USA > Connecticut > Litchfield County > Cornwall > Historical records of the town of Cornwall, Litchfield County, Connecticut; > Part 18
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This northwestern portion of Connecticut was settled at a much later period than any other part of the colony. It was nearly a century after the valley of the Connecticut River had been occu- pied by the English pilgrims or their descendants, and long after that portion of the colony adjacent to the sea had been brought under civilized cultivation, that public attention was turned to the Western lands, as they were called. A controversy had arisen between the colony and the towns of Hartford and Windsor as to the title to these lands embracing all the northwestern part of Litchfield County, and this controversy existed for several years, and it was not till about the year 1730 that this matter was adjusted between these towns and the colony by a division of the lands. The most valuable portions of them were surveyed and laid out into townships in 1732, but the towns of Norfolk, Colebrook, and Barkhamsted were unoccupied for nearly thirty years later.
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The first inhabitants of this town came in 1738 and 1739, and set- tled in the central and western portions of the town, taking up their home lots, as they were called, building houses, and other- wise establishing a municipal organization. This portion of the town, the Hollow, seems not to have attracted the attention of the original proprietors of the town, as none of them established their home lots here. Up to about 1743 all the lands in this locality were common and undivided, owned by the original proprietors of the town, and subject to a division among them as regulated by the laws of the colony according to the amount of their interest in them. On the twenty-sixth day of April of that year (1743), Thomas Orton of Farmington purchased of James Smedley of Fairfield, one right in the common land in Cornwall, including all the lands which had been laid out on it, except fifty acres on Cream Hill, where Peter Mallory lived. Orton laid out most of the land on his right in the Hollow, and he also added to his domains by purchase from adjoining proprietors, some of whom were in Goshen, so that he finally owned a large share of the land embraced in the Sedgwick and Hurlburt farms, being more than one thousand acres of land. This Thomas Orton was the first white inhabitant of Cornwall Hollow. His house stood on the high bank south of the brook on which Mr. Merwin's saw-mill stands, about sixty rods west of the old Litchfield turnpike. The site was pointed out to me by my father more than sixty years ago, but all traces of it are now obliterated. Orton remained in the Hollow but two or three years, when he removed to Tyringham, Massachusetts, and was a very respectable inhabitant of that town for many years. Before leaving, he sold the greater part of his real estate here to Benjamin Sedgwick of West Hartford, who was the purchaser of the greater portion of it, and the residue to Dr. Jonathan Hurlburt of that part of Farmington which is now the town of Southington, and these gentlemen entered upon their possessions in 1748.
The first public highway by which access was had to the Hollow, was one leading from Canaan to Goshen. It passed over a slight depression, in the sandy hills south of the Wilcox farm, along the base of a wooded hill, north of the place where the forge formerly stood, thence up a steep hill called-I know not why-Hautboy Hill, to the residence of Mr. Benjamin Sedgwick, now the site of Philo C. Sedgwick's house, thence up the hill by Dr. Hurlburt's residence to the west side of Goshen. Traces of this old highway, through its whole length to Goshen line, were very distinct, within
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my recollection. At the top of the hill, above Hurlburt's, it met another highway leading from Goshen East street, by the late Mr. Merwin's, and thus communication was opened with both parts of Goshen, east and west. Nearly all of Goshen, as it then existed, was on those two streets, there being then but a very few people at the Center. This was the main thoroughfare through the Hollow for nearly twenty years. The settlement of the inhabitants, after- wards, on the east and west sides of the Hollow compelled the abandonment of this road and the opening of others near where they now run. The west road by the school-house and up the Hollow Hill, as it was called, to the west side of Goshen, was the main avenue of travel until the building of the Litchfield and Canaan turnpike, in 1799.
On the old highway first mentioned, Mr. Sedgwick and Dr. Hurlburt erected their habitations, the former at the place now owned by his great-grandson, Philo C. Sedgwick, Esq., and the latter at the place now owned by his great-grandson, Mr. Marcus Hurlburt. As those gentlemen, with their families, were the only inhabitants of the Hollow for nearly six years, I shall give as minute sketches of them as the material at my command will allow.
