USA > Connecticut > New London County > Groton > Historic Groton : comprising historic and descriptive sketches pertaining to Groton Heights, Center Groton, Poquonnoc Bridge, Noank, Mystic, and Old Mystic, Conn. > Part 5
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The surviving seventeenth century records of Groton are to be found in the archives of New London, of which it remained a part for sixty years. In the early division of lands east of the Thames those lying in and around Center Groton are unnoticed. They mostly re- mained in commons until Groton attained her corporate independence. So far as we know no settler made his home there until near the end of the century. Nor is it easy to discrim- inate chronologically between the very few who came before its status as a town center was fixed, as we have outlined in our intro- duction, and those who followed soon after. The precise date at which W. aner Bodington reared his cabin one-third of a mile north of the
cross roads remains to be defined. The same may be said of Thomas Dunbar, land trader, tavern keeper, and builder and operator of Dunbar's mill on the Great Brook at the west, whose "Big House" just to the east of Boding- ton's place punctuates the later records here and there. But in the decades between 1660 and 1690. the more easily accessible and more easily tilled if not more fertile lands of the town were not being neglected. The Smiths. the Averys and the Morgans had early made their homes at the lower end of the Poquon- nock valley, and the time was to come when the descendants of the first two were to be the principal citizens and land holders in the locality with which we are especially con- cerned.
Along the banks of the Mystic and the Thames and in the more distant "Poquetan- nock Grants," groups of sturdy pioneers, whose names are of familiar memory had cleared and were cultivating their homestead acres. They were town builders all; it was an era when race suicide was noknown, and new settlers were continually coming in to push farther into the interior of the tract whose periphery only was as yet dotted with their scattered farms.
It is not to be forgotten that "the church had the town," that the absence of any one from the sanctuary at the tap of the sabbath drum furnished a proper subject for judicial inquiry ; and that in extreme cases, even the whipping post and the stocks were esteemed appliances with which to persuade men into ways of pleasantness and paths of peace.
Small wonder that as the century drew to a close the desire for a separate and more con- venient church establishment, fanned by 1111- reasonable and even minatory opposition, should at last, like the "Spirit of Cathmor" be "stalking large, a gleaming form." There is a touch of grim humor in the petition to the General Court, ignored, denied, and renewed, for the privilege to "imbodye themselves into church estate, in order to the comfortable en- joyment of the ordinances of God." The meas- ure of discomfort involved in winter trips by bad roads and worse ferries to the fireless
-
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sanctuary on the farther side of the Thames we can easily comprehend; and to many of those independent farmers there was an added element of discomfort in the autocratic minis- trations of the Reverend Gurdon Saltonstall.
A stately Puritan of the Puritans, an aristo- crat to his finger tips, "who felt in himself few of the infirmities of humanity and was in- tolerent of them in others;" the most forceful character of his day and generation, he was unfortunately the champion of the worst as well as the best elements of a dying ecclesias- tical system. To his potent influence with the General Court was largely due the failure of the various prayers for a separate church es- tablishment in Groton which were laid before
CENTER GROTON CHAPEL
it between 1696 and 1703. In 1700 the lash of discipline was applied to sundry recalcitrants, who dared to sign their names, first to a "Complaint" and then to a "Remonstrance" against him and his methods, But even his eyes must have discerned at last the physical if not the spiritual necessity of the case.
In 1702 the town "consented" by vote "that the inhabitants that "dwell on the east side of the river should organize a church and have a minister of their own at an annual salary of 70 pounds ;" and they were further authorized to build a meeting house thirty-five feet square at the joint expense of both sections.
Large bodies move slowly, and before the more ponderous one at New Haven had regis- tored its conclusion in the matter, the town had voted that three hundred acres of the
common lands should be sold or otherwise used for church purposes, and the dwellers east of the river had called as their minister the Reverend Ephraim Woodbridge of Kil- lingworth, a recent Harvard graduate, and born of an unbroken line of clergymen from the days of Wyckliffe down. In the early spring of 1703, a committee appointed for the purpose reported a sale to Thomas Dunbar (already mentioned ) of nineteen acres of the public lands for church purposes. The lo- cation of the Meeting House was determined as we have seen, and the clearing at Center Groton soon rang with the sound of axe and hammer where there were few to be cheered or disturbed by the echoes.
