USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > History of Hartford County, Connecticut, 1633-1928, Volume II > Part 25
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Among the Granby men who have made their names in the state and county, chiefly in Hartford, were for lawyers those who have been mentioned in the general history, like William C. Case, his son William S. Case, and Theodore M. Maltbie and his son Wil- liam M. Maltbie. Edward W. Dewey was sheriff of the county. Jonathan B. Bunce, who retained his summer residence here, was president of the Phoenix Mutual Life Insurance Company and of the Society for Savings,-one of the foremost financiers in the state. James N. Loomis was an adopted son, having come here from Southwick, Mass., in his youth. Twice and for many years he was postmaster. During the Civil war he was selectman and after that commissioner of deeds of North Carolina. Also he was treasurer of the Salmon Brook Water Company. Albert B. Wells, a descendant of Gov. Thomas Wells, was town treasurer for many years. Cicero Holcomb taught school in Granby for a time, then went to Virginia, where his knowledge of the classics brought him pupils who afterwards were prominent in the Confederacy. His own views were pro-slavery. He returned in 1861 and again was a local instructor.
At West Granby, back of the Barn Door Hills, and at North Granby, on the edge of the Massachusetts boundary-line notch there are small agricultural centers, each with its own post office and quaint history. If there is in the state a more romantic spot than Crag Mill and its pines and chasms in North Granby, it is hard to find. Harvy Godard, born in 1823, who owned much land hereabouts, who had a saw and grist mill and held most of the local offices, was the first master of the State Grange, 1875 to 1879. Of his sons, Porter B. became a lawyer in Kansas City, Mo., and George S., state librarian. It seems fitting that amid such inspiring scenery, North Granby should have one of the best rural libraries in the state. It was dedicated in 1891, the gift of Frederick H. Cossitt, who was born in 1811 on the farm diagon- ally across the road. After his boyhood on the farm and at the death of his father, he went to Clarksburg, Tenn., on request of his uncle, in which state he made a fortune in drygoods, a business which he continued in New York until his death in 1887. In be-
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queathing a large amount to the Memphis library, he expressed the desire that $10,000 go to North Granby for similar purpose, if the town wished it. The gift was gladly accepted in 1889. The directors were E. W. Dewey, L. S. Spring, Benton Holcomb, George S. Godard, Dr. W. A. Stratton, A. C. Latham and C. P. Loomis.
East Granby possibly would have remained a part of the old town, after its distinct society had been formed in 1736, had it not been for the shortsightedness of the town meeting in rescind- ing its vote to allow itself to be held there every third year. A portion of Windsor (now Windsor Locks) had been added to the society in 1737 and altogether the society at Turkey Hills felt worthy of this much recognition. Absolute independence of Sims- bury was obtained in 1786 and Windsor Locks was formally taken from the mother town in 1854; the East Granby portion was in- corporated as a town, covering eighteen square miles, in 1858. Its first census, 1860, revealed 833 souls; that of 1920, 1,056, in a territory dependent largely upon tobacco.
What can be achieved on a Connecticut farm, so often aban- doned, was heralded throughout the state this year of 1928 when Charles Palmer Viets of the town was one of only three to win a certificate like an honorary degree from the Connecticut Agri- cultural College, in recognition of service in the advancement of agriculture and rural life. Mr. Viets, a farmer's lad from his birth in 1863, got his schooling in the local schools and at Dr. Beach's in Windsor Locks. At the age of nineteen he started a milk route. In 1888 he married and bought a farm, where he has raised stock and poultry with tobacco as a cash crop. When his son became a partner with him, he made traffic in cattle a side line, helped promote the tuberculin test and was an official and director in organizations formed in the interests of agri- culture.
An ancestor of the Viets family was Capt. John Viets, who married Abigail Eno of Simsbury. He was a descendant of Stephen Hart, the first deacon of Thomas Hooker's church. His son, James Rollin Viets (1821-1896), beginning in the commercial firm of his cousins, John Jay Phelps and Amos R. Eno, in New York, bought out his brother, John J. Viets, and after a few years
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was sole proprietor of the store for thirty years. For thirty-nine years he was treasurer of the parish.