The first pilgrim of the name of Sedgwick was Major Robert Sedgwick, who settled in Charlestown, Mass. in 1637. He was a leading, active member of the colony for nearly twenty years. When Cromwell came into power in England, he invited Major Sedgwick back, and placed him in command of a body of troops who were to operate against the French possessions in Nova Scotia. He returned to England, and was immediately sent out with the army which was to reduce the island of Jamaica, under General Venables, and in a short time he succeeded Venables in the chief command, with the rank of major-general. He died of sickness in Jamaica, in May, 1656, leaving three sons, Samuel, Robert, and William. The last-named settled in Hartford, where he married Elizabeth, the daughter of the Rev. Samuel Stone, colleague of the celebrated Thomas Hooker, the first minister of Hartford. This marriage was most unfortunate, and the relation was dissolved in a few years by a decree of the Court of Assistants. The only fruit of it was a son, Samuel Sedgwick, who was born after the deser- tion of his father, whom he never saw, and from this son of William, born under such circumstances, have descended all the Sedgwicks whom I ever knew. He inherited some estate from his mother, and on arriving at maturity he became the owner of a
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valuable farm in West Hartford, which is situated about one mile south of the church in that town. There he raised a family of ten children, and died in 1739. His youngest child was Benja- min Sedgwick, who was born in 1716, married Anna Thompson of Wallingford, and for awhile was a merchant in West Hartford. Thomas Orton, whom we have mentioned, married a sister of Mr. Sedgwick, and, in 1748, sold to him his lands here, as we have before stated.
Mr. Sedgwick, having erected his house, entered vigorously upon the clearing up of his farm, which contained some six or seven hundred acres of land in Cornwall, Goshen, Canaan, and Norfolk. He erected a saw-mill on the stream which passes through the farm, at the place where the forge once stood, at the foot of Haut- boy Hill, and encountered the labors, trials, and privations incident to the early opening of new countries to civilized occupation. The forests in this region were well tenanted by bears, deer, wolves, turkeys, and other animals which tempt the skill and adventures of early settlers, but I do not know that he ever entered, to any great extent, into these sports. One adventure, which was related to me by Samuel Wilcox, is undoubtedly authentic, as Wilcox knew him well. He was at work in his saw-mill, and heard, for several hours, the barking of his dog in the woods north of him, and when he had completed his work, at sundown, he took his axe, as his only weapon, and sought the place where the dog was sound- ing the alarm, and found that he had driven a large bear into his den. This den, which was shown to me by Mr. Wilcox, is about forty rods north of my late father's residence, and is still in good preservation, although somewhat reduced in capacity by the removal of a part of the stones which formed one side of it, when the house built for my late uncle Benjamin was erected, in 1809. When Mr. Sedgwick came to the aid of the dog, the bear rushed from the covert upon him, threw him down, and he would soon have fallen an easy prey to the violence of the enraged animal, but the dog, faithful to his master, seized him with a fearful grip behind, which caused the bear to turn upon the dog, and Mr. Sedg- wick took the opportunity to bury his axe-blade in the back-bone of the bear. Mr. Sedgwick died at the early age of 42. He was a man of christian character and profession, and was chosen deacon of the church in Cornwall some time before his death, and he is called Deacon Sedgwick in the traditions of the Hollow. His death was very sudden, on the 7th of February, 1787, from apoplexy. It occurred in the night. His wife, awakened by his
.
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groans, found him in a dying condition, and before the attendance of Dr. Hurlburt could be procured, he had ceased to breathe. His epitaph is concise, and very expressive of the manner of his death:
" In an instant he is called Eternity to view ; No time to regulate his house, Or bid his friends adieu."
Of his family I shall speak in the sequel.
Of Dr. Hurlburt my record must be brief, as I have only some scraps of information concerning him. The name of the family is ancient in our State, and, a century ago, prevailed extensively in Middletown, Berlin, and Farmington. Dr. Hurlburt came from a locality called Panthorn, which is within the present town of Southington, then a part of Farmington, and emigrated to the Hollow with Deacon Sedgwick in 1748, having purchased a part of Thomas Orton's farm. His son, Ozias, insisted that his father, the doctor, was very badly overreached in the bargain. Whether Doctor Hurlburt engaged, to any great extent, in medical practice, I am not informed, but the fact that he was sent for when Deacon Sedgwick was in his extremity, indicates that some reliance was placed upon his medical knowledge. I have seen some entries made by him in an old account book, now in possession of his grandson, Frederick Hurlburt, describing the constituents of sev- eral kinds of medicine, which indicate that he had a considerable knowledge of chemistry for those times. He died in 1779, at the age of 79. He had three sons, Ozias, Jacob, and Hart, the last of whom died, when a young man, of consumption. The tradition was, in my early years, that he had a supernatural premonition of his approaching fate, and that an audible voice came to him from the old grave-yard, that his days on earth were numbered. He was always spoken of as a most amiable and lovely young man.
