USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > History of Hartford County, Connecticut, 1633-1928, Volume II > Part 22
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49
1009
HARTFORD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT
preached in many places and at ninety-three was chaplain of the United States House of Representatives. Mr. Graham's son, Dr. Sylvester Graham, was the first to produce the kind of flour that bears his name.
When it came about that there could be other than the founda- tion Congregational Church, the Baptists here organized their first society in the state in 1769, building their brick church in 1777 and a larger one in 1846.
Joseph Hastyngs, who had organized the "New Lights" in 1750, was the first pastor. Erastus Andrews, whose son, E. Ben- jamin Andrews, became president of Brown University, was among his early successors. In 1780 Deacon Bolles of Hartford, who walked every Sunday to church in Suffield, organized the first Baptist Church in his home town. The Second Baptist Church was established in West Suffield in 1805. The present church, built in 1840, succeeded the original one, in a more central loca- tion. The Third Baptist Church is that of the colored people, organized in 1905 after many negroes had been attracted to this section for the tobacco plantations. A church was built on Kent Avenue and Rev. David H. Drew of Springfield came as pastor. Methodist services began in 1832, seven years before the church was built. Levi Warner was pastor when in 1844 his son Olin, who was to become the distinguished sculptor, was born. The society was disbanded and absorbed in 1920. The Episcopalians organized Calvary Church in 1865, Rev. Augustus Jackson rector, and at once bought a building site on Bridge Street, where they erected their edifice in 1872. The Church of the Sacred Heart was dedicated for Roman Catholic worship in 1886 when Rev. James O'R. Sheridan of St. Mary's, Windsor Locks, was in charge of the mission. Rev. John E. Clark was the first resident pastor. The Polish people, under Father Wladary, held services in the Catholic Church after organizing St. Joseph's in 1905, and in 1912 bought property on Main Street where they worshiped pending the building of their edifice.
After the Pynchon committee in 1671 set apart two lots for the good of the ministry forever, such little benefit as accrued went to the ministers of the ecclesiastical societies. In 1791 the sixty acres were leased to Elijah Granger for 999 years for the interest on £351. The income eventually was divided between
1010
HARTFORD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT
the First and Second societies. When in 1803 the Baptists had come to have a majority, the town voted that the income should go to three societies, but the Supreme Court ruled that the town had no jurisdiction over church matters.
What is referred to as the town's formal "revolt" from Mas- sachusetts rule, elsewhere dealt with in this history, was in 1749. It was the culmination of spirited protests since the time of the fixing of the colony boundary line in 1713 and of strong votes for Connecticut support in the 1720s. No representatives were sent to the Massachusetts Assembly in 1749. Two years before, the renowned soldier Capt. Phinehas Lyman had been appointed agent to act with agents from Woodstock, Somers and Enfield to appear before the legislatures of both Massachusetts and Connecticut to try to secure annexation to Connecticut. Through the energy of Lyman, Connecticut appointed commissioners but Massachusetts turned a deaf ear. It was at the May session that Connecticut took the historic step and assumed jurisdiction. The towns at once held town meetings under Connecticut laws and elected regu- lar officials. Massachusetts for twenty years continued to assess the towns but levied no taxes. Captain Lyman and Asaph Leavitt were Suffield's first representatives. A probate district separate from Hartford was established in 1821.
Lyman ranks as one of Connecticut's heroes. Born in Dur- ham in 1716 and obtaining his degree at Yale in 1738, he opened a law office in this town in 1743 and later established a law school. In 1755, in the French-Indian war, he was appointed commander of Connecticut forces in Johnson's Crown Point cam- paign and won glory recounted in the general history, but received no recognition in England. Elihu Kent, Phinehas Lyman, Jr., and eleven others from Suffield were in his forces. In Amherst's victorious Montreal campaign of 1760, he led four Connecticut regiments and achieved more distinction. In 1762 he had com- mand of Connecticut, New York and New Jersey troops in the victorious Havana expedition. Rev. John Graham of West Suf- field was a chaplain at that time. In the resultant treaty, Eng- land received from France all of that country's territory east of the Mississippi, and Lyman, obtaining grants in England in rec- ognition of what he had done, went to that section with a party of
-
1011
HARTFORD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT
Springfield men to colonize. That was in 1774. After they had fixed the site of a town on the Big Black River, the son Thaddeus returned to Suffield to sell all of the property except the homestead, which stood on the site of the present railroad station, and to take the family back with him. Before they reached Black River in 1776, both the general and his son had died and Mrs. Lyman died soon after. Thaddeus and his sisters returned to live in West Suf- field, selling the homestead to Benajah Kent.
