USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > History of Hartford County, Connecticut, 1633-1928, Volume I > Part 3
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Thomas Hooker was the type of the harried but sturdy young minister, and more. He was born in Marfield, county of Leices- ter, in 1586, of family of fair estate. An able scholar at Cam- bridge, he taught for a time, or until he obtained a living in the manor of Francis Drake, nephew of the circumnavigator, for which office he did not have to qualify according to the rules of the church since the position was donative, in the interests of Mrs. Drake, an invalid. The manor was at Escher, in Surrey. Mr. Hooker lived in the family, forming friendships that later stood him in good stead. He married Mrs. Drake's companion, a woman of education and refinement. His acceptance of a lec- tureship in connection with the church of St. Mary at Chelmsford was displeasing to those subservient to Laud since it implied friendliness with the people, and Laud, transferred to the see of London in 1628, was becoming more brutal. Mr. Hooker was ordered to appear before the Court of High Commissioners, un- der bond of £50, July 15, 1630. For one so guilty, the penalty might be imprisonment, torture, slitting of the nostrils or some other cruel indignity.
His bond being paid by friends and his family looked after
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HARTFORD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT
by the Earl of Warwick, he secretly boarded a boat for Holland, barely eluding Laud's men. He did not accept position in the British Presbyterian Church till he had removed from Amster- dam to Delft where he became associate of Pastor John Forbes. Upon the pastor's being removed by request of the British gov- ernment, Mr. Hooker continued at Delft two years and then ac- cepted pastoral duties in Rotterdam with Rev. Hugh Peters, later prominent in the colonies, and Rev. William Ames. Mean- time the American project was a matter of careful considera- tion. The reorganization of the company for colonists together with the increasing fury of Laud and his King was deciding the course of many who had been hesitating. Hooker was a con- spicuous figure. One suggestion was to have him and Cotton go together with a group from Essex to settle near Boston, but inasmuch as better results might be obtained by separating the two leaders, this plan was changed. The "Braintree Company" was known as the "Hooker Company" because of its devotion to him with whose teaching they were familiar. Hooker was dem- ocratic and likewise tolerant. He says in a letter, "I would do the devil no wrong though he never did me good."
This group went out from England in August, 1632, expect- ing Hooker to join them with Rev. Samuel Stone of Hertford County, a Cambridge graduate and a lecturer, as teacher. Not long after the party had sailed, Hooker crossed over to England to join Eaton, and Cotton with him. There, finding that Laud's men had detected their presence, all three went secretly aboard the Griffin and after an eight weeks' voyage reached their des- tination September 4, 1633. Among those to greet them was William Goodwin, who had arrived September 16, 1632, and had been in charge of the advance Hooker party as elder. The Brain- tree Company was transferred from Mount Wollaston to New- town (now Cambridge) where Hooker and Stone were inducted into their offices as pastor and teacher October 11, 1633.
Meantime, Plymouth, Hartford County's first connecting link with the mother country, was adjusting itself more or less to irritating conditions of parent-corporation ambition to get on financially. The remainder of the church members were brought over, but by 1630 there still were not more than 300 in the colony. Their governor continued to be elective, restricted by a council of assistants; the body of freemen, being the legislature, held
(Photographed by Dudley from mural painting by Alfred Herter in Supreme Court Chamber, Hartford)
DRAWING UP THE "FUNDAMENTAL ORDERS," THE WORLD'S FIRST WRIT- TEN CONSTITUTION-HOOKER MAKING AN ADDRESS
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HARTFORD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT
veto power, till by 1639 (Connecticut's Constitution year) popu- lation had increased to an extent to necessitate representation by chosen "committees." They had to be self-reliant for they had no friends at court and never had royalty confirmed their charter; they had to agree among themselves in all governmental matters if enforcement were to be assured; they were approach- ing the democratic ideal in something of a tribal fashion. People of different religious views, they did not welcome nor yet did they persecute. The prophecy by friends in England in hour of great- est stress was to be fulfilled: "Let it not be grievous to you that you have been the instruments to break the ice for others. The honor shall be yours to the world's end."
X
CONFLUENCE OF THE FARMINGTON RIVER WITH THE CON- NECTICUT RIVER
First house in the colony beneath the X
II THE SOIL AND ITS OCCUPANTS
HOW HILLS WERE FORMED-LOCAL EVIDENCE OF PREHISTORIC CREA- TURES-VAGARIES OF CONNECTICUT RIVER-THE INDIANS AND THE DUTCH-DORCHESTER PUSHES FORWARD-SALTONSTALL'S ATTEMPT.