Those two families, Sedgwick and Hurlburt, were the only fam- ilies residing in the Hollow for more than six years. Their nearest neighbor in this town was the Rev. Solomon Palmer, the first min- ister of Cornwall, who lived where Earl Johnson lately lived. The road was opened to the town street from the Hollow at the first coming of Orton, except that part of it which crossed the mountain range west of the Hollow. It was nearly in the same place which it now occupies. The grade over the hill has been greatly improved within the last thirty-five years. Samuel Oviatt, from Milford, had located himself in Goshen, on the hill above
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Edwin Merwin's, where the large stone chimney is still standing, and even after Fowler Merwin, also from Milford, while yet a sin- gle man, commenced clearing up the farm which he occupied till his death; but it was not till 1754 that any further permanent set- tlement was made in the Hollow. These naturally commenced on the west side, that being nearer the center of the town and more inviting, from the general appearance of the country. The road from Goshen west side was extended through to Canaan in 1760 on the lay which it now occupies, and that over Hautboy Hill was naturally abandoned. There was no road on the east side of the Hollow for many years from Canaan to Goshen, and after it was built on that side there was a strong rivalry for the travel between the two; but it greatly preponderated in favor of the west side till the building of the turnpike, when it turned the other way.
There is a misty tradition that a man of the name of Abbott lived somewhere in the Hollow at a period perhaps somewhat earlier than 1754, but I have not been able to locate his residence, or to determine when he left the place.
The earliest permanent settler in the Hollow, after Sedgwick and Hurlburt, was Solomon Johnson, whose father, Amos Johnson, the patriarch of all the old Johnson family in Cornwall, came from Branford at the earliest settlement of the town. Amos Johnson was a large land-holder, his possessions here including all the old Bradford farm, and he gave off about fifty acres to his son Solo- mon, who built his house where Mr. Lyman Fox now lives. He built a saw-mill near the school-house, in company with my mater- nal grandfather, Jesse Buel, and the remains of this saw-mill, and of the dam, were remaining within my recollection. Johnson remained in the Hollow about twenty years, and left in an extra- ordinary manner. He had become involved in a lawsuit with Jonah Case, who lived at Goshen west side, and told his family that he must go and see his lawyer, who was John Canfield, of Sharon. He left under that pretence, and was never seen or heard of by them afterwards.
I will now speak of persons and incidents which are within my more accurate traditional or personal knowledge, and in giving sketches of the old residents, it is natural to begin with the fami- lies of the first settlers, Sedgwick and Hurlburt.
Deacon Sedgwick died in the very maturity of his powers, at the age of 42, leaving six children, three sons, John, my grand- father, Theodore, and Benjamin, and three daughters, one of whom married the Rev. Hezekiah Gold, the second minister of
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Cornwall, and who died at the age of twenty-eight, leaving four sons, Thomas, Thomas Ruggles, who were eminent lawyers, Benja- min, the father of Col. Stephen J. Gold, and Hezekiah, the father of Dr. Gold. Hezekiah was in his very early infancy when his mother died. Another daughter of Deacon Sedgwick married the Rev. Job Swift, and became the mother of a very numerous and respectable family in Vermont. The other daughter married Jacob Parsons, Esq., of Richmond, Massachusetts, who removed to Broome county, N. Y., while it was yet new, and to a great extent uninhabited.
The second son of Deacon Sedgwick was Theodore, who was educated at Yale College, where he graduated in 1765. I have heard my grandfather say, that the burden of his education was very heavy upon the family, but he lived to obtain an eminence of fame and honor, which satisfied them for all their struggles and made them happy in the reflection that they had borne them. He was a member of Congress under the old confederation, senator and representative from Massachusetts under the present Constitu- tion, and for one term was Speaker of the House of Representatives. He was a tried and trusted friend of Washington, who relied much on his aid and counsel in setting the machinery of govern- ment in motion under the new order of things. He retired from Congress in 1803, and soon after was appointed a Judge of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, which office he held till his death in February, 1813. He left four sons, all of whom were respecta- ble lawyers, and three daughters, the youngest of whom, Catharine, still survives .*
The third son of Deacon Sedgwick was Benjamin, who first settled in Goshen, and who built the old house still standing near the west side cemetery, and there married a Miss Tuttle. He removed in a few years to North Canaan and became a merchant, and built the house which is yet standing, and was lately occupied by his son-in-law, James Fenn, Jr., about one mile east of the four corners. He died at the early age of thirty-six, leaving one son and four daughters, and a handsome estate to his heirs.
