USA > Connecticut > Litchfield County > Cornwall > Historical records of the town of Cornwall, Litchfield County, Connecticut; > Part 19
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of ill-treatment from Uncle Joab, as we used to call him. His wife was a pattern of meek, quiet piety, and they had a large family. His sons, Frederick and Rodney, are all of them whom I know to be living.
A man of the name of William Tanner settled in the Hollow as early as 1755, on the spot where Mr. Eber Harrison now lives. He also owned the Ford place. His father, of the same name, was from Rhode Island, and was in the town at its first settle- ment, and lived in the south part of it. The younger William lived in the Hollow more than twenty years, when he sold to Dan- iel Harrison and Thaddeus Ford, and himself removed to the locality called Dudleytown. From his very large person, and to dis- tinguish him from others of the same name, he was called Great Tanner. I saw him once in his extreme old age, but I had only a short interview with him, and knew but a very little about him.
The Harrisons in the Hollow are the descendants of two brothers, Daniel and Noah Harrison, who removed into the town from Branford, in 1763. Daniel lived on the hill, where the Net- tletons have since lived, and he was the father of Daniel, Jr., Joel, and Luther Harrison. He died when I was very young, and his was the first burial I ever witnessed. Noah Harrison, the younger brother of Daniel, I remember very well. He was the father of He- man Harrison, deceased, and of Edmund Harrison, still living at a very advanced age .* The old house which Noah Harrison occupied is still standing, and it looks as it did sixty years ago.t Mr. Harrison and his son Heman occupied the farm on which their descendants now reside. The father, Noah, was distinguished for his skill in subduing, taming, and breaking to the yoke wild young cattle. We were frequently summoned over from our side of the Hollow to work on the road in that neighborhood, the highway district extending to Pond Brook, and on such occasions we were fur- nished with a sumptuous dinner at the Messrs. Harrisons, and I well remember how I relished the baked Indian puddings which formed part of the dinner. Noah Harrison lived to a good old age. His son Heman, whom I have mentioned, was distinguished for his quiet, industrious, thrifty habits, and seemed to be a timid, bashful man, very seldom speaking when he was in company, and was seldom seen abroad. He died at a comparatively early age.
Daniel Harrison, the son of Daniel Harrison of whom I have
* Mr. Edmund Harrison died in 1866, aged 98 years and 4 months. T. S. G. t The brown house, still standing but unoccupied, near the residence of Luman Harrison. It is the oldest house in town. T. S. G.
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spoken, was a man of marked and positive character, which would make him a leading man in any circle in which he moved. He seemed to have been literally born to command, and his right to that precedence was always acknowledged by his neighbors. If a building was to be moved, and long strings of teams marshaled to do it, universal consent awarded the direction of affairs to him, and his stern and assuming demeanor in directing the movements partook largely of the character of imperial dictation. He would call the men to order by a few smart raps upon the building with his ox goad, and woe to the wight who was found recreant in that interesting moment. When he ordered the forward movement, his eye was upon every part of the performance; and when he ordered a stop, forward movements instantly ceased. Even down to old age, whenever a building was to be moved, his services were always in demand. I have often worked on the roads when he had command of the gang, and it was wonderful to see what entire deference was paid to his orders. If he said a large rock was to be dug around and removed, all went to work to do it without cavil or question. This obedience came from deference to what was thought his superior judgment. His manner, when thus in command, was stern, sullen, dominant. His words were few and pointed, and his will was indomitable. He never retreated or gave back a hair's breadth from any purpose he had formed. He was employed to draw building stone for my grandfather, and I was standing by a bar-way near the house, when he attempted to pass through with his team and cart, very heavily laden, when the hub of his cart-wheel came up, all standing, against a firmly-set bar-post. "Pull away that bar-post," said he. "You can't pull it away," said my grandfather. "Yes we can too," said he, and many stout hands seized it, and away sagged the bar-post, and on went the team. He thought this school district had wronged him in not acknowledging and paying a small claim he had against it, and he declared he would never attend another meeting in the school-house till the bill was paid. It was thought that once when his own minister, Mr. Hawes, appointed to preach in the school- house one afternoon, he would yield his avowed purpose and go to hear his minister; but he did not attend, and I heard him say in reference to this meeting, that if Gabriel had appointed to preach in the school-house he would not have gone to hear him. The district finally yielded, and paid the bill, and then all was right again. I have frequently heard him testify in court, and have admired the positiveness, precision, and conciseness of his answers
