike roads over the Talcott mountain. The Farmington capitalists were large owners in the stock of both these roads. They did not foresee that by making it easier for themselves to go to Hartford they would make it easier for their customers to do the same."
It was into this safe, elegant and harmonious environment that John Mix stepped in 1791 as Town Clerk, taking a place rightfully his by virtue of family background, military accom- plishment and a capacity for public service and good judgment recognized by all. He was the son of Ebenezer and Anna (Good- win) Mix and was born in West Hartford in 1755. He married Martha Cowles, daughter of Ezekiel Cowles, July 1776 and eight children were born to them. Eben Hooker Mix, born October 10, 1776, known as Captain Eb, was one of the quaint sailor characters of Farmington. In his young days he was supercargo of ships in the East India trade, and subsequently he commanded ships in that trade. As years increased and he retired from business, he became one of the notable characters of the town. One of the stories told of him is in the humorous vein sometimes adopted by Julius Gay: " ... Sailors are wont to be superstitious. Their lonely lives on the mighty ocean fosters the feeling. A ghost had been seen several times in the old burying ground, and Captain Eb was not surprised, when, looking from his chamber window one dark night, he saw a tall form clothed all in white and having two great white wings which it waved at intervals in a ghostly fashion. Captain Eb shouted to the apparition to be gone, but it moved not. He then proceeded to exorcise it with the rich expletives which sailors are wont to bring home from lands beyond the sea. The waving of the ghostly wings was the only reply. As a last resort Captain Eb seized an old queen's arms, well loaded, which had seen service in Revolutionary days, and taking deliberate aim
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at the ghost, blazed away. When the smoke disappeared the ghost was no longer to be seen. The next morning, when the sun lighted up the scene of the midnight encounter, there ap- peared one of the tall white slabs which were just beginning to take the place of the old red gravestones, and at its foot lay the remains of Deacon Elijah Porter's old white goose."
Captain Eb may have been suspicious of floating white ob- jects in the cemetery at night, but his years at sea, as much as his natural courage, offered a quick solution.
Some details of his years as a sailor came out in letters and diaries written by his brother John, his sister Martha and his wife, Sally.
"April 1815 Captain Elisha Mix brought in the armed brig 'Warrior' laden with 320 bales, cases and packages of dry goods and a quantity of specia - having made six captures." He had sailed November 1, 1814, as Commodore on the "Decatur," commanding the schooner "Ann." February 10, 1816, he sailed for Smyrna and other Mediterranean ports. His wife wrote of the scarcity of money, of Gad Cowles building a fine store - and of hundreds of fine ships rotting in their docks.
Captain Eb returned but to sail again November 4, 1816. His wife wrote under date of January 25, 1817, "no information of Eb"; April 19, "anxious about Eb"; June 24, 1817, "If I could only hear from my dear husband and know that he is in health it would make me almost well." July 10, 1817, "no word yet. Shipwreck of Fame." July 30, 1817, "I rejoice very much to hear of Eb's health and that the vessel was spoken with that he sailed in."
Under date of April 1, 1803, Elisha Mix was one of the crew signing an agreement with Thomas Atwater for a sealing expe- dition. "We said the crew does now agree to bind ourselves to seal on the island of Massefuco two years and in that time to use all our best endeavours to procure a cargo of seal skins and these profits and safely keep from harm and damage and deliver the same and use all our best endeavours to get them on board the ships that carry them to China and America, all for the sole use and benefit of Thomas Atwater Jr for which he will give the said named crew forty five skins out of every hundred
The Barnes-Mix House On site of Thomas Barnes Homestead Front part built by John Mix about 1800 Now home of Mrs. Stephen B. Lawrence
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sold which shall be full compensation. October 25, 1805. 'Huron' arrived in N. Y. 2nd voyage. 13025 skins shipped to Canton, 45,000 belong to gang - 212 on each hundred belong to Elisha Mix foreman - 8 in gang - skins sold for .95."
Other children were - Ann Goodwin, born in 1780, died in 1783; Betsy, born in 1781, died in 1809; Ann Goodwin, born in 1784, married Dr. Harry Wadsworth, son of Dr. Theodore and Betsy Wadsworth of Southington. Dr. Harry Wadsworth was practising physician in Farmington where he died in 1813. Ann died in Farmington March 27, 1824. William, born in 1785, died in 1789. Catherine, born in 1787, died in October, 1863. She married the Rev. Joshua L. Williams November 30, 1813. They had a daughter Catherine Hooker Williams born in 1826, who married John Deming, and they became the parents of Edward Hooker Deming, for fifty years the town's foremost citizen, judge of probate, treasurer of the Farmington Savings Bank and member of committees for all public good.
John William, born in 1794, died in 1820. Martha Hooker, born in 1793, died in 1837.
The last years of John Mix's life brought their full measure of sorrow. After more than fifty years of married life, Martha died February 23, 1826, and before his own death April 30, 1834, John had seen five of his eight children buried and had long years of anxiety over his first-born son.
But as he sat in the sun on his back porch in the big red house he had built just south of the old cemetery on Main Street, or warmed himself at one of the many fireplaces during the cold winter months, when he was old and could no longer see, and, we are told, was not as patient with his affliction as we are told we should be, if we could have sat with him while he reminisced, we would have heard a story of life, love, war, politics and peace unrivaled in fact or fiction.