Thus had begun the movement from England toward the Connecticut River. While the second step was being considered, while new aspirations for freedom of thought were being nour- ished, is the time to look upon the new territory to which they were to go and the people who were living there. The sachem Wahginnacutt had told of the fertility of the valley; he could not tell of the intensely interesting geological history. Between the early-formed hills of western and eastern Connecticut lay a de- pression from the Massachusetts northern line to Long Island Sound, beautiful in its variety and marked with broken forma- tions of a date much earlier than that of the higher lands. When this depression had been an arm of the sea, streams from the hills had left a deposit of mud. Some volcano poured its lava over the whole area. Upon this another mass of mud accumulated, an- other and heavier flow of lava came, and thus a third time, form- ing layers of shale, sandstone and conglomerate between lava, while near Mount Lamention at Meriden was left buried under lava a great bed of volcanic ashes and of molten rock poured from the volcano.
Then occurred tremendous upheavals; the layers of lava and of the mud in which man was to find evidences of the animal life of the prehistoric period, were tilted upward and were broken at points along the length of the original depression, forming the hills which were to make the eastern and western borders of the Connecticut Valley. The second volcanic eruption formed a sheet of lava 500 feet thick in places, the edges of which, when the up- heaval tilted them, made the Talcott Range, Cedar Mountain, Hanging Hills at Meriden and the other hills down to the shore.
20
GLACIER MARKS, SUMMIT PARK, NEAR TRINITY COLLEGE, HARTFORD
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HARTFORD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT
One of the best evidences of nature's powerful performances in those remote ages is at the very doors of Trinity College-the "Summit," now preserved as a park ground. Old-time quarrying of trap rock (lava) for city streets revealed strata, showing the deep-down layers of mud and then the thick upper crust of lava, with plain exhibit of the effect of the intense heat from the lava. On the surface can be seen the scratches made by the glaciers which thousands of years after the volcanic era wore down the rock formation and left deposits of sand and stone.
In Manchester in particular (Buckland quarries), wonderful remains of the saurians of the Triassic Age have been found, the first of them by Maj. Charles H. Owen in 1884, after a part of a valuable specimen had been built into the foundations of a build- ing. In Farmington, in more recent years, on the land of A. A. Pope, a fine skeleton of a mastodon was unearthed. Footprints of the monsters of millions of years ago have been removed to museums from the sandstone below Glastonbury.
The earth convulsions changed the courses of the streams that had flowed into the disappearing arm of the sea. The Con- necticut kept on toward the Sound but, checked by the upheavals at Wethersfield and Berlin, was compelled to cut its way toward the southeast through the hills at the Narrows and find its new course along the steep bluffs below Middletown. The Farming- ton, which probably always had flowed from the northwest, was driven by the Talcott Range and the rising land near Bristol to run northerly sixteen miles before it could find its way through the range to the easterly slope, as can be seen on the county map. By miles it is one of the longest as it is one of the most pictur- esque streams in New England, but the direct line from its source in Massachusetts to its mouth at Windsor is not much over thirty miles, while within the state there are nearly sixty miles of it, or more than the entire width of the state.
On the east of the Connecticut the Scantic rises in Somers, winds up into Massachusetts, then back through Somersville, En- field, East Windsor and South Windsor and thence into the Con- necticut, a total length of about twenty-three miles. The Hock- anum is fed by Shenipsit ("Snipsic") Lake in Ellington, Tolland and Rockville, comes away westerly and southerly through Ver- non, veers off into South Windsor, dips down into Manchester and makes westerly into the Connecticut at East Hartford near
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HARTFORD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT
Silver Lane-a distance of eighteen miles. Between this and the Scantic is the Podunk, in East and South Windsor.
As will be seen by the map from "Barber's Collections," the Connecticut ever has been a river of vagaries. The map shows how it has changed contours in Wethersfield and Naubuc (Glas- tonbury) since colonial days, forming Wethersfield Cove, obliter- ating Wright's Island, shifting meadow lands. The whole river body moved eastward as far as the point where it formerly had reached its most northeasterly course, north of the Wethersfield town line, which means north of the mouth of Pewter Pot Brook on the Glastonbury side. Then, had it not been for the under- lying shale it would have cut through the present village of Wethersfield. Hartford got an addition to its South Meadows, including a knoll which had been Pennywise Island in the old channel; the promontory at the elbow when the old channel turned northeasterly included the new basin Wethersfield Cove.