In those colonial wars names of many Suffield men were promi- nent. Capt. Joseph Kellogg,* who was captured at the age of twelve in the Deerfield raid and was held by the Indians ten years, returned to his home and was conspicuous in town service. Capt. John Harmon, Lieut. Benjamin Harmon and Ensign Joseph Adams were at the siege of Louisburg in 1745. For over a hun- dred years the town maintained three militia companies. Many of the names on those rolls appeared on the rolls in the Revolution. Capt. Elihu Kent commanded the company which marched on receiving the news of the Lexington fight, and Capt. Oliver Han- chett the company of seven-months men who went soon after. Captain Hanchett and his men were in Arnold's agonizing Quebec campaign. It was a boast that there was not a tory in Suffield. Other officers were Capt. Phineas Lovejoy, and Lieuts. Nathaniel Pomeroy, Consider Williston, Samuel Granger and Bildad Granger. Orderly Sergeant Jacques Harmon was on duty at the execution of André. The order for the execution appears in his orderly book which has been kept.
The first cotton-yarn mill in Connecticut was set up here in 1795 and in 1819 there were four such mills, together with one oil mill, three fulling mills and clothiers' works, two carding machines, three grain mills, three tanneries, four stores and two taverns. The first iron works were opened in 1700 and with two others of later date continued to 1770. Samuel Copley's fulling mill was the first of its kind here.
Preeminence in agriculture was attained only by patient till- ing of an unfriendly soil. By 1849 there were 295 large farms almost all of which were raising tobacco. Local cigar-makers alone used 57,700 pounds of Connecticut seed-leaf as wrappers
*Capt. Martin Kellogg-see Newington Section-was a brother.
1012
HARTFORD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT
on Spanish cigars, and year by year the town has been a leader among the state's towns in this culture and manufacture. Cigars were rare till 1810. That year a drunken Cuban cigar-maker happened to stop in Suffield. Simeon Viets set him to work. Soon girls were called in to learn from him the art of making the "Principe" and immediately Suffield was famous. Among the first girls employed were Clarissa King (Rose) and Sally Olds (Ingraham), and they kept at it fifty years. James Loomis was the first and long the pace-making peddler in New York state. Viets gained affluence but died a poor man. The rolling of cigars was conducted on a large scale in private families and the prod- uct actually threatened to displace ordinary currency in trade, at the rate of from one to two dollars a thousand, being made- these "supers"-of uncured leaf. Experts could turn out a thous- and a day. But by 1860 the value of good Connecticut tobacco was so high that attention was given to selling it rather than to mak- ing it up. By the census of 1849 there were (exclusive of the home industry) twenty-one cigar concerns here, employing 150 men and 80 women, making 14,482,000 cigars valued at $165,000. In these later days some of those who began with home-making and peddling, like the late Charles Soby of Hartford, had stores of their own in other places and returned here with large capital to invest in plantations of shade-grown tobacco.
Increase in population and consequently in attendance at town meetings necessitated the holding of town meetings in some other place than the newly carpeted church, so the town and school to- gether in 1839 built a hall where the basement could be used for the meetings and the upper floor for the school which hitherto had been located on the common. When the hall was burned, a better one was built on the same site in 1862.
Suffield provided one-fourth of the $100,000 capital of the Windsor Locks & Suffield Railroad in 1868, the road to be built by the New Haven, Hartford & Springfield Company with which it merged in 1871. Owing to Suffield's terrain, surveys indicated that the main road would best cross the river somewhere near the rapids, and after considerable controversy the point below the island was decided upon. The four-mile branch line to Suffield, now a part of the New York, New Haven & Hartford system, was
-
1013
HARTFORD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT
opened in December, 1870. The Central New England runs through West Suffield, and there are trolley and bus lines.
Hezekiah Huntington in 1796 was the first postmaster. The West Suffield office was opened in 1839 with Erastus H. Weed in charge and mail came three times a week between Westfield and Hartford. East Suffield boasted an office from 1851 to 1856.