The oldest son of Deacon Sedgwick, the late General John Sedgwick, spent his life upon the old farm which was his father's, and reflecting, I marvel at what he accomplished. He was of the age of fourteen years when his father died, and all he inherited
* Miss Catharine Sedgwick resided at Stockbridge, Mass., and was an authoress of wide celebrity. She died in 1869. T. S. G.
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was two-sevenths of his father's estate, which was incumbered with the support of a young and expensive family. He had this advantage over his brothers and sisters, that by the laws of inher- itance as they then existed in this colony, in partial imitation of the English laws of primogeniture, he received a portion of the estate of twice the value of that of each other child; yet from such slender beginning, when he had arrived to the age of fifty years, and before he had divided off a portion of his estate to his children, he was the owner of a territory which extends from the highway near the school-house, that being his western boundary, full two and a half miles eastward into the towns of Goshen and Norfolk, and which would average more than a mile in width, an ample portion of which had been brought under cultivation from a state of Nature. He was never in affluent circumstances, the whole income of his farm being devoted to the support of a large household and to extending and improving his possessions. Nor did his household consist of his own family merely, but he employed large numbers of laborers, who and whose families were fed from his ample stores-within my recollection there were, at one time, ten dwellings, all but one built of logs, all inhabited, in the locality which we call Meekertown, and from them issued swarms of laborers to earn their daily bread by their daily labor, and many of these found employment and keeping on the large and ample domains of General Sedgwick. The table at which he presided reminded one of a good-sized country boarding-house, and the barrels of pork and beef, and the immense piles of vegetables with which his cellar was stored, resembled the supplies of an army commissariat. He was a man of very large physical dimensions, and performed an immense amount of personal labor. He was first a captain and then a major in the army of the Revolution, and after the war, a brigadier-general of militia. He started to join his regiment at Ticonderoga in December, 1775, and on the first night of his absence his house was consumed by fire. My father, his oldest son, then ten years old, told me that he was called up in the night and informed that the house was on fire, and that he awakened to such a degree of consciousness as that he remembered to have seen the flames through a knot-hole, but overcome with drowsiness he fell asleep again and had nearly perished in the flames before he was rescued. General Sedgwick was called back by express, and I have heard it said that within
24
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one week the frame of a new house was standing on the site of the old one.
General Sedgwick was a man of strict religious principle and possessed of undaunted moral courage, never fearing to express his opinion before any audience, however large, and his efforts of natural, unpretending eloquence were sometimes very effective. He was a member of the Legislature of this State at twenty-eight sessions, and took an active part in its deliberations, and was once a candidate for Congress. He died in August, 1820, at the age of seventy-seven years. He had twelve children, eight of whom lived to mature years, but now they are all gone to the resting-place of man, and his descendants are scattered in a wide dispersion over the face of the earth. One of his grandsons, who bore his honored name and who had acquired a national fame as a gallant soldier and a skillful military leader, sleeps beneath the tall column which rises amid the graves in your beautiful rural cemetery, and not the stirring battle roll nor the martial trump, not the clash of arms nor the shouts of victory "can awake him to glory again."