In modern times the vagaries have been the source of liti- gation. The law of natural accretion, by which gradual action of the river gives permanent possession to the soil deposited was maintained by the Supreme Court in 1887 when the Thaddeus Welles estate in Glastonbury failed in a suit to establish right to land washed to the Wethersfield side of the river. It so hap- pened, however, that in the course of a few more years, a little further down the stream, soil worth $100 an acre had been washed from the Wethersfield side for a total of about eighteen acres to the Glastonbury side and in such way as to increase by that much the southerly part of the property of this same Welles estate. A Wethersfield man who tried to recover value of part of this failed, though in lower court he had nine of the jury with him. By riprapping and dredging, the Government has consid- erably checked further changes in that locality.
But despite such demonstration of the river's powerful wil- fulness, the present generation appears little affected by possible evidence of a tendency which might even leave the great stone bridge at Hartford extending over fairly dry land while the river to be bridged would be flowing through the East Hartford meadows. The meadow bluff at one time was undoubtedly the eastern bank, but between that and the river since the first set- tlement much of the land has yielded crops. The low-water mark at Hartford is 1.8 feet above that at the Sound, and the tide is
HARTFORD.
IN
1690
HANNE LI
RT. IVERI
EAST HARTFORD
O
Pewier Pat
Brook
OF CONN
Keeney's. Coyes
WETHERSFIELD.
"Drop Charvul HOrodalong
OLD HIGHWAY TO PRATTS
Y
FERRY
Parallel with Jurisdiction Line.
Old no
Runen! !
One mile and Itrods
io
70.
S EN
1792
IN
IN
Wrights Island
LINE ESTABLISHED
Channel of River u 16:00. copied From
PROBABLE
BARBER'S. Historical Collections OFCONNECTICUT Published in 1836
Scale 100 rods to un ich
....
VAGARIES OF THE CONNECTICUT RIVER
GLASTONBURY.
CHANNEL
Parallel with Jurisdiction bine
PRE
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HARTFORD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT
about one foot. Since the settlement the Hartford shore has receded about fifteen feet. On the east side, nearly opposite the steamboat dock, was a large island; Dutch Island was just south of it. They became a part of the mainland and were built upon, but today a once small pool to the east of them has become the good-sized Long Pond, south of the large causeway with its now single under-pass for flood water. A long island off present Riverside Park on the Hartford side joined the mainland, and today the water is more shallow there while along the east side, above the stone bridge, is a deep channel. On the west side of this channel was an island. It was removed at the time the bridge was built but soon reformed and now is kept down only by constant dredging by steam buckets from the shore as a com- mercial enterprise.
At the South Windsor shore, the river is giving its most pro- nounced evidence of its proclivity. Within a few years a fine broad beach, a mile long, enjoyed for recreation purposes, has appeared where the water once flowed. But south of this and down to the railroad bridge, the east bank has been cut back considerably over a hundred feet in the last decade; good farm land and the road thereto, together with trees, have disappeared; Clay Point, a strong promontory, is no more; a deep, swift pool grows larger while a sand bank forms at the opposite shore; the land along the meadow bank is lower, and thus Olmstead's Brook has been diverted till it makes a marsh extending to Long Pond south of the bridge causeway. Especially in the 1927 fall flood, it looked plainly as though the river were seeking a channel from above the railroad bridge straight south, cutting out the present Hartford bow. What the river in flood time can do along its present banks will be shown in the latter part of this history.
At the actual mouth of the river, where silt finds lodgement, little more has been done than to keep the west channel clear, abandoning the east channel which was the main channel in Revolutionary days.