The last year of their control, in 1687, the Pynchon committee of management, following the rules adopted in 1671, laid out on the east side of High Street forty acres for support of a school and a grammar school if possible. The income was negligible for a century and never was more than $25 a year, yet in some way a school of sorts was maintained. Anthony Austin appears as schoolmaster in 1796, "with aversion," teaching where he could. No house was provided till 1704-a second one in 1733, which exists today as a part of a residence on Conrad Lane, after having been the property of the town, the First Ecclesiastical Society and the Center School District as these controlling organizations suc- ceeded each other in history. It was removed from near the meet- ing-house in 1797. In that year another house was built, on the common, near the graceful and majestic Congregational Church of that day. It was a time when Suffield, with a population of 2,500, could be classed with Springfield and Hartford. The school was later moved to the site of the present town hall, was burned in 1860 and was rebuilt, under town and district auspices, a town hall being provided for on the upper floor. The district sold its interest to the town in 1889 and the structure on Bridge Street was erected.
The West Suffield district's first schoolhouse was built in 1750 near the corner of Ireland Plain. A third district was formed a few years later. This original house was outgrown in 1803 and the present one was built in 1813. The number of districts increased till there were seven in the First Precinct and four in the Second. The old district system was superseded by the town system in 1898, and the three upper grades were assigned to the First and Second Center district buildings. That year it was voted also to send the higher-grade pupils, at expense of the town, to the Suffield School (as now known), the story of which insti- tution is to be found on another page. The third school that was
1014
HARTFORD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT
built stood on the common in front of the church, and in its rooms this Connecticut Baptist Literary Institute (as then known) was opened in 1833.
These items are sufficient to show that few towns in the county had given as much attention to school matters. It was fitting, then, that this should be the town of the man who was known as the father of the state school fund, Gideon Granger, Jr., (1767- 1822). After graduation from Yale in 1787, he became a lawyer of distinction. When in 1795 the state voted to sell its Western Reserve (in Ohio) for $1,200,000, Mr. Granger as a member of the Legislature was largely instrumental in having the money dedicated to the support of schools. Himself, Oliver Phelps, Luther Loomis, Thaddeus Leavitt, Ebenezer King, Jr., and Asha- bel Hathaway bought one-fourth of the total. Mr. Granger was postmaster-general for thirteen years from 1801. Oliver Phelps, born in 1749, was agent of the Connecticut Land Company, which took over the 3,600,000 acres in Ohio, and Samuel Hale was asso- ciated with him and Mr. Granger as members of the state com- mittee. Previously they had been interested in disposing of the 2,000,000 acres of Massachusetts land now comprised in Ontario and Steuben counties in New York. The Connecticut venture was not so successful.
The town had a distinct literary atmosphere even before the scholastic institute was organized. In a period around 1800 its name was known through its publishers, the foremost of whom was Edward Gray. At one time later there was a periodical, the Imperial Herald, and Edward T. Addis of Bridge Street edited the Windsor Locks Journal.
Rev. Ebenezer Gay, Jr., and his descendants, including the long-time postmaster, Lawyer William Gay, whose noble colonial house ranks well today with others of the period, were promoters of culture. The minister maintained a library in his manse in 1791. There was a subscription library in West Suffield in 1812, Isaac R. Graham librarian. The present public library was opened, thanks to the zeal of the citizens, in 1884. On the passage of the state law in 1893 to encourage free libraries, the supporters of the institution formed an association and the library was con- tinued in the Loomis Block till the new building was erected. In 1897, Sidney A. Kent, who had returned from Chicago to his
---
- -
CAPTAIN JONATHAN SHELDON HOUSE, WEST SUFFIELD, 1926 Oldest house in Suffield. Built in 1723
KENT MEMORIAL LIBRARY, SUFFIELD
1017
HARTFORD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT
native town, gave $35,000 for a building as a memorial to his ancestors, the town to provide the site. The old south building of the Literary Institute, standing on land that in 1678 had been part of the grant to Mr. Granger's pioneer ancestor, Samuel Kent, was procured, the building removed and the handsome structure of Indiana limestone was dedicated in November, 1899. Mr. Kent, son of Albert Kent, was a brother of Albert Emmet Kent, founder of Kent Laboratory at Yale and father of Congressman William Kent of Kentfield, Calif. Sidney was educated at the Con- necticut Literary Institute. With his brother in 1854 in Chicago he established a successful packing business and subsequently was associated with Philip D. Armour and others. He con- tributed largely to the funds of the local institute and gave Chi- cago its Kent Laboratory. For maintenance of the library here he deposited $25,000 and reimbursed the town with $5,000 for the site-in the heart of one of New England's most picturesque villages. Martin J. Sheldon, of Suffield and New York, bequeathed $25,000 to the library as a memorial to his brother Hezekiah, farmer, teacher, legislator and historian, and what with the town appropriation and the Helen M. King and the Jane Leavitt Hunt funds, the annual income soon became $2,100. Housed in the library is the notable collection of books, manu- scripts and records, not for Suffield only but for other towns, made by Hezekiah S. Sheldon.
