USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > Berlin > History of Berlin, Connecticut > Part 23
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This day, however, passed away like the other. Most of the men came back at evening, to communicate their failure to the now agonized family and friends. A small party, however, had wandered so far to the south during the day, that they concluded to encamp out for the night.
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The following day, this party renewed their search. They continued to pursue a southerly course. Occasionally they fired their guns; they halloed; they called his name; they sounded their drum.
At length, the sound of the drum broke upon the bewildered man's ear. He stopped; he listened. He went on. Again he paused. His brain was confused. His mind was disordered. Still he had sufficient understanding left to think; and a . thought now glanced over his mind, that his friends might be in search for him, and he dragged himself towards the coming sounds.
He thought these sounds increased. He was sure they did. He heard his name sounded at a distance. The sound came through the forest like the voice of mercy. He could no longer advance. He stood like a marble monument. A few minutes brought the party within his view. They also saw him. A thrill of joy he felt play round his heart, and, as they approached to welcome him to their bosom, his mind seemed to recover its tone. Tears of joy burst from his eyes; and an exclamation of gratitude ascended from his lips to the great Author of his deliverance.
The joy of his neighbors was scarcely exceeded by his own. They conducted him home, a distance of thirteen miles, which he had wandered. The place where he was found was this mountain in Berlin; and well afterwards was it called Mount Lamentation.
I cannot describe to you, my children (said Mr. Goodrich), the joy which thrilled through the hearts of his family-which spread through the village, as the party made their appearance, with the object of their toilsome search. I dare say the story was long remembered by both old and young, and was improved by the pious pilgrims, in a religious way. It would lead them to reflect upon the lost and wandering state of mankind, in respect to their creator. Let us (said Mr. Goodrich) improve it in a similar manner. We are lost, my children; we are wan- dering, in a darker, and still more dreary wilderness. But there is One, who is appointed 'to seek and save the lost.'
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Happy will it be for us, if we be found of Him, and are restored to the family in Heaven above, who will welcome our restora- tion with songs of joy, such as angels sing."
In the ancient burying ground at Wethersfield may be seen a table monument which bears the following inscription :
Here lyes the body of Leonard Chester Armiger late of the town of Blaby and several other Lordships in Leicestershire, deceased in Wethersfield Anno Domini 1648 oetatis 39.
Strange figures, rudely cut on the stone, doubtless an armoral device, have been supposed by some to represent the hobgoblins that appeared to Mr. Chester when lost in the forest of Mt. Lamentation.
According to Historian Stiles, Mr. Chester built a grist mill at Wethersfield in 1637, and tradition says that he was in search of a suitable site for this mill when he lost his bearings, and wandered for three days, while his anxious neighbors, armed with drums, muskets, tin pans, tin pails and brass kettles, with anything and everything that could make a noise, searched for him .*
Some fine morning, should you join one of the processions of college boys who come to Berlin village by trolley, and head for the south, they will lead you on a tramp of three miles down past the old tollgate site and a little farther on the turnpike,
* A part of this chapter, dealing with the origin of the name of Mount Lamentation, called forth a criticism by Chas. H. Hollister, now deceased. In a letter to the Berlin News, dated March 7th, 1906, he writes: "The article [by the Rev. Charles A. Goodrich] makes Mr. Chester out to be 'a derned fool.' In coming from Wethersfield to Mount Lamentation, he had to cross the creek at Rocky Hill, and again before he reached Mount Lamentation he would have to cross the Mattabessett River. In that early time he must have had to swim or wade, and being a thorough woodsman, why did he not follow the creek or river until he reached the Connecticut and then back to Wethersfield ?"
No doubt it was Miss North's intention to let the reader determine the historical value of Mr. Goodrich's tale, and reproduced it as such.
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beyond the point where Old Colony Road branches off toward West Meriden, until in the distance appear three small houses, on the west side of the road. When within about sixty rods of the first house you will turn into a field and go eastward until you reach a projecting cliff at the base of Mount Lamentation.
This is the goal.
In the spring of 1887 Mr. William M. Davis of Harvard, who in 1877 began a careful geological survey of Connecticut, discovered at this place a very curious formation, which was pronounced to be of true volcanic origin.