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to questions put to him by counsel. One of the most unpleasant positions in which a witness can be placed is to be called upon to impeach character, and the question whether a man is upon a par for truth is often evaded, or the answer so modified as to be as little offensive as possible; but if you put the question to Daniel Harrison he would say no, and say no more. He opposed the removal of the meeting-house in this congregational parish, although it was to be built a mile and a half nearer to him, insist- ing that good ecclesiastical strategy required that the fort should remain on the frontier. Having thus spoken of Mr. Harrison in regard to some traits in his character, it is pleasant to remember him in others. He was a man of decided Christian purpose, never neglecting public worship when able to attend, and in the absence of a clergyman, often assisting good Deacon Mallory in conducting the public exercise of worship. He also attended and took part in social meetings in the neighborhood, and then his exhortations were earnest and his prayers fervent. If any neighbor got behind in his work through sickness, loss of team, or other untoward causes, he was always ready to lend a helping hand in bringing his neigh- bor's matters into a prosperous condition, and to incite others to do so, He was remarkably kind to sufferers in times of sickness, and would face any danger to relieve them. When Ebenezer Jack- son was sick with the small-pox, of which he died in 1799, and dismay and terror spread through the town to such an extent as to drive all the neighbors away to leave him to his fate, Mr. Harrison defied the pestilence, and went to see him and minister to his relief. Again, when the spotted fever prevailed to an alarming extent in the town in 1812, most people avoided contact or intercourse with the sick, but Mr. Harrison was indefatigable in ministering to their wants. He was a man of great public spirit, never withhold- ing his share of labor or expense to carry forward meritorious public objects. He lived to an advanced age, and pleasant memo- ries of him survive in the recollection of elderly people in the Hollow.
I now come to speak of the Wilcox family, the patriarch of whom was Samuel Wilcox, of whom I have a very distinct per- sonal recollection, as he lived down to 1810. He was born in Simsbury in 1727, but his father removed to Goshen as early as 1748, and lived in Humphrey's Lane, near the East street. The name was originally Wilcoxon, and was so written in the Simsbury records down to near the commencement of the last century, when it was altered by common consent to Wilcox. He purchased in
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1773 the place where Sylvester Scovill now lives, and lived there four years, when he sold that place to Timothy Scovill, and pur- chased the farm at the north end of the Hollow, where he spent the remainder of his life, and where his descendants now reside. He inhabited a log-house as long as he kept house. In the latter part of his life, his son, Zadok Wilcox, who had removed to the house on the east side of the Hollow, which he occupied till his death, took the old gentleman into his family. He was familiarly called Uncle Sam, and was a noted hunter and trapper, and the latter years of his life were principally occupied in telling stories of his adventures among these mountains in pursuit of bears and deer, whose haunts and dens and lurking-places were as familiar to him as the fields of his own farm. He killed twelve bears during the hard winter, as it was called, in 1780, as well as very many deer. These kinds of game, as well as wild turkeys, were very abundant in all these parts then. He called his favorite musket Old Stagpole, and he kept it hung on wooden hooks in his house during his life. He made all the ox-yokes and bows that were used in these regions, and they were finished specimens of workmanship. He was a disbeliever in the Copernican system of astronomy, and could not be persuaded that the world revolved. He was well read in the scriptures, and a strong believer in the Arminian sys- tem of divinity. He was a strong tory in the revolutionary war, and I once heard him say, "I did not join in this rebellion against good old King George," and then he would sing out in a kind of plaintive intonation, " Shame, British boys." He was in the habit of using great extravagance in his comparisons and descriptions. A great thing was as big as the ocean, and a tall person as high as the clouds. If he wished to speak well of any thing or any per- formance, he would say that it was bloody good, or done bloody well. I remember hearing him describe a sermon preached by parson Robbins of Norfolk, in Goshen, during the ministry of the Rev. Mr. Newell. His text was, " I gave her a space to re- pent, and she repented not." Said he of the preacher, "He stretched his little arms from Torrington to Canaan almost, and he preached bloody well." His company was very much sought by the youth and children to listen to the numberless stories he could tell of his exploits in hunting game and killing rattlesnakes, some hazardous adventures of the latter kind being frequently inter- mingled in his relations. He died from mere decay, at the age of ninety years, without any apparent distress, and I have a very
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pleasant remembrance of my intercourse with him during the years of my childhood.