He was twenty-one years old, a graduate of Yale, when stir- ring calls came from the newly-built meeting-house for men who could defend their homes. Hurriedly persuading Martha Cowles to marry, he enlisted in the colonial army. In 1778 he was appointed adjutant of the 2nd Regiment, the commission
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being dated June 1, 1778, as a transfer from Ensign of the Third Regiment. He served as an officer on the staff of General Wash- ington, later was a member of the Society of the Cincinnati and served as Secretary of the Connecticut branch. After the war, he dressed always as a gentleman of the period in fine broadcloth, silver knee buckles, his long hair tied with a black bow. His manner was formal, his temper quick, he was always punctilious. Julius Gay wrote of him: "He was very hospitable, a good neighbor, a member of no church, bound by no creed and in politics a federalist. In his later 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 the judicious use of the thunderbolts of the Almighty."
But now at the close of the war, in his new home, with his young wife, growing family of sons and daughters and the rap- idly bestowed honors of his townspeople, life was very full and very pleasant.
Year after year he was sent by Farmington to the Legislature. Every committee whether for church, town or state, had him as a member. He and John Treadwell and Colonel Noadiah Hooker decided who should be the new minister of the church, which roads should be built, where new bridges should be placed, and how much they should cost, how to care for the growing problem of town poor, and approved the matter of a canal through the town, at the same time organizing a village library and setting up and financing twelve school districts.
The enlargement of conveniences and further accommoda- tion for the trade which was now streaming through the town, in these years after the war, leaving a very substantial deposit of gold in its wake, was of first importance. Town meetings for twenty-five years were concerned primarily with the con- dition of roads, bridges and turnpikes. New roads were built connecting the ancient highways. As bridges were swept away in floods or worn with the countless steps of men and animals, new and better ones were built with extensive causeways to
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nsure added height and protection. Turnpike companies were encouraged, not only for the convenience of travel, but because these companies bore the expense of highway construction and ipkeep - a matter carefully gone into at each town meeting. The town fathers were now comfortably wealthy, but still rugal. These very turnpike companies were later the undoing of the Farmington merchants, for they not only brought trade from the western towns of Connecticut and New York, but joon took this trade straight through Farmington and into Hartford, Middletown and New Haven. In these years from [791 to 1823, Farmington had its day, exceeding in both popu- ation and wealth that of Hartford.
Vessels owned by the Cowles family and the Deming brothers went to the far corners of the world, bringing back silks, tea und monogrammed china from China, rugs, carpets, coffee and ¿pices as well as bric-a-brac from India and furs from the South Sea Islands. Rum and molasses from the West Indies was the basis of much of the wealth here, and great houses with ball- rooms, pianos and imported wall papers and hangings from England were soon built. Horses and carriages glittered on the Main Street through the dust clouds of summer and the deepest nows of winter. Much of the wealth, carefully conserved, is till comfortably tucked away today.
John Mix aided in administering this wealth and the many duties which came with it.
He was first elected Town Clerk in 1791, with Colonel Noadiah Hooker as Town treasurer.
Town votes for those years are eloquent, still radiating the atmosphere of those busy, important meetings, when each man ilthough a good neighbor, had his own vigorous opinion. Under late of Dec. 12, 1791, "At a Meeting of the inhabitants of the Town of Farmington William Judd Esq. chosen Moderator to ead in said meeting and the following persons were appointed o the several offices affixed to their names respectively:
"John Mix Esq., Town Clerk for year ensuing
Col Noadiah Hooker Treasurer do
Selectmen Asahel Wadsworth, Roger Hooker & William Ford
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Constables - Ezekiel Cowles Jr & Collector of State Taxes Romanta Norton, Roger Hooker & Elijah Miller & he to collect the Town tax in the Parish of Northington to be made on the list of 1791
Surveyors of Reuben Woodruff, Elisha Hoisington, Roger Highways - Hooker, Asahel Wadsworth, Elnathan Hooker, Abel Hawley, Samuel Porter, John Cook, Elijah Gridley, Bayze Welles, David Gleason, Jedediah Norton
Grand Jurors -Correl Case, Noadiah Woodruff, Terency Edson, Daniel Millar, Lent Hart
Tything men- Solomon Cowles, Jr., Abel Woodruff, Joshua Phinney, Amos Hawley, Samuel Root, jr., Noadiah Burr, Jr., Amos Woodford, Obadiah Gillet, Lydar Woodruff.
Listers - Isaac Cowles. Timothy Pitkin, jr., Abel Thomson, Roger Woodford, James Cadwell, David Gleason, Samuel Risley.
Fence Viewers -
Phineas Lewis, Eleazer Curtiss, Mor- gan Goodwin Jr., Timothy Welles, William Ford, Samuel Bishop.
Sealers of Weights - Sealers of Measures -
Isaac Gleason, Isaiah North
Shubel Porter, Reuben Millar, Sam- uel Burr.
Eliphalet Wadsworth
Sealers of Leather - Key Keepers -
Seth Lee, Timothy Welles, Solomon Millar.
"Voted, that a Tax of a penny, halfpenny on the pound on the list of 1791 be paid into the Treasury by the Ist day of July 1792, and that Ezekiel Cowles Jr be the Collector of said tax in the Ist Society and account with the Treasurer accordingly.
"Voted, that a Tax of three pence on the pound on the list of 1791 for the purpose of making necessary repairs on the high- ways payable in Labour by the Ist day of November 1792 agree- able to the former arrangement made for that purpose - pro- viding nevertheless that if any person shall pay two thirds of the
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amount of such tax in money, it shall exonerate him from the whole.
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