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The Sequin Indians in the river valley were a comparatively modern out-cropping of the bands that had pushed along from perhaps Bering Strait, following the lake line. Sowheag was chief of the group in this immediate section and Sequassen was
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HARTFORD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT
his son. That there was no great chieftain as in other sections of New England may be taken as evidence that the Sequins were of a mild and complacent sort. Like most Connecticut natives they paid some tribute to the warlike Mohawks of northern New York; they were on good terms with the Rhode Island Narragansetts but they were in awe of the Pequots at New London, the latest comers into southern New England. Apparently the Pequots had not conquered them in strife; they simply had usurped authority over lands, and yet not to an extent to demand tribute, possibly through fear of clashing with the Mohawks. Clearly it was with such conception as this that the Englishmen, from time imme- morial precise about land titles, made their purchases of those who were the real possessors; the Dutch on the other hand mak- ing them of those they thought were more powerful. The groups of Sequins-and the settlers designated their sections by the names of the groups-were: Matianuck (Windsor), Sachem Natawanute whom Holmes had brought along with him in his boat and had reestablished, let the Pequots say what they would; Suckiaug (Hartford), Sachem Sequassen; Pyquaug (Wethers- field), Chief Sowheag, and across the river the Wongunks, the Podunks (South Windsor and East Hartford), with a "fort" near the Podunk river for the summer and another on the Hockanum for the winter; and the Tunxis (Farmington), a branch of the Suckiaugs. The summer village of the Suckiaugs was where Village Street Green now is and they planted the land along the river from there south, the only open space. North Meadow Creek, until recent times quite a stream, furnished shelter for their canoes. Before the arrival of the Dutch doubtless the mouth of Little River had been a favorite place. Their chief hunting grounds were along that stream and in Farmington. Their only known story will weave in with that of the English- men.
The same may be said of the Dutch. At the present juncture, preceding the arrival of the actual settlers, they and the Sucki- augs were having nothing to do with each other; the Dutch had reported Holmes' audacity to New Amsterdam; forty soldiers, with trumpets and guns had been sent up overland, had seen Holmes' stockade and had marched back to report that the posi- tion was too strong to take without much bloodshed. Thereupon traders had been sent farther up river to cut off the Englishmen's business, only to find the Indians decimated by the periodical
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HARTFORD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT
plague of smallpox; the Dutchmen, themselves falling victims, worked their way back to Windsor where they were nursed till able to complete their journey to the House of Hope. This sig- nificantly named post was made partly of brick brought from Holland (specimens of which are now with the Connecticut His- torical Society) on the south bank of Little River some rods back from the Connecticut, where the bend in the tributary made good harborage. Had the guns aimed at Holmes been fired when he sailed by, the balls would have had to sweep across the sandy promontory on the north side of the creek, ever since known as Dutch Point, much wider then than now. Around the house was a palisade where fifty people could find refuge. Attempt was made to raise hay and vegetables in the soil just outside of it. For his land Van Corlear alleged that he paid "one piece of duf- fels, 27 ells long; six axes, six kettles, 18 knives, 1 sword blade, 1 shears and some toys" to "Tattoepan, chief of Sirkenames River" (which was the name for Mystic River near New Lon- don) "and owner of Connecticut." The papers of this first Hart- ford real estate transaction never were producible in the long international arguments of later years, but the statement suffices to show the custom of the time, the value set upon the property and the fact that the Dutch did not search titles so thoroughly as did the English.
§
In these days when the movement from the Bay Colony was fast taking shape and scouts were looking over the "promised land," Jonathan Brewster, son of Elder William, was made resi- dent agent at Windsor for the Plymouth Company. In 1635 he was reporting that "Massachusetts men" were coming almost daily and casting covetous eyes on the additional land that had been bought north of the Tunxis River. The tone of the letter indicated that he had thought nothing of the earlier visits of prospectors who doubtless had included the wandering Oldham in 1633 when with his three companions he went on to Wethers- field and tested the goodly soil, nor of the visit of men bearing a letter from Pynchon who went north and selected Agawam, nor yet of a few who had gone down near the House of Hope and fixed upon Suckiaug (Hartford); but the 1635 strain upon his hospitality had caused him to break forth in protest. He cried
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HARTFORD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT
out that he did not know who might not come next. Right here is a bit of evidence that the Plymouth Company contemplated a genuine settlement and not a mere trading post as has been as- serted in the arguments over priority of founding, for he wrote that this Windsor land might become a "great towne and have commodious dwellings for many years together."
Those whose conduct provoked the letter were in reality rep- resentatives of the foresighted Ludlow of Dorchester-twelve of them who tarried nine long days, not "consulting" Brewster but using his freely proffered guides and boats and partaking of his limited supplies. He took them to interview the Dutch on a loca- tion but the Dutch "did peremptorily withstand them." As later appeared, the Dorchester men, seeing that these meadows north of the Tunxis were not being occupied, felt that they must still be in the open market, and when the hegira from the Bay became irresistible arranged in 1637 terms of purchase; still later the Plymouth pioneers (1638) sold the original Plymouth site, south of the Tunxis, to Matthew Allyn of Hartford.