At first it was called "Connecticut's Extinct Volcano," but Professor Davis submitted, as more appropriate, the name "Ash bed," which was adopted, and the locality is now known in the geological world as "The Meriden Ash Bed."
The deposit which, in general, is of a greenish gray color, shows a depth of about thirty feet. It consists of pitchstone, vitrified sand, angular fragments of trap and other materials, with bombs of dense trap, wrapped in rings of glass, rounded and flattened, interspersed at irregular intervals, all cemented together and technically called breccia.
What remains of the bed extends for an unknown distance under Lamentation, and thus has been protected. If, as is supposed, the original deposit covered an area of several square miles, it was long since worn away by erosion.
Lands composed of disintegrated trap are remarkable for fertility.
The theory at first advanced, after the discovery of the bed, was that the ashes and bombs were thrown there from above, from a central crater some distance away, spoken of, by a writer in the Connecticut Magazine for January, 1905, as a "mammoth volcano, a magnificent belcher, with tremendous force under- neath, whose mouth vomited fire, ashes and melted rock." As one remarked, "When the eruption was going on, there must have been a great scurrying of the old reptiles, whose tracks were found on the sandstone beds at various points in the valley."
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Diligent and repeated search failed to reveal the exact locality of the possible grand central crater. If lost, it may be under the mountain.
The suggestion of a scientist from a neighboring town that it might be in the peat swamp, was scouted by other wise men.
The crater, if ever found, will be as a pipe or neck of lava, not as a cone. When it was announced that an extinct volcano had been discovered at Mount Lamentation, great interest was excited among geologists, and the "ash bed" was visited by hundreds of persons from Meriden, New Britain, and Middle- town, by classes from the colleges and schools, with their teachers, until a well-worn path was trodden from the road to the bluff. The Meriden Scientific Association, not content with a surface view, laid the rock open in places by the use of dynamite.
Ten years later Professor Davis wrote: "I have taken parties there every summer since then and I hope to do my share toward beating down that path for many years to come.
For several seasons this district was taken as one of the training grounds in field study, for the Harvard Summer School of Geology. Harvard, Yale, and Wesleyan students, with their professors, once united on an excursion to this locality. They left their trains at Meriden and walked along the turnpike to Lamentation, which they explored to the point where it terminates, over near East Berlin. There, Spruce. Brook cuts a trench, and shows how the trap rock passes to the covering of sandstone. At the end of the day the company took trains for their homes from East Berlin station.
The truth must now be told, though it should conflict with the most interesting details of this description, even though it may destroy the picture in our imagination of fire balls shooting from "Old Fly" across the heavens to Lamentation. Scientists have, with reason, modified their views as to the origin of the breccia bed. Still it remains a fact that once on a time there were great "goings on" in this region. We are told that an arm of the sea came up from the south into Berlin,
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that rivers ran swiftly from an elevation of from 150 to 200 feet above sea level, and that a lake covered all of Middletown, Cromwell, and Berlin.
Some years since, when a well was dug on the Risley place, now owned by Mr. Roby, a bed of shells was unearthed.
Where there are rivers, or lakes, there will be sand and mud, and so here, layer after layer of sandstone was formed under water.
While the earth was cooling off outside, and the heat under- neath was still sufficient to melt all known substances, there came a tremendous explosion of imprisoned steam, from the underground reservoir. At the same time a stream of molten trap was cast up through the sandstone. As the fluid rock spread, like a vast sheet, over the cold, wet surface, the lower part formed a thin, solid, glassy layer. Before the upper part had time to cool, another explosion of steam, with more melted rock, followed, which shattered the hardened layer of trap into fragments and forced them throughout the red hot mass above where they remained without melting again.
The whole sheet of trap was afterwards lifted, tilted to the east, and broken apart, so that what now appears as the face, is the broken edge, and this is the latest theory of the forma- tion of the "Meriden Ash Bed." It all happened ages ago- millions of years we are told, but its history written so plainly, by the hand of the Almighty, on this cliff lies an open page, so that, not "he who runs," but he who studies may read.
We must not linger too long at the "ash bed." Mount Lamentation is a great sheet of trap and there are other inter- esting localities. On our way back to the trolley we shall wish to visit a mud volcano about half a mile farther north high up on the mountain, over in Berlin.