His oldest son was Zadok Wilcox, whose history and character ought to be preserved, and who is remembered with much interest by the elderly people in the Hollow. He was, upon the whole, a remarkable man. His log-house stood, when I first knew him, near a great rock just north of where the brook comes close upon the highway north of the Pendleton farm; and there were born to him a somewhat numerous family. When the building of the Litchfield turnpike turned the course of travel to the east side, his habitation, now standing, was there erected, and there he spent the remainder of his days. He possessed remarkable conversational powers, and was the life and soul of every circle in which he mingled. His educational advantages must have been very limited, yet I never knew a man in common life who could command more appropriate and pertinent language to express his thoughts than he could. He possessed a loud, clear voice, which was heard above all others whenever he spoke. His statements were frequently illustrated by appropriate anecdotes, of which he possessed an exhaustless fund, and whenever he visited a family circle, his leave-taking was re- gretful to the household, and he was urged to prolong his stay to the last possible moment. He was the dentist of the neighbor- hood, extracting all the teeth that demanded that operation. He used a darning needle to remove the adhesive flesh from the doomed tooth, and the instrument with which he extracted it he called a hawk's bill. I remember he performed the operation for me when I was quite a child, and almost before I could utter the scream which the pain of the pulling forced from me, he pro- claimed three times in a loud voice, "It's out, out, out!" He was also the great songster of the neighborhood; some of his songs were of a serious, sentimental cast. Dwight's Columbia and Burns's Mar- iner's Farewell were favorites with him. He also frequently sang Garrick's song, written in admiration of his Peggy. As this song has gone out of the books, I will repeat a verse or two as I remem- ber it from his lips:
Once more I'll tune my vocal shell, O'er hills and dales my passion tell ; A flame which time can never quell, Still burns for thee, my Peggy.
Yet greater bards the theme have hit, And say what subject is more fit, Than to record the sparkling wit And bloom of lovely Peggy. 25
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While bees from flower to flower do rove, Or linnets warble in the grove, Or stately swans the rivers love, So long shall I love Peggy.
I stole a kiss the other day, As she to church was on her way ; The fragrance of the blooming May Is not so sweet as Peggy.
Some of his songs partook of a coarse kind of wit, and were well adapted to excite mirth and hilarity, and were heard with great delight. One of these commenced with this stanza:
There was an old woman in our town, I have heard some tell, Who loved her husband dearly, But another man quite as well.
He adopted the Protestant Episcopal form of church government as the true rule, and adhered to it during his life. He made loud and clear responses in the public celebration of worship when it was conducted in that form, and the ceremony was quite deficient of interest when he was absent, which was very seldom; and in the choral exercises his voice was prominent and his help indispens- able. He was a man of good, placid, even temper, and I have no doubt died without an enemy. His decease was very sudden, from apoplexy, in 1821. I called on him about three weeks before his death, and I never saw him in better humor or in finer spirits. I am told that no grave-stone marks his resting-place. This is not creditable to his descendants.
Another son of Samuel Wilcox was Joseph Wilcox, the father of Russell Wilcox, Esq. Joseph Wilcox lived many years in the Hollow. He was a blacksmith by trade, and his shop stood for most of the time during his residence in the Hollow, nearly opposite my father's house. He was a hard-working, honest man, who sup- ported his family well by his labor, and brought them up respecta- bly. He removed to Canaan about 1807. He was a very obliging, accommodating neighbor, and between our families there was al- ways a very neighborly feeling, and the friendships formed between the children of the families have been perpetual. I remember that my mother shed tears when she parted with Mrs. Wilcox on her removal to Canaan.