At its October session the General Court was pleased to ratify these proceedings, and at the May session of 1704. also solemnly ap- proved of an addition of 20 pounds per annum to Mr. Woodbridge's salary, he having agreed to build his own house without further call upon the taxpayers. The foundations of the house were probably already laid, as the young divine had given hostage to fortune on the fourth day of the same month by marrying Miss Hannah Morgan, daughter of one of the "complainants" previously disciplined by Sal- tonstall. His formal ordination in the new Meeting House took place on the eighth day of November following, and the Church at Poquonnock was officially launched upon the ecclesiastical sea. Its history belongs to an- other pen than ours, as well as that of the rival sect whose apostle was soon to appear upon the field, and whose proselytes were ere long to outnumber the friends of the Standing Order and overturn the system upon which the latter leaned for support : but the story of Center Groton with both eliminated would be but a repetition of that of Hamlet with Hamlet left out.
Of the building, which for more than sixty vears was to serve the community as church and town house, no detailed description has been handed down to us, and even its exact site has been a matter of some question. It prob- ably stood a few feet to the east of the now unused store, which last was built long after
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the demolition of the church in early Revolu- tionary time. Its dimensions have already been alluded to. It is safe to assume that in its construction few of the graces of archi- tecture were involved either in exterior or in- terior fittings. It was a square, and doubtless rather ugly looking building, without chim- neys, with entrances on its southern and east- ern sides, and crowned by the pyramidal or hipped roof then much in vogue. The scanty floor space within was reinforced by galleries upon three sides, the pulpit overhung by the inevitable sounding board occupying the fourth.
The dignitaries, civil, military or religious, who could afford the luxury, were, by special vote, accorded space, presumably near the pulpit in which to build pews for them- selves and families. The first to be thus hon- ored was John Davie, the first town clerk of Groton. The allotment of seats was a task re- quiring both nerve and judgment on the part of the committee appointed for the purpose, calling as it did for an appraisal of the relative social claims of the worshippers. But the power of the town was behind the committee, and "being so seated" the claimants were warned to "remain silent." A like divinity no doubt hedged about the committee of one, who was charged to "take care of the youthe on the Lord's day, that they may not play."
If the maximi propounded by the great French philosopher as to "the nations that have 10 history" can be applied to churches, the twenty years pastorate of the Reverend Eph- raim Woodbridge was doubtless a happy one, as no records of it are known to exist. The occasional reference to him in the civil records touch mostly upon the very worldly matters of life, and as such are not of material inter- est. He seems to have been popular always, tolerant at a time when intolerance was the rule with the Standing Order to which he be- longed, in' short, a worthy representative of a class which has been denominated "the moral and religious aristocracy of the town." Un- like his successor he was untroubled by sern- ples concerning the minister's rates, nor was he hesitant in his requisitions for what at this
day would be accounted unwarrantable favors. The house to which he conveyed his bride, in which his six children were born, and in which in the prime of his years he died, was Constructed by him of materials more enduring than those of the Saybrook Platform, to whose harsh provisions he is believed to have accord- ed but a tacit assent.
After his death in 1725, the house became the property of his successor in the minis- terial office, the Reverend John Owen who was like himself a Harvard graduate; a character beloved of all, whose epitaph, "God's faithful seer" seems to have been but a just recogni- tion of the merits of an unusually worthy man. Mr. Owen was ordained in 1727 and died in 1753. The Reverend Jonathan Barber the third and last minister at Center Groton be- came its purchaser in 1762, four years after his ordination. A Yale graduate, a man not only of liberal education but of liberal ten- dencies as well, widely known in the land as missionary and reformer, and the close friend and ally of Whitefield, the traditions of more than half a century were properly sustained when he took up his abode under its generous roof tree.