The "ash bed" is not in the least like a bank of coal ashes, and neither has the "mud volcano" the look of a mud hole. Professor B. K. Emerson of Amherst describes it thus :
"The place is on the same trap ridge and may be found by going north from the last locality along the Berlin turnpike to the point where a road comes in from the southwest.
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Opposite this road a wood road runs east to the ridge, and going a few rods north one comes to a fine point of view of the lake to the west, where beacon fires have been built. Directly beneath in the bluff is a rock shelter, and the southern wall of this is the south wall of the throat to be described. The explosive force of the steam at the base of the trap sheet has formed the same brecciated agglomerate as before, but has here forced its way through the whole thickness of the trap sheet in a throat three rods wide and flowed out on the surface as a submarine mud volcano The walls of the throat are clearly exposed. At the lowest point visible the trap is rudely columnar and compact. This is plainly the undisturbed surface of a normal lava flow.
The mass that rises in the throat and spreads over the lava sheet has all the peculiarities of the breccia farther south.
It contains the rounded, bomb-like trap blocks, isolated blocks of indurated white sandstone containing blebs of pitchstone and rounded by abrasion, blocks of scoriaceous red sandstone, also containing pitchstone and fragments of jet black, fine- grained basal trap, often full of the long steam tubes which are usually found at the bottom of the trap, together with various other trap varieties. The whole is cemented by glass. .
It rises over the lips of the throat and flows southward. . . . The breccia can be followed north about thirty rods. I traced it south about forty rods. It is doubtless continuous with the two thin layers of tuff in the sandstone above the trap east of the ash bed."
"Altogether a very instructive locality," say the scientists, and classes under their direction, obtain, from one day's visit at Mount Lamentation, a clearer idea of conditions, far back, when the mighty forces of flood, fire and steam were at work giving shape to the earth's crust, than from many months' study of books.
Professor William North Rice of Wesleyan University is about to publish a work descriptive of the rocks and cliffs of this region, and those who wish to know more of the subject may do well to consult that publication.
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On Mount Lamentation is a famous soft rock, its length of about forty feet covered from end to end with inscriptions- carved with jackknives-names of generation after generation of Berlin boys and girls who thus immortalized themselves.
. The outside of the rock seems to have hardened in recent years, but the inside is still quite soft. The best way to approach it is to take the mountain road at the Jarvis farm, and follow the path southerly about a mile.
The rock is on the very top of the ridge, about half-way between the E. C. Hall house and the old Abram Wright place and can be seen from the turnpike.
One day two village lads, Charley Sage and Charley Warren, went up to cut their names on the rock. Charley Sage's father was a stonecutter; to save his jackknife and make a better job he carried along his father's mallet and chisel. When the chisel broke, he looked at it sadly and remarked, "I don't know what my father will say to me now."
On the southern slope of the mountain, back of Martin Dunham's, a stone marks the point where three counties meet, Middletown, New Haven, and Hartford.
Saturday, November 3, 1906, fifty-eight professors of geology and their pupils from Wellesley, Holyoke, and Smith colleges (ladies first), and from Harvard, Yale, and Wesleyan univer- sities, came down at Spruce Brook, from the mountain, which they had followed all the way up from Meriden. They called on the Benson family, and one of its members carried some of the company over to the Berlin station. The work of the day had been quite satisfactory to the geologists, and many new places were discovered which showed volcanic action.
The most envied of the party, however, was the one who found a topaz, as large as a silver quarter. This souvenir is to be cut, to bring out its luster. The topaz is a valued gem, found usually in primitive rocks.
CHAPTER XVI.
The South District: The Roberts Farm; David Sage, Alfred Ward, and Their Children; the Stantack Road.
The course of our history will now lead eastward from Bishop's corner in the South district. The statement, in an early chapter, that "The Bishop house was long since torn down and the new schoolhouse now stands on the place," called forth a response by letter, from Charles H. Aspinwall, in which he says :
The new school house in the South district stands several hundred feet north of the site of the old Bishop house.
The old black heart cherry tree nearest the road which runs east and west, stood in the angle formed by the main part of the house and the ell. The well was located in this ell part.