There was another son of Samuel Wilcox who must by no means be overlooked. Sylvanus Wilcox was his true name, but common usage gave him the name of Dr. Todd. He spent a
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year in Vermont when he was a young man, with a physician by the name of Todd, and after his return people commenced, first in sport, to call him Dr. Todd, and it finally came to pass that he was known and called by no other name. I knew him when he was comparatively a young man. In his latter days he was always the owner of a good horse, which received unremitted care and attention from him, and of which he was always very proud. He was social, agreeable, and pleasant in his intercourse with his friends, fond of music and dancing, and other social pleasures. His last days were clouded by untoward fortunes, and are re- membered with regret, but all who knew him have a kind feel- ing for the memory of Dr. Todd.
Captain Reuben Wilcox was the only son of Zadock Wilcox. His mother was a daughter of Joshua Culver of Litchfield, who was noted through the county for his great physical power, and in his early life for his desperate adventures in rowdyism. After this statement, it is due to Mr. Culver to say, that in his latter years he was a very devoted and useful christian. I heard him once deliver a discourse in Meekertown, but I retain no remem- brance of the style or power of the sermon. Captain Wilcox had more of the Culver than the Wilcox in his complexion and stature. He was of a dark hue, very compactly built, of large frame, and of personal strength beyond any other man of his time in the Hol- low. He was a man of extraordinary strength of memory, and of extraordinary acquirements for a man of his position in life. He was possessed of more historical facts regarding the men of this locality, than any other person living here. He was fond of the society of children, and was much addicted to amusing them by his anecdotes. I remember he took me with him one day, when I was very young, to Walnut Hill, where he was getting out barrel staves, for the mere purpose of having my company, and I was amused from morning till night by his interesting conversation, adapted to the capacity of a mere child. He was free and fluent in his conversation, wrote a very handsome business hand, and had a very good common-school education. His mind was of a very inquisitive turn, and he never gave up an inquiry till he had pros- ecuted it to a complete solution. He has frequently asked me the meaning of Latin and Greek sentences which he had seen in mot- toes, coats-of-arms, and legal maxims, and pursued the inquiry till the whole matter was explained. He was well versed in New England history, especially that part of it which related to the
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French and Indian wars, and when he had obtained knowledge upon any point which was new, was very ready to communicate it to others. He was a man of laborious, industrious habits, and I have spent many hours in his shop, seeing him manufacture bar- rels, and at the same time keep up a lively and interesting conver- sation. His death, like that of his father's, was very sudden, of apoplexy. It should have been stated before, that he represented the town in the Legislature in 1849.
The first settler on the Pendleton farm was Major Jesse Buel, my maternal grandfather. He was a grandson of Deacon John Buel, the patriarch of the Litchfield Buels, and a son of Captain Jonathan Buel, who lived on the line between Goshen and Litch- field, a little south of Deacon Brooks's residence. His wife was Lydia Beach, daughter of Deacon Edward Beach, and she is cele- brated in Mr. Power's history of Goshen as the lady who spun seven runs of yarn in one day, and who bore off the palm of victory over several competitors. Her father, who was my great-grand- father, and Major Buel's mother, who was my great-grandmother, lived to within my recollection, and I have seen them both. I have also seen my own grandchildren, making six generations in one line of descent. Major Buel came to the Hollow about 1770, and built the house which stood, till within a few years, near the present residence of Mr. Yale. His children were all born there. He kept the first tavern in the Hollow, and the large amount of travel on this route during the Revolutionary war made this a somewhat lucrative business. I have heard my mother speak of the passage of a part of Rochambeau's French army through the Hollow in 1781, on its way from Rhode Island to Virginia, to assist in the capture of Cornwallis. The officers of high grade obtained quarters in the tavern of her father, while the main body encamped in the road and fields adjacent. Major Buel remained in the Hollow till 1792, when he sold his farm to Increase Pendle- ton of Guilford, and himself removed to the south part of Salis- bury, his farm adjoining the town of Sharon. His wife Lydia died in 1789, and she is represented to have been a woman of superior excellence and amiability of character. Her epitaph is tender and sweet to the feelings of her descendants, who cherish her memory with unqualified respect and veneration:
Composed in mind, submitted to The will of God she dies- Bids all her earthly friends adicu, Assured in joy to rise.