Whitefield visited the place in the summer of 1763, and the spacious grounds of the par- sonage were thronged by a congregation which no church in the colony could have accom- modated, who came from far and near to listen to the greatest pulpit orator of the century. Mr. Barber was, in the melancholy words of the church records, "taken from his usefulness" in 1765, but dwelt under its roof until his death in 1783, and it remained in possession of his descendants for nearly half a century longer. A parsonage for over sixty years, it has since been by turns inn and farm house, and in the third century of its usefulness it serves in the latter capacity to-day, a visible link between the old times and the new.
Groton became an independent township in the year 1705, and the first town meeting was held at the center in December of that year. On May 28th, 1706, at a similar gathering the crude foundations of an educational system were laid by the appointment of Mr. John
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Barnard to be "town schoolmaster." A tract of ten acres of land "northward of the Meet- ing House" was ordered to be laid out for school purposes, and a "convenient dwelling house sixteen feet square" to be built thereon ; "the house and land to be the town's, the ben- cfit to be for the school." Subsidies might be, and were freely voted to clergymen, but not to schoolmasters. On the 11th day of Septem- ber following, as the result of a deal with the ubiquitous Thomas Dunbar, the vote was re- scinded and ten acres "south of the Meeting House" substituted. Yet the traditions are to the effect that the house and lot soon after occupied and improved by Mr. Barnard, as well as the school house later erected, were located in accordance with the original vote,
SCHOOLHOUSE
and so far as the school house is concerned the tradition is certainly correct.
The school master served the town in a peripatetic capacity, for as then constituted it covered an area of more than seventy square miles, and to build a schoolhouse in each of the five sections into which it was divided for educational purposes would have been an in- heard of extravagance. The sessions in the central section were held either at "the con- venient dwelling sixteen feet square" or at the Meeting House for a time, and the others at the houses of well to do citizens elsewhere, a six months session being in turn allotted to each locality. Mr. Barnard retained his posi- tion until 1712, when his name disappears from the records. Little is known of him, but he was probably a descendant of the Barnards of Andover, and it is a fair inference that the
minister was his friend and sponsor. During his incumbency "Mistress Barnard" swept the Meeting House and kept the key, receiving for her services the sum of 20 shillings per annum.
It is difficult to estimate even approximately the compensation received by this educational pioneer for his weary round of services, but it was undoubtedly a meager one, in keeping with the times. A comparison with the liberal allowances made to the minister is naturally suggested, but we forbear.
The date of the erection of the first school- house which was situated a short distance to the north of the Meeting House is uncer- tain, as is that of its demolition. It lasted however till the beginning of the nineteenth century. The last to teach within its walls was the grandfather of the writer, who dis- missed his class rather abruptly one morning, when he found that the big stone chimney had collapsed during the night, completely wreck- ing the already dilapidated building. So far as known there is no reference in the records to the construction of its successor, which was placed at the foot of the gentle eminence known as Schoolhouse Hill on the west. It did duty for at least three quarters of a century, and as late as 1820 the attendance there was as great as in any district in town. A new and modern building placed near the chapel at the east, succeeded it in 1883. but the old one. converted into a dwelling, still survives.
Save in the periods of excitement which stirred the religious field, the history of Center Groton from its settlement down to the Rev- olution epoch is an uneventful one. Another pen not less sympathetic than ours has else- where traced the rise and progress of the move- ment tending to church reform, which was be- gun in 1705, by the Reverend Valentine Wightman, and we pass on with the remark that the leaven of religious liberty was so thor- cuglily disseminated by the great evangelist that when, long after, the new constitution of Connecticut, which formally divorced church and state, and buried out of sight an already defunct system of parish despotism, was submitted to the people, Groton cast a unanimous vote in its favor. Of the ultimate
7
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effect of the movement on the fortunes of the village we have spoken in our introduction.
The division of the town, in 1725, into two ecclesiastical societies, the northern one corre- sponding to the present town of Ledyard was another blow at its prestige as a town center. In the tempestuous revival period, historically known as the Great Awakening, and continued in an intermittent way from 1741 to 1744, the two great leaders of the movement Parsons and Davenport, preached there to open air con- gregations great in numbers, considering the widely distributed population from which they were drawn.