The Oldham incident was a matter of no concern until in mod- ern times when pride of priority asserted itself. Oldham and his "adventurers" chose the beautiful fields at Pyquaug, built their huts in the fall of 1634 and turned the soil. Fifteen years after the settlement of the three towns, the General Court adopted boundary regulations, and after the words "most anncient towne" in the record there appears a parenthesis in different handwrit- ing reading "which for the river is determined by the courte to be Wethersfield."
Among the other visitors of whom Brewster complained was one who represented a new and important element in the whole history of the "River Towns." This was "Mr." Francis Stiles, a London builder, accompanied by twenty-seven others, includ- ing Rachel (Mrs. John) Stiles and two other women, the first of the Connecticut colony. Enter the "Warwick Patent." In Eng- land, despite Saltonstall's recent successful defense of the New England colonies before the court, Laud had assumed official supervision with purpose to crush religious and civil systems in force among them; a royal governor was to be imposed; emigra- tion from England of any above a servile station could be only by permission; lords of the New England Council were hastening to divide up New England territory between themselves without regard to company patents; judgments were being procured
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HARTFORD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT
against individuals of the Massachusetts Bay Company living in England, their fellows left as outlaws; the council was at an end and the indifferent Sir Ferdinando de Gorges was ere long to be appointed governor-general. In its last days the Earl of Warwick was president of the Plymouth Council in England. To himself and with only his secretary at the session, he granted this patent which in controversial history bears his name. By it, shrewdly, Viscount Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke, Richard Saltonstall, Pym, Hampden and other leaders in the cause of liberty were to estab- lish a colony for "lords and gentlemen," precisely as should ac- cord with Laud's fierce decree. As for "royal governor," John Winthrop, Jr., was commissioned-for one year. The territory covered was from Narragansett River westward indefinitely and the northern boundary inadvertently overlapped that of the Mas- sachusetts Bay. Lion Gardiner, war veteran, was to erect a fort- ification at the mouth of the Connecticut-palpably the best of locations,-George Fenwick was to be local agent, and Lady Fen- wick accompanied him.
In this way, Warwick got something to stand on in the crash that was impending. But what with the rumbling of civil war already in the air, there was need of all Puritans of rank on their native soil, and Lady Fenwick was to be the only "lady" of the colony. She was a charming woman who became a member of Hooker's church in Hartford and whose body was buried at Say- brook. Saltonstall, for his part, sent out Stiles' party with direc- tions to establish a fine estate up the river. He surprised the Brewster Pilgrims at a moment when the Dorchester party hap- pened to be out prospecting. Taking dates together it would seem that this was what caused Ludlow's men to arrive at the decision that Windsor's north meadows (or "Great Meadow") was the ideal place for them. It eventuated that Stiles was allowed a little land at the north end (where the Oliver Wolcott homestead now stands) and many acres for the "estate" east of the river where also the Dorchester people bought wide territory of the Indians. Absorbed by the rush of events in England, Saltonstall abandoned his plan, after writing that his party had "carved well for themselves." He added with a significance of deep import in subsequent history that in the future they would see how much help could have been afforded them. Ludlow did not like the idea of a royal governor and was too impetuous or dis- ingenuous to perceive what was beneath the surface.
III THE WARWICK PATENT
THE HOW AND WHY OF THE "ADVENTURERS" WITHIN ITS BOUNDARIES- FIRST WINTER AT HARTFORD-SIGNIFICANCE OF PROVISIONAL GOV- VERNMENT DOCUMENT.
That the Warwick Patent had much to do with the history of the River Towns and thereby with the birth of the Constitution interpretation of modern data, long obscured and sometimes even now handled too shrinkingly, confirms. What actually prompted Warwick in giving the grant in 1631 to important land hitherto passed by and how he did it for "lords and gentlemen"-perhaps riding two horses at once, the mad king's horse and the horse of the colonists-has nothing to do with subsequent operations. Those operations, together with his letter about future helpful- ness at Windsor, lend color to the supposition that in 1631 he may have foreseen the ugly attitude of the King in 1635 and therefore have been riding on the colonists' horse all the while. Patriots Pym and Hampden were associated with him.
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