The location of the first church, in 1737, by the committee of the General Court was the beginning of trouble. Turkey Hills differed from most societies however in this, that the chief com- plainant, Samuel Clark, did not want the building so near him, and an award of £20 damages was allowed him. For the dozen families at that time, 1738, William Wolcott of Windsor east-side was conducting the services. Taxes were high but not out of line with those in other societies what time the colony was so much entangled in England's wars. Individuals were rated as well as land; the personal tax was the chief item on the list. The tax for building the church was 18 cents on the dollar and a like amount for support of the minister. In addition there was the tax for schools which were under the jurisdiction of the ecclesias- tical society. The successive clergy were frequently in difficulties with the parish over the matter of pay, but not to such extent as has been seen in Simsbury. One cause of the difficulties, here and everywhere, was the depreciation in the currency due to the wars. Rev. Nehemiah Strong's difficulties were such that he left in 1766 and subsequently appeared as a professor of mathematics at Yale and as the author of several series of almanacs published in Hartford and elsewhere.
The ordination of Aaron Jordan Booge, Yale 1774, was a notable occasion in 1776. Clergy and laity from surrounding hamlets came to Turkey Hills, which had appointed seventeen tavern keepers for the day, or practically the entire male mem- bership of the society. Indeed the church records show only fourteen men and twenty-three women in full communion at that time. The number of non-communion members, by the Half-Way Covenant plan, does not appear. Tradition preserves that the ball in the evening surpassed anything of the sort in the town's annals. It also is known that during "Priest" Booge's pastorate there was increase in membership and interest. He removed to Massachu- setts in 1785, in which year, near the close of the war century, only twelve people were on the tax list. By 1812, irregularities had brought collapse to the extent that the General Assembly had to renew the corporate powers. In the pastorate of Rev. Stephen Crosby, 1826-32, the present sanctuary was built by subscriptions
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from members. Alterations were made in 1865 and in 1927 there was complete refurnishing, the society being self-supporting and having a fund accumulated from bequests. The first Methodist church was built on Copper Hill in 1839 and the new one, in 1859, a little west of that site.
The first iron works in the colony were set up in the northeast corner of the parish early in the eighteenth century, and new works in 1728 further south by Samuel Higley, who had a process for "turning iron into steel." In 1820 the Cowles Manufacturing Company employed a special process for plating the spoons they made at what is still known as Spoonville, but the supremacy of farming as an occupation never was threatened.
The romantic story of Newgate mine and prison is given in the review of the Revolution in the general county history. That portion of the town-one of the highest points of the Talcott Range-was in the allotment to Ensign Higley, who settled in original Simsbury in 1660 and was one of the original proprietors in 1684, ancestor through his sixteen children of Jonathan Trum- bull, of judges and ministers and of the Enoses and Pettibones of Simsbury. Copper Hill itself had not been sold or granted in 1705 when the proprietors appointed a committee to investigate traces of copper; it was a common and therefore all would share; two-thirds of the profits were to go for school teacher's salary and one-third, by decree of the Assembly, to Yale. The chief shafts were on the hill; Higley's was to the south. Hanover was the name given to the settlement around the refining works on Hop Brook, because of the number of Germans. Considerable foreign capital was invested at one time and another. Capt. James Holmes of England, who secured a twenty-years lease in 1772, was the one to dispose of the main property to the colony for prison pur- poses in 1773. By roofing the west shaft the Government made it "next to impossible for anybody to escape." Such was the report of Commissioners William Pitkin, Erastus Wolcott and Jonathan Humphrey, but Wolcott, Humphrey and Josiah Bissell as over- seers soon found differently. In 1779 the frequently burned block-house over the main shaft was reinforced by another, a military guard was established, mechanical operations were sub- stituted for mining and the caverns made more secure. Most of the war prisoners were Hessians. When certain of the tories
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began to destroy property and to communicate with the enemy, they were added to the rolls. Twenty-eight of these, led by Capt. Peter Sackett, escaped and made a general jail-delivery. Shel- don, an officer of the guard, was killed when rallying his men. It appearing that there had been bribery, the soldiers were locked up until one of them was convicted. A year later when the buildings were burned and Abel Davis of the guard let all the tories escape, he was tried and sent to Hartford jail for a year.