Between 1720 and 1740 there was brisk land trading in which the Avery family, moving up from the lower Poquonnock valley along the Great Brook on the west, and the Smiths from the eastern shore of Poquonnock Lake, large- ly participated. Conspicuous in these deals were Thomas Dunbar and Samuel Cunning- ham who were among the earliest residents in the place. Samuel Daboll from East Hamp- ton, Long Island, became a resident in 1715. Joseph Belton came from Newport about 1725 and commenced buying upon a liberal scale, establishing his home near the foot of Candle- wood Hill on the northern side of the post road. Scarcely a trace of its site now remains. Later his son, Jonas Belton, erected the Belton Tavern in the clearing a half mile west of the corners, a building which was one of the land marks of the region for generations, and finally perished by the torch of an incendiary in 1852.
Houses, mostly of small dimensions, arose on every hand in the suburbs, of which none are left and the names of the occupants even are no longer familiar. At the time of great- est expansion the smoke of nearly a dozen chimneys ascended from as many clearings amid the woods of Candlewood Hill. The for- est has for the most part reclaimed its ovn, and even the deer has returned to browse by the springs whose once generous flow was the prime attraction to the sturdy, pioneer.
The Meeting House ceased to be used for church purposes in the year 1768. It was taken down at the beginning of the Revolution, and
a few of its interior panels used in the con- struction of the dwelling of Charles Smith, now the Daboll homestead, are all that remain of it to-day. With the exception of the vener- able parsonage, whose history we have al- ready traced, the latter is now the oldest house in the place. It was purchased in 1805 by "Master Nathan" Daboll of Sergeant Rufus Avery of . Fort Griswold fame, and is a house of many memories.
"Master Daboll" whose name is linked in the educational annals of the country with those of Noah Webster and Lindley Murray, was born a few hundred yards to the north and had received a part of his early education at the hands of the Reverend Jonathan Barber, but in the mathematical field in which his rep- utation was acquired, was a self taught man. He was fifty-five years of age when he settled down in the home which was to shelter him in his later blindness, but his famous Navigation School was continued under its roof by himself and his son Nathan, and in an intermittent fashion by his grandson also. The Almanac issues, begun by him in 1773, have regularly gone forth from its office now for one hundred and four years. Of other associations we may later speak.
The opening of the Revolutionary period found the place shorn of the most of the promi- nence thrust upon it at the beginning. Equi- distant between the church departed on the west, and the already venerable Baptist Meet- ing House on the east, it was an ecclesiastical center no longer. Nor was it a political center unless the occasional meetings of the town fathers at Belton's tavern had served to keep its title clear. The town had been formally divided into school districts in 1770, of which it was the first in number. In point of attend- ance it was also the first, but there was no edn- cational center now. It was, in appearance, as 't always has been, a straggling village, but the many suburban homes of which we have spoken probably swelled its population to a number greatly in excess of the present one.
No post office was established anywhere in the town until the year 1812. Correspondence was a luxury indulged in by few. The post-
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man rode, and the lumbering stages jolted at long intervals over what was now the King's Highway, and tired travellers refreshed them- solves at the tavern where "News much older than the ale went round."
Some of the young men were early at the front in the battle for liberty, one or two of them to remain there until the last gun was fired, but it was not till near the end of the strife that its bloody spray was dashed into the very midst of the hamlet. In the battle and massacre at Fort Griswold on the sixth of September, 1781, the town of Groton lost more of her sons in one day than in all the other years of the war put together; and to the list of victims Center Groton contributed her full share. Of seven persons who an- swered to the alarm guns on that fateful morn-
THE OLD BARBER HOUSE Where Whitefield Preached
ing, but one escaped unhurt, and that one was carried away to face the dangers of disease and starvation on a prison ship at New York.
The oldest victim of the butchery, James Comstock, seventy-five years of age, was a visitor at the home of his son-in-law, Nathan- iel Adams, Jr., at the foot of Candlewood Hill. The two went forth together, died together, and in the bitter chaos which followed were buried in a common grave upon the farther side of the Thames. The laurels belonging to the younger of the two have been for genera- tions mistakenly laid upon the grave of Na- thaniel Adams, Senior, who took no part in the battle, and who was buried years after- wards among the Gungywamp hills.