The prosperity of the town was attested when the First Na- tional Bank was established in 1864, Daniel W. Norton president, and the Suffield Savings Bank in 1869, Martin J. Sheldon presi- dent. The former, now under the presidency of C. L. Spencer, Jr., has a capital of $100,000 and a surplus of half that; the latter, under the presidency of Samuel R. Spencer, has deposits of over a million and a half. Charles L. Spencer, Sr., went from the presidency of the national bank in 1913 to be president of the Connecticut River Banking Company of Hartford, holding the position till his death in 1921. Cashier Alfred Spencer, Jr., in 1891, became cashier of the Aetna National Bank and remaining with that institution became president and is now chairman of the board of the Hartford National Bank and Trust Company, of which the original Aetna is a component part. The Spencer
23-VOL. 2
1018
HARTFORD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT
families, who have been prominent in all of Suffield's history, are descendants of Thomas Spencer of Hooker's party in 1635 and of his son Thomas who was a Suffield pioneer.
The Farmers Mutual Fire Insurance Company is another financial institution which is a credit to the town. Its business, under the presidency of George A. Peckham, is limited purely to the mutual purposes for which it was organized.
Civic development in the '90s was marked. The water supply was introduced after Apollos Fuller of Mapleton had struck an abundant source in his artesian well. The First School District was incorporated as a village in 1893, the water company was chartered, the Fire Department was organized, electric lights were introduced and trolley lines inaugurated (in 1902). The grange, which was the outgrowth of the Lyceum and Farmers' meetings of Crooked Lane (Mapleton) in the '70s, with their Mapleton Hall of 1882, was organized in 1885. Its "May break- fasts" on May Day each year soon came to be looked forward to by people all along the valley. While the town has no formal hos- pital, it has the equivalent thereof for a town of its size-about 5,000 population and a grand list of $7,340,000-in its Emer- gency Aid Association, formed in 1903 with Mrs. David W. Good- ale as president.
The celebration of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the town itself made history by emphasizing what New Eng- land stands for. Special honor for this affair in October, 1920, is given to Edward A. Fuller, who died the following year at the age of seventy-eight. Prof. William Lyon Phelps of Yale, son of Rev. Sylvanus D. Phelps, delivered the historical address. Law- yer Seymour C. Loomis of New Haven, another "son," and Henry B. Russell were also speakers. State's Attorney Hugh M. Alcorn was to have delivered an address but was detained by duties before the federal Supreme Court. The pageant, in which several hun- dred participated, was a series of beautiful spectacles on the south banks of Stony Brook, a most effective setting.
In the Civil war, when 350 was the number of men available for service, one finds the names of 286 on the honor roll. A good part of three companies was recruited here. The first became a strong unit of the First Heavy Artillery, Capt. Rolland S. Bur-
-
SUFFIELD'S QUARTER MILLENIAL, 1920
Assembling for the Pageant. Main Street in the background. View of typical Connecticut River mea- dow with elms
1021
HARTFORD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT
bank. William Soby, his first lieutenant, resigned, reenlisted in the Seventh Connecticut Volunteers and was mortally wounded in 1862. The second company went out with the Sixteenth, Henry Hintz captain, and suffered severely at Antietam and in the prisons after Plymouth. The third was Company G of the Twenty-second, in which George W. Johnson and David P. Corbin served as captains and Walter Luce and Thomas McMain as lieu- tenants. There were twenty-two men in the Seventh and thirty- seven in the Twenty-ninth (colored). The granite monument on the common in honor of these men was erected in 1888.
In the World war, while not such a large portion of man-power was called out, the response from men, women and children to all kinds of calls, and without regard to nationality, was no less zeal- ous. The memorial unveiled at the two-hundred-and-fiftieth an- niversary of the town is most fitting. Tablets of "enduring brass," placed on the town hall, were dedicated, bearing the names of all the men in all the wars-ninety-four in the French and Indian; 260 in the Revolution; eighteen in the War of 1812; two in the Mexican; 286 in the Civil war and 170 in the World war, including Students Army Training Corps and the Y. M. C. A .- a total of 838. Lieut. A. Waldron Mills, just returned from the Army of Occupation at Coblentz, had command of the World war veterans at this dedication.
Sibbil Dwight Kent Chapter of the Daughters of the Revolu- tion-named after the wife of Elihu Kent,-the Ladies Wide- awake Club, the Woman's Reading Club and the Mapleton Liter- ary Club keep the civic interest at high level. Special attention is given to the preservation of landmarks and ancient houses of beautiful design. The oldest of these houses is that of Capt. Jonathan Sheldon in West Suffield, built in 1723.