The jail continued to be the state prison till 1790, in which year the Assembly more specifically denominated Newgate, appointing such eminent men as John Treadwell, Roger Newberry and Pliny Hillyer to be overseers, they to rebuild with brick and to provide a guard of ten men in charge of Maj. Peter Curtis. The prisoners worked by day in the shop and at night were returned to the caverns, where they slept on two rough platforms. When at work they were fettered and fastened to beams by chains. Wrought nails were the chief product. The stone wall around the grounds was built in 1802 by Col. Calvin Barber of Simsbury. Subsequently buildings included not only cells but a chapel and a hospital, and in 1824 a treadmill, women's quarters, a kitchen and an office. The prison in Wethersfield was built and the 177 prisoners were removed there in 1827.
The Phoenix Company in 1830 bought the property from the state. The directors were John O. Pettibone, William Dubois and John Bacon,-Richard Bacon of Simsbury agent. That and all successive attempts to work the mine profitably were failures. It continues to be a place of historic interest.
Referring further to the distinguished men from the original Granby town, it is noteworthy that three of the state's most emi- nent librarians of today can be counted among them, as elsewhere noted. They are Frank B. Gay, son of Alfred Gay, of Granby, who is now director emeritus of the Wadsworth Atheneum; Al- bert C. Bates, son of Charles Bates of East Granby, who is librar- ian of the Connecticut Historical Society, and George S. Godard, son of Harvy Godard, of North Granby, who is state librarian. Congressman Walter Forward, comptroller, secretary of the treasury in Tyler's administration and chargé d'affaires in Den- mark, and his brother, Congressman Chauncey Forward, were
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natives of East Granby. In the Civil war, Col. Richard E. Hol- comb of the First Louisiana, the first regiment of federal white men in that state, who was killed at Port Hudson, was an East Granby citizen.
§ CANTON : COLLINSVILLE
It remained for the settlers in the southwestern corner of original Simsbury to lay the foundations of industrial greatness. Presumably that was not the motive of Richard Case, 2nd, when he went there in 1737 and in 1747 built a house on land on East Hill which has remained in the family down to modern times, the log-house foundations still in existence. Benjamin Dyer and his son Thomas built in 1756 and the latter's house in these recent years was the home of Congressman William E. Simonds. Others who migrated during the church controversies in Simsbury were Nathaniel Alfred, Thomas Bidwell, Deacon Abraham Case, Amos Case, Capt. Josiah Case, Capt. John Brown and Oliver and Solo- mon Humphrey. By 1764 the present Hartford and Albany turn- pike was to this settlement what a trunk-line railroad would be to a new modern community.
The location is on the eastern side of the meandering Farming- ton River where it is making its long reach to Farmington before turning northward for a place to break through the Talcott Range. The favorite places for the first-comers are today indi- cated by the post offices-at Canton, Canton Center, North Canton and Collinsville. When the Connecticut Western Railroad was built, the relative importance of Collinsville, seat of the Collins Company, was such that a spur track of the road was built to it from the main line. Service on that line having been discontinued there is now only the freight station at Collinsville which con- nects with the Northampton Division of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad at Simsbury. There are approxi- mately 20,000 acres of land in the town, a population of nearly 3,000 and a grand list of $3,310,000. Though the soil is broken by high hills, there are several streams and soil in the valleys is exceptionally fertile.
The people of this original "West Simsbury" organized their ecclesiastical society in 1750 and built their meeting-house in
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1763, when Rev. Gideon Mills was pastor. Corporation existence as a separate town named Canton began in 1806. Despite the fact that the main trail was further south, the early farmers for the most part settled around Canton Center. The first post office, in 1798, was at Suffrage, now Canton Village, and the first bridge across the Farmington was built as a part of the highway to Litchfield a mile north of present Collinsville. Frederick and George Humphrey built a sawmill in the south part of the town. This and a forge set up by Colonel Talcott and Forbes & Smith in 1774 were swept away in the "Jefferson flood" of 1801. Alto- gether there have been a number of sawmills, a flax mill, carding mills and several distilleries. The first powder mill was built by Jared Mills and Edmund Fowler at the point where the Nepaug stream flows into the Farmington from the westward. This was conducted for sixty years. A second powder mill on Cherry Brook and near the North Canton Cemetery was established by Swett & Humphrey in 1834 and abandoned in 1865. Meanwhile the Collins Company was building up.