It is in order now to speak of the family of Dr. Hurlburt, as they were cotemporary with that of Deacon Sedgwick. I have already stated all I know of the son, Hart Hurlburt, and that was told to me by my mother nearly sixty years ago. Dr. Hurlburt had two other sons, half brothers, Ozias and Joab, and these lived on the farm which he left them. Ozias took the west part of the farm and lived on the west road, opposite the old burying ground. In his early years he was threatened with con- sumption, and never regained any firm health. In view of the advantages afforded him, he had cultivated his mind to a remark- able degree, and was a most interesting, companionable man in social intercourse. He united very early with the Methodist church, and frequently took part in public religious services. He was a theologian of no mean acquirements, and having read many of the master works of the old divines, was well informed on the most abstruse points, and could defend his cherished opinions with much skill, and, I may say, learning. I heard him say once, that he "should have been a crazy man if he had not got shot of the doctrine of election." He was a believer in supernatural omens. Signs in the heavens, meteoric phenomena and spots on the sun were all full of significance to him. I once heard him say, that he must give it up that a blazing star, as he called a comet, was a certain sign of war. It so happened that a comet came within the reach of our vision just before the war of 1812, and he remem-
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bered that just such an event occurred just before the old French war and the war of the Revolution, and his faith in their premoni- tory significance was thus confirmed. It ought to be said that those opinions were by no means singular during my childhood; in fact, they were very common. He was well versed in modern history, especially in regard to the wars of the Duke of Marlborough, and would recount the exploits of dukes, marshals, and generals with much interest. He said the battle of Fontenoy was the hottest battle ever fought under the cope of heaven. He was also a poet of no mean pretensions, as well as a theologian, and towards the close of his life he published a sermon and several poems, and both sermon and poems show abilities which, if cultivated, would give the author a respectable position among the writers of the day. He also constructed a Hudibrastic poem in several cantos, descrip- tive of men and events in Cornwall, which excited much interest in its day, and which was very ingenious and witty. I have heard him repeat page after page of it in my childhood, and deeply regret that it has gone out of existence. He described most humorously the proceedings of the town which led the way to the removal of the meeting-house from the top of the hill near Mr. Ford's to the valley below. One measure to help forward that result was the construction of a road through the valley by Edmund Harrison's, to facilitate communication between the Hollow and the new meeting-house. The starting point was the fork of the roads near the school-house, and the committee who laid the road were represented as deliberating whether to follow the old road owned by Thaddeus Ford, or to go straight through the land of Hurlburt and Bradford, and their final determination was thus expressed :
" We will not go around by Thad. Ford's, But cut across the farm of Bradford, And bend around close by Ozias, For he professes to be pious."
He spoke of several influential, ambitious men in the town who lived in separate sections and led separate factions, and whose names are familiar to elderly people present, as follows:
"Keep Swift in Warren, Sedgwick north, And Patterson on water broth ; Give Ned the power and Noah the land, And you'll have peace through all the strand."
It was said that the wife of a large landholder was overheard
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praying that they might become the owners of all the land that joined them, and cantos represented her as
" Petitioning to the higher Powers For all the land that joins to ours."
If this old poem had been preserved, I am sure it would be much thought of, and read with great interest by the present generation.
Mr. Hurlburt had three children, Ulysses, Gilman H., and Almira. Ulysses was a physician in West Stockbridge, Mass .; Gilman was a well-educated, well-bred, polished gentleman, who taught our school for several winters, and afterwards became a physician in Western New York, and his father and mother went to reside with him in 1817, and there spent the remainder of their lives. The daughter, Almira, was also a well-educated lady, and taught our school for several summers. She afterwards became the wife of Mr. Bigelow.
The other son of Dr. Hurlburt was Joab, who lived on the old homestead, where his grandson, Marcus Hurlburt, now resides. He lived to the advanced age of eighty-six years, and his wife to about the same age. He was a shop-joiner, manufacturing plows, rakes, and such other agricultural implements as were then in use by farmers. He was a man of few words, seldom speaking but to give brief answers to questions, but his work was done in the most finished manner. He seldom smiled, and I do not believe that any one ever heard him raise a loud, hearty laugh. He had a strong propensity to undervalue and underrate everything he had. His tools were always in perfect order, and yet he would complain that they were dull. He had a field of rye which yielded at the rate of 373 bushels per acre (probably the largest ever raised in the Hollow), and when my uncle Benjamin said to him that it was a very large yield, he said, " It would have been tolerably good if the infernal geese had not eaten it all up." I said to him once, when crossing a field of his where a crop was growing, that it looked very promising. " It looks pretty well now," said he, "but I guess it will all blast." In his household he appeared to a stranger to be stern, sullen, silent, and indifferent. He had, however, his good traits. In 1816 his son Frederick was visited with a long and dangerous sickness, and I frequently watched with him, and I never witnessed a more tender and affectionate solicitude from a parent toward a sick child than he exhibited. He also cultivated amicable relations with his neighbors, and nobody could complain
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