Distinguished men or their descendants, other than those men- tioned include : Timothy Swan, song-writer; Rev. Cotton Mather Smith, father of John Cotton Smith, governor 1813 to 1817; Elias Austin, grandfather of Stephen F. Austin, who founded Texas where his father Moses had started to establish a colony; Aaron Austin, who removed to New Hartford in 1767, long prominent in state affairs and judge of the Litchfield County Court; Francis Granger who, like his father, while resident in New York state was appointed postmaster-general; Luther Loomis, grandson of
1022
HARTFORD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT
Graves Loomis, founder of the distinguished family, who was a merchant, a legislator and a leader of the Conservative party; Reuben Harmon, Jr., who, after his removal to Vermont in 1768, was the first to make authorized one-cent pieces, by order of the Legislature-seventeen years before they were made in Connecti- cut ; Rev. David Newton Sheldon, president of Waterville College, 1843-53; Capt. Edward A. Gillette, First Connecticut Heavy Ar- tillery, manager of well-known hotels who was brought back to the old homestead from his Glen House in the White Mountains in 1887 and died on reaching here; Edward A. Fuller, another vet- eran of the Civil war, president of the E. A. Fuller Tobacco Com- pany, selectman, representative, state prison director, member of the Board of Pardons, director of the Soldiers' Home and chair- man of the local Board of Finance, and John C. Mead, architect and builder who when a youth designed the Congregational Church and the delighted townspeople made up a purse for him, and who designed most of the buildings of the Literary Institute and several of the prominent buildings in Hartford.
§
ENFIELD-THOMPSONVILLE-HAZARDVILLE
The early story of Enfield is much like that of Suffield. Nine years after Connecticut had begun to insist that the Massachu- setts surveyors had come too far south in endeavor to get Spring- field well within Massachusetts boundaries, Pynchon and his asso- ciates had begun the systematic settlement of this territory. The few Hartford and Windsor pioneers were practically unconscious of the proceeding for the time, but seeds of the long boundary controversy were being sown. Pynchon's layout was "three or four miles" down the Connecticut to "Saltonstall's Brook" and eight miles to the east, therefore obviously within the lines of the Warwick Patent and below the lines of the Massachusetts grant. Pynchon's committee for organization consisted of himself, Sam- uel Marshall, Thomas Stebbins, Jr., Jonathan Burt and Benjamin Parsons, who selected the land around present Thompsonville for their start. Only settlers, not speculators, were allowed to apply. For £25 the land south of Freshwater Brook was bought of the Indians, additional to the land previously bought north of this.
1023
HARTFORD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT
John Pease and his two sons of Salem, Mass., were the first to come, choosing for "the street" the ridge parallel with and half a mile from the brook. Three years later Pynchon endorsed the incorporation as a distinct town, but under committee manage- ment till officers were elected in 1688. The selectmen already chosen in 1683, namely John Pease, Jr., Isaac Meacham, Jr., and Isaac Morgan, were permitted to continue and in 1689 the com- mittee resigned jurisdiction to the inhabitants. As told on other pages, the town was deliberately annexed by Connecticut in 1749, to the extent of 22,647 acres, or about 5,000 acres less than Suf- field. The need of direct connection with Suffield was met, as has been said, in 1808 with the first bridge to span the Connecticut, supported on six masonry piers and costing $26,000. After Thompsonville the settlements that developed, on smaller scale, were to the eastward-Scitico, Hazardville and Shaker Station.
The best soil for cultivation being south of Freshwater Brook, the first meeting-house, in 1684, and likewise the second in 1706 (where Timothy Edwards preached his "awakening" sermon that filled the countryside with intense fear of punishments in the here- after), and then the third in 1772 (where Thomas Abbe, immort- alized in Taylor's poem, beat his drum to rally men for Lexington, over a hundred responding) were built successively on the ridge to the east of the Connecticut, the broad common and majestic trees to make it one of the fairest villages in New England. It was Maj. Nathaniel Terry who led those men to Lexington, son of Samuel Terry, one of the original settlers and ancestor of those who have made the name illustrious in war and in literature. Near the grave of the first Col. Nathaniel Terry is that of Rose Terry Cooke of Hartford and Winsted and of the whole country as a writer. Here also is the grave of Asaph Terry, Revolutionary veteran and colonel of militia after the war. The meeting-house of 1772 was moved and made the town hall in 1848 when the present edifice was erected opposite the original site.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.