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Major Buel died in Salisbury in 1818, at the age of seventy. He was a most amiable, genial, and good humored man, who had many friends, especially among the young.
Mr. Increase Pendleton, who succeeded him in the ownership of his farm, was well advanced in life when he came here, and at my remembrance of him his wife had died, and he was an old man, living in the family of his son, William Pendleton. He retained the ownership of the farm while he lived, his sons, William and Joshua, cultivating allotted portions of it. He was a large, over- grown, sluggish man, who would occasionally walk up and down the road, with staff in hand, and was very apt to be out when the crops were divided between himself and his sons. His daughter Julia, afterwards the wife of Uri Merwin, lived with him, and appeared to care for him with all proper attention. His sons William and Joshua were active, stirring men, who raised large families. Joshua removed to the West many years ago, but Wil- liam remained here during his life.
Thaddeus Ford, from Guilford, whose wife was a sister of Abra- ham and Oliver Hotchkiss, lived at the foot of the hill, a little west of the residence of his son, the late Samuel Ford, and within a rod of the old school-house. He also erected a small building in the gorge of the hills above him, in which he had an apparatus for running a spinning-wheel by water-power, and there I have wit- nessed the operation of a female drawing off the threads from a distaff of flax with both hands, at a very rapid rate. Mr. Ford was a man of decided opinions and purposes, and had his own peculiar way of expressing them. He had a peculiar kind of ges- ture, with closely-clinched fingers and extended thumb, and when- ever the neighbors undertook to repeat his assertions, they would accompany the recital by an imitation of his gesture. He some- times made in the carelessness of his emotions curious blunders in the inversion of syllables and the misplacing of words. I remem- ber once to have heard him finding fault with the manner in which William Pendleton had constructed a box for the deposit of the ashes made at the school-house, and intending to say ash-box, he called it ax-bosh, and his thumb was out when he said it. He had two sons, Zerah and Samuel, both of whom died in this town, and his wife and several daughters died of consumption.
The last of the old settlers in the Hollow was John Bradford, who came here from that part of New London which is now Mont. ville, in 1783, at the close of the Revolutionary war. He was a
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direct lineal descendant of the Pilgrim Governor Bradford of Ply- mouth colony. He lived where his grandson, Fowler Bradford, now resides, having purchased the farm of Amos Johnson. He was a very quiet, retired, affable man, always very neat in his per- son and dress, and much given to a dry kind of waggery and story-telling, which would call out a jolly laugh from bystanders. He was very fond of telling anecdotes, and would entertain any social circle by his pleasant humor and salient jokes. He attended all the religious meetings of the different denominations who cele- brated their worship here, and I never heard a profane or vulgar word from his lips. His only son, James F. Bradford, who lived where his son-in-law, Lyman Fox, now lives, was a man of quicker movements and more personal activity than his father. If he called on a neighbor on business, he was always in a hurry to have it accomplished, and he would be off in a twinkling as soon as it was done. He was of untiring industry, and very successful in acquiring property.
I might extend these imperfect sketches of individuals to an indefinite length, but they would be of persons well known to many present, and would protract this talk to an interminable prolixity. I have spoken of every man I remember to have been a householder here sixty years ago.
The first school-house in the Hollow stood at the foot of Ford Hill, as we used to call it, on the road leading westerly from the late residence of Samuel S. Ford. It stood directly in front of the house of Thaddeus Ford, and it seems to me within one rod of it; so near, at least, that much of the conversation in the family could be heard distinctly in the school-house. I now remember but two of my old schoolmates who now reside in the Hollow, who attended school with me in that school-house, to wit, Eber Harrison and Olive Cowles (now Mrs. Reuben Wilcox). The Baldwins, Ithamar, Noah, and William, and Stephen How, are the only other survivors of those who attended school there that I now remember. The school-district then extended to Canaan line, north of Deacon Nettleton's, and embraced the families of Joel and Luther Harrison and Joseph Cowles. After the school-house had been removed to the place which it now occupies, the gentlemen just named took measures to be annexed to the Cream Hill district, and an earnest controversy was had in the town-meetings on the question of their being set off. I well remember the close and earn- est canvass which was made, and the drumming up of voters in the
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