I can just remember Samuel Bishop, Sr's daughter, Betsey. who lived in the house alone for a time. She was a kindly, gentle, old lady who must have loved children, for my impression of her is very pleasant. After a time she moved away, and the old house was occupied by several tenants until it gradually became uninhabitable. I remember roaming through this empty house many times when a boy. It was a low, rambling old place, with many small rooms, nearly all on the ground floor.
Betsey Bishop spent her last years in Springfield, where she owned half of a pretty house. A favorite nephew owned the other half, and she lived happily until after his death. She left a sum of money for the care of her family burying lot, at Maple Cemetery, in Berlin, where she desired to be laid beside her father and mother, but her wish was not regarded. .
Miss Bishop's mother, Elizabeth [Galpin], born about 1767, was the daughter of Benjamin Galpin, who kept the old tavern at Boston Corners. Elizabeth Galpin's sister, Roxy, was the second wife of Selah Savage, and the mother of Mrs. Franklin Roys. The two sisters used to sing songs that they learned from the dancing parties at the tavern.
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The large elm tree on the north bank in front of the Loveland house, now occupied by the Roys sisters, was set out in 1784 by Samuel Bishop. He told Mr. Galpin that, when he was nine- teen, he went over on the ledge, dug up that tree, and brought it over to the village on his back. At the same time he planted, on the south front bank, a buttonball, which grew to an immense size. It was a target for lightning once too many times, and shortly before 1870, it was split so that a large limb fell over against the house, and for safety the old giant was cut down.
Samuel Bishop died September 27, 1856, aged ninety-one years. His wife died December 25, 1840, at the age of seventy-three.
Since Erastus North's day, women have complained that they could not find anyone to put scions into their fruit trees. Mrs. Bishop grafted her trees successfully with her own hands.
Over the hills, easterly and southerly, around Bishop's curve, at the head of the road, as it runs east and west, may be seen the house of Martin Dunham, built about 1850, by his brother, Solomon Dunham. The farm next east was long owned by the Roberts family. John Roberts died in 1837, aged ninety-two years. His wife, Sarah (Merrills), died in 1830, aged eighty- two years. They were members of the Worthington Congrega- tional church previous to 1812.
There were twelve children in this family, whose names were : Sarah, Electa, Eleazer, Samuel, Harry, William, Mary, Maria, John, Emeline, Lucetta, and Julia. Besides the large house, now standing, there was a smaller house farther east, which was occupied by the son John, father of Walter Roberts of New Britain.
John Roberts and his father were blacksmiths. Their shop was on the north side of the way easterly from the dwellings.
This story is told of John. He made a pair of tongs and set the rivet so tightly that he could not open them. Men in those days wore cloaks, and Roberts, with his tongs hidden under his cloak, came up to Lotan Beckley, the village black- smith. After standing around awhile he remarked, casually, that he knew a man who made a pair of tongs and he couldn't
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open them when finished. "Why didn't you tell the d --- fool to heat 'em again," said Mr. Beckley. Roberts returned to his shop, put his tongs into the fire and opened them easily.
The Roberts farm was purchased in 1844 by S. C. Twitchell. It is now owned by C. M. Jarvis, who is showing what can be done with an abandoned New England farm.
Next east of the Roberts blacksmith shop was an old house, known as the King place. Benjamin King was here in 1802. Widow King was the last wife of Seth Savage, Sr.
The King house was occupied by tenants until shortly after 1850, when it was torn down. There were two front rooms and a large kitchen at the rear. William Luby says that when he was eight years old his father rented that house. His mother was dead; there were four Luby children; and an aunt, who came to keep house for them, brought her four children, so that they had lively times.
There was no floor or ceiling over the kitchen and the chil- dren used to jump from the front chambers down onto the kitchen floor. One day, when left alone, they threw a bed down and jumped onto that, and they "caught it" when the old folks came home.
The farm house next east of the King place, now (in 1906) the home of the Benson family, was formerly owned by Albert "Hulbert," so spelled in 1824. Robert Hurlbert of this town was a son, by adoption, of Mr. and Mrs. Hulbert. They had no children of their own.