Previous to 1826 in this country axes were made by black- smiths, without an edge, the purchaser having to put that on by patient grinding for half a day. In the office of David Watkinson & Company of Hartford, who furnished most of the steel in this part of the country, Mr. Watkinson's nephew, David C. Collins, conceived the idea of doing the grinding at the base of supply and with his brother, Samuel W. Collins, and their cousin, Wil- liam Wells, he bought the Humphrey grist mill privilege at the picturesque bend in the Farmington. One man could turn out eight forged axes a day on a wage of $144 paid annually. South Canton became Collinsville on the post office list, and since that day in 1831 the greatest plant of the sort in America, in which much Hartford capital is still invested, has flourished. The first of the many great enlargements was made in 1832 when E. K. Root, a remarkable inventor, was brought from Chicopee, Mass., as superintendent. The original Collins & Company became the Collins Company two years later, capital $150,000, since when dividends have been paid regularly. The Collins brothers were sons of Alexander Collins, a Middletown lawyer whose widow removed to Hartford after his death in 1815. David went into the store of his uncle, David Watkinson. Samuel was employed by
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EDWARD H. SEARS
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Edward Watkinson, with whom he became a partner before he was of age. He was resident manager of the ax business for many years, dying in 1871. He had seen the product, which included steel tools and weapons, well on its way to an all-world market. The actual boundaries of the village now extend over into Burlington and Avon. It was while living here on the moun- tain-side overlooking Collinsville that Rose Terry wrote her poem "The Two Villages," the second village being the cemetery on the hillside across the river.
The ax company built the first Congregational church in Col- linsville in 1836, services having been held previously in the com- pany's hall. The Cherry Brook meeting-house was built in 1763, replaced by the present one in 1814. The Catholics built in 1852, the Episcopalians in 1876, the German Lutherans in 1893 and the Swedish church that same year. At Canton Street there are the Congregational Church and the Baptist Church on the green. St. Matthew's German Lutheran Church is on the Torrington Road.
In time there came to be eleven school districts for primary education in the town. The Collinsville High School building was erected in 1854. Two years later the town took over the super- vision of the schools in distinction from the societies and districts. Prior to the establishment of the high school, Sylvester Barbour at North Canton and George B. Atwell at Suffrage had private schools.
There is an excellent public library in Collinsville, of which Miss Julia E. Parrish is the librarian. It was established in 1913.
In the French-Indian wars, Canton was represented by twenty men; in the Revolution by eighty and in the Civil war, with a population of only 2,500, by 242, of whom forty died in the service.
John Brown of Ossawatomie, for whose raid at Harper's Ferry he paid with his life, his soul to go "marching on" through the Civil war, was the grandson of John Brown, 3d, of West Sims- bury, who was a captain in the Revolution and died in the service. The captain's son, Owen, who later helped establish Oberlin Col- lege in Ohio, removed to Torrington, where the birthplace of the abolitionist John still stands. The pikes which the last named ordered at the Collins Company's in 1857, elsewhere referred to,
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were for use in Kansas; a number of them were taken to Harper's Ferry.
Another consignment of spears, ordered by a New York firm, was secretly shipped to Georgia by that firm for use by a Con- federate leader who had small conception of requirements and believed that a regiment armed with these could do wonderful service. They actually were used in some of the engagements in that part of the Confederacy, where rusting remains of them were found in the fields after the war, still giving evidence of their excellent make. In the Philippines the deadly machetes of the natives, primarily an implement of horticulture and agriculture, with handles carved by their owners, had come from Collinsville.
During the World war an efficient company of the First Regi- ment of the State Guard was maintained here. Lawrence John- son was a major, A. H. Brucker and Frederick A. Widen captains and Leroy L. Day and W. G. Sexton lieutenants.
President Heman Humphrey of Amherst College, mentioned under Simsbury, was from this part of the old town, as also was Rev. Hector Humphrey of Trinity College, later president of St. John's at Annapolis. Others of distinction included Rev. Dr. Selah Merrill, archaeologist; Solon Humphrey, railroad-builder; Mayor Merrill J. Mills of Detroit and Mayor Thomas Dyer of Chicago. One who in these later days was a power in every phase of the town's life was Edward H. Sears (1846-1907), whose family were drawn from Williamsburg, Mass., by the good repu- tation of the Collinsville High School. As he was about to enter Yale, he took a position as bookkeeper in the Collins office for a fortnight and continued in the concern till his death, succeeding Maj. W. J. Wood in the presidency in 1886. He also was presi- dent of the Farmington River Power Company. His name was on the roll of the Constitutional Convention in 1902. At the centen- nial celebration of the town he delivered the historical address. As head of the company he was succeeded by William Hill.