Corporal Edward Mills answered the sum- mons from what is now known as the "Brown Farm" in the woods beyond the Great Brook northwest of Belton's tavern. Brave Anna Warner, his foster daughter, (the Mother Bailey of later story ), hurrying to the fort the next morning, found him still living, and re- turning to their stricken home, brought his wife to his side to see him die. Peter Avery, aged seventeen, sallied forth from Belton's tavern, probably accompanying Lieutenant l'arke Avery, Jr., who took with him also his son, Thomas, another boy of seventeen from their home at Dunbar's Mill on Great Brook at the west. The son early in the action was slain at his father's side; the lieutenant horri -. bly mangled and disfigured by British bayo- nets, survived his wounds for forty years to die finally in the original Avery home on Poquon- nock Plains. The boy Peter, taken prisoner re- turned from the hell of the prison ship, lived long at the Belton place an active farmer and trader, and ended his days in 1845 in the fam- ous old house east of Candlewood Hill long known as the "Harry Niles Tavern" and cele- brated as the scene of later "training" and barbecue.
Jolm Daboll, Jr, (whose name is more or less confounded with that of another John, a brother of Master Nathan, who served in the Continental army from 1776 until it was final- ly disbanded), resided a few hundred yards west of the Great Brook. Wounded in the bat- te he was saved from death in the massacre through the humane intervention of a British officer whom he was wont to describe in his old age as "The handsomest man I ever saw." "Squire Jolm" was a familiar figure in church and town affairs for forty-four years after- wards.
Our sketch, already too extended, must has- ten to its close. From the Revolution down to the present, occasional happenings, not at all exciting in their character, attract the atten- tion of the annalist. The principal, and for a time the only physician of any note in the town, made Center Groton his home early in the nineteenth century, and the honse built by him at the junction of the Ledyard and Gale's
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Ferry roads is still one of its landmarks, though no one of his name has dwelt in it for more than half a century. Dr. John Owen Miner, grandson of the Rev. John Owen of be- loved memory, was a well known figure in his day and generation.
About the beginning of the century the Haley homestead at the corners was built by Russell Smith. It was long an inn before it was purchased by the lon. Elisha Haley, an- other prominent citizen, who was both poli- tician and man of affairs for forty odd years.
"Master Nathan" Daboll died at the home- stead in 1818. Three years later his son Na- than, who was all his life a man of affairs, was elected town clerk of Groton. From 1821 to 1837, the town records were kept in his office and from 1839 to 1845 the probate records as well, during his incumbency, first as clerk and later as judge. lle also served in both branches of the legislature as did his son, David A. Daboll of honored memory. "Squire Nathan" died in the old homestead in 1863, and his son in 1895.
For a time the lost prestige of Center Gro- ton as a political center seemed likely to be renewed. But an attempt in 1836 to secure it through the crection of a town house near the site of the meeting house of colonial days, was unsuccessful, and the setting off of the Second Society as the town of Ledyard in the same year left it no longer even a geographi- cal center. This was three years after it had received its belated christening by the estab- lishment of its post office on the thirtieth of January, 1833, with Gilbert A. Smith as its first postmaster.
1
, Incidentally we remark that the post office now known as Poquonnock Bridge, dating from 1841, was first called "Pequot," and
changed its title only after the elder Poquon- nock had had a dozen years in which to get accustomed to the modern name, which for convenience we have applied to it from the beginning of this narrative.
The opening of the Providence and New London turnpike, begun in 1818, made Center Groton a way station upon a busy stage thor- oughfare, and the building in the same year of the first woolen mill in the town on the site of Dunbar's Mill, by the corporation known as the Groton Manufacturing Co., attracted nu- merous operatives, who recruited its dwin- dling suburban population and revived to some extent its waning trade. The mill did a thriving business for many years, but shut down in the aftermath of the panic of 1837, and was destroyed by fire a few months later.
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