The road known as "Old Stantack," two miles in length, which starts opposite the Hulbert house, is sometimes followed by boys of an exploring turn of mind to its termination, on the Middletown and Meriden road, near Bradley and Hubbard's reservoir.
Spruce Brook starts in Middletown, a mile or so south of the Berlin town line, and, as it runs northward, crosses Stantack, a short distance south of the Hulbert house. At that point a dam was laid and a sawmill was built. In 1798, Roswell Wood- ruff leased, for seventy years, to Elisha Savage, that water
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privilege, with his mill and mill house thereon, described as being east of the dwelling house of said Woodruff. From this statement it would appear that Roswell Woodruff lived on the west side of Stantack road, but no one now living can tell us anything about the Woodruffs.
At the expiration of the seventy years lease not much remained of the property to revert to Woodruff heirs. A scat- tered pile of stones, a shaft and a broken water wheel now lie across the stream to mark the site of the old mill.
Elisha Savage was the grandfather of Mrs. Roys and she remembered that when a child she was often sent from her home on Savage hill with hot dinners for the men who worked at the mill all day.
In 1805, John Roberts, Jr., claimed Stantack road as his private property, and petitioned the town for permission to enclose the land.
Fifty years ago, the bank east of the Savage sawmill was covered with elegant mountain laurel, and not far away grew the pretty, though noxious, lambkill. The same young girl who exclaimed over the laurel blooms, discovered a bed of luscious wild strawberries extending up the mountain slope. Her liking for strawberries overcame her fear of snakes until a monstrous reptile leaped from the bushes and thrashed along her pathway.
Ask the Benson boys to tell of their experience with rattle- snakes, red adders, and black snakes. A rattler of unusual size was caught alive in their yard a year ago.
Deacon North, whose boyhood days were spent in these fields, used to tell this story : "A great black snake found by the boys was cut apart, and, by actual count, forty-two little snakes ran out of the body of the old one and around in again, at its mouth."
Reference has been made to the Stantack Road. According to a report found on page 403, vol. 22, of Middletown Land Records, that road was laid out December 12, 1780, by a com- mittee appointed for the task by the town of Middletown. As
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surveyed it was four rods wide, and was bounded on either side by stubs of trees; a "Black Oak Staddle" here, a "bunch of Maples," or a "Walnut Staddle" there, and so on throughout its length.
On the north side of the way, next east of the Albert Hulbert farm, may be seen an ancient house known to the last two gen- erations as the "Ward place." The Sages once owned land all the way from Connecticut river over to Berlin Street, and this Ward place seems to have been the home of David Sage, Jr., great-grandson of David Sage, the Welch emigrant who came to Middletown in 1652.
David Sage and Lois Harris, his wife, had fourteen children, seven sons and seven daughters, born between the years 1754 and 1775. Their names were: Abraham, David, Harris, David and Jonathan (twins), Seth, David, Lois, Ann, Mehitable, Ann, Bathsheba, Ruth, and Lois.
The father, David, died in 1779. On the stone at his grave in Maple Cemetery, we read this inscription :
Under this stone doth lie the Body of Mr. David Sage, jun'r. Killed instantly by a fall from a horse on the 25th of Febry A. D. 1779. In the 47th Year of his Age-
And all those little children! What wonder that three years later Lois, their mother, gave up the ghost, and died, as she did, at the age of forty-eight years.
The children held onto their home until 1795, when, as shown by a deed dated June 10, of that year, Abraham Sage, the eldest son, conveyed to Simeon North, his right in the house and barn, with the five-acre home lot bounded east on Spruce Brook, and one-ninth of the sawmill. This deed included thir- teen acres of land besides the house lot.
By another deed, of date August 29, 1798, Lois Sage, the youngest child, and Bathsheba Bulkeley, her sister, sold for £24 to said North, one-third of the dwelling house and barn, "being the same distributed to Lois and Bathsheba from their father's estate," and "now occupied by sd. North." Then on May 6,
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1799, their brother David sold to North his share of the house, being one-sixth part thereof and eight acres of land.
Mr. North seems to have bought out the Sage heirs for the sake of the land. He sold the part of their house and barn that he had from Abraham, in 1795, to David Woodruff, the next year, for £195, but he kept the land, all except the five acres that have always gone with the house lot.
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