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LIV HARTFORD'S WESTERN EXTENSIONS
WEST HARTFORD, FARMINGTON, UNIONVILLE, AVON-PRESENT RAPID DEVELOPMENT OF CITY'S SUBURB-PARENT FARMINGTON CHURCH AND DISTINGUISHED CLERGY-STATELY HOMES OF WELL-KNOWN MEN-SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES-ROMANCE OF THE GREAT CANAL- INDUSTRIAL UNIONVILLE A RESULT-AVON'S FERTILITY-MONTE VIDEO AND TALCOTT MOUNTAIN TOWERS OVERLOOKING WONDROUS VALLEYS-VARYING TYPES OF GOVERNMENT.
Historically, West Hartford, being the town's "West Divi- sion," was a part of that Constitution Town. The Hartford pro- prietors merely measured off their Indian purchase, out beyond their western commons, for convenient division like any other common, from the already defined Farmington line on the Talcott Range eastward three miles or to present Vanderbilt Hill and then to present Prospect Avenue. This done, the space was divided equitably among the proprietors in 1672. Those who moved out there to make their homes easily acquired the dignity of an ecclesiastical society. Distance from the Hartford churches and the high water in Trout Brook prevailed over arguments that the number of Hartford church-taxpayers should not be dimin- ished; the 1710 petition of twenty-eight inhabitants was granted by the General Assembly, schools were opened, the church was organized in 1713 and Rev. Benjamin Colton was installed as pastor. Peace reigned in this the "Fourth Church of Christ of Hartford" till near the close of Mr. Colton's pastorate of forty- three years, and the trouble at that time was soon overcome.
The church land included the present part together with much adjoining property. Today's edifice of Monson granite, with library and reading room given by James Talcott of New York as a part of it, dedicated in 1882, is the fourth in succession from the first one and is in every way worthy of its fine locality. Its imme- diate predecessor was the colonial structure, built in 1834, on the northwest corner of Farmington Avenue and Main Street, later
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occupied as a town hall. The society's second pastor, Nathaniel Hooker, Jr., was one of the most eminent in this church, well favored as it has been. He was a descendant of Thomas Hooker. Fresh from Yale, he was but twenty years old when he was in- stalled, and his career was cut short by death at the age of only thirty-two. Through the Revolution period and for sixty-six years to 1838 Nathan Perkins was the pastor, preparing youths for college in addition to his clerical duties, and altogether leaving a distinct impress upon the town. The plan for the Hartford Theological Seminary took definite shape in his house, where he had assembled the neighboring clergy; it was he who placed the corner-stone of the first building at East Windsor Hill. At the same time he was traveling around New England as a missionary and writing much for publication. Rev. Myron N. Morris, pastor from 1852 to 1875, was twice a representative in the Legislature and was a member of the Yale corporation. It was during his in- cumbency that the struggle, which had been renewed at intervals since 1797, to be set off as a separate town was successful, West Hartford being incorporated in 1854. Rev. Franklin S. Hatch was pastor when the present church was built. The land along South Main Street south of the church to Seyms Street was bought by the church from the Burr estate during the pastorate of Rev. Thomas M. Hogdon (now pastor emeritus), including the site for the larger church which the society soon will build. During the pastorate of Rev. James F. Halliday the requirements of the par- ish have so increased that it has become necessary to seek addi- tional room in the grammar school building on Raymond Road.
Quaker Lane in the eastern part of the town took its name from a small Society of Friends that tried to gain a footing here in the latter part of the eighteenth century; there was neither molestation nor encouragement. Their meeting-house came to be utilized by the Episcopalians who organized St. James' parish in 1843 under the direction of Rev. George Burgess of Christ Church, Hartford. The brick church on South Main Street was built in 1853 when Rev. Samuel Benedict was rector. Prominent among the rectors have been Abner Johnson and Dr. T. R. Pynchon, both of them later presidents of Trinity. Rev. Dr. John S. Lit- tell, the present rector, is secretary of the American Society of Church Literature. The Baptists, soon after organization, built
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