USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Naugatuck > History of Naugatuck, Connecticut > Part 2
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FOUNDING OF WATERBURY
mittee, demanding forfeiture of the defaulters' proprietary rights in the settlement. Nor were the requirements eased for inhabitants whose dwelling houses failed to conform to the stipulations. Several houses were protested for lacking chimneys or for not being of the prescribed dimensions. For some of the defaulters the penalty was merely imposition of another year's residence in Mattatuck before their titles to their lands were recognized as absolute. Others lost their proprietary rights entirely. New incumbents, after purchas- ing the buildings on the forfeited lands, were in turn con- strained to fulfill meticulously the terms of the original articles of agreement. The seventeenth century Puritans obviously believed that only by such strict conformity to the rule could a permanent new community be built. Settlers of later generations, if prone to envy the privileges of the pro- prietors, did well to remember the exactions of courage and energy required of the first comers.
In 1680 the proprietors came to agreements first with men of Derby and then of Woodbury about plantation boundaries. On the east side of the Naugatuck river Beacon Hill brook marked Mattatuck's southern limit, on the west side a line run over "Twelve Mile" hill where was placed the stake marking Derby's northern boundary, twelve miles from Milford's north bound. The boundary between Matta- tuck and Woodbury to the west was run eighty rods east of Quassapaug pond. In each case the General Court confirmed the bounds as described. Town officers were elected in 1681 and thereafter the Committee for Mattatuck largely left direction of plantation affairs to them. Five years later, in May 1686, the town, now taking the name of Waterbury, was formally admitted into the corporation of Connecticut as a separate entity, the twenty-seventh town of the colony.
Meanwhile the proprietors had to secure from the In- dians additional titles in the soil, although the deed of 1674 appeared to have given the white men clear title to land running north and south for ten miles on either side of the
13
HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
river and six miles wide. In 1684 Deacon Thomas Judd and John Standley, acting for the plantation, bought scattered pieces of land within the original grant-probably small lots to which there had been rival Indian claimants-and also a tract of land running northward from Mt. Taylor for eight miles. These purchases were made from the Farm- ington or Tunxis Indians. But the proprietors found it wise in February of 1686 to conclude a negotiation with the Derby Indians as well, whereby the twenty parcels of land in the southern part of the town already bought from the Tunxis tribe were again bought from the Derby Indians.
This land, nearly identical with the township of Nauga- tuck today, was described as extending upon the east side of the river from "Wecobemeas, the land upon the brook or small river that comes through the Straits northward of Lebanon and runs into Naugatuck river at south end of Mat- tatuck bounds, called by the English Beacon Hill brook," to "the brook at the hither end of Judd's Meadows, called by the name Sqontk" and eastward to Wallingford and New Haven bounds; on the west side of the river the parcels in- cluded those from "Saracasks" to "Towantucke; and half the cedar swamp, with land adjacent from it eastward. .. . " The English settlers obviously were unwilling to risk dis- putes with any of their Indian neighbors. In fact, twenty- five years later the scrupulous settlers obtained still a fifth deed to confirm their rights to a small piece of land in the southwestern part of Waterbury, although this plot was in- cluded in the purchase of 1686.
The plantation bounds now included eighteen miles of lands north and south, ten miles east and west, about one hundred thirty-six square miles in all. The wilderness marked the northern bound, Farmington, Wallingford, and New Haven the eastern, Beacon Hill brook and the Derby line the southern, and a line run eighty rods east of Quassa- paug pond the western limit. One hundred and fifty years later John Barber, the Gazetteer, was to exclaim in wonder
14
FOUNDING OF WATERBURY
that the town pronounced capable of supporting thirty fam- ilies had achieved a population of 8,000 persons!
Although the growth of Waterbury after 1686 was not rapid, it was steady. The original location of the "Town Plot" had been moved from the west side of the Naugatuck river to the east side in 1678, after the proprietors resumed the planting of the settlement. House lots were reduced in size from eight acres to two acres for each family, thus mak- ing possible a more compact town. The layout of the town was like that of all early New England settlements: a com- mon, flanked by the home lots with a desirable plot set aside for the minister, and outlying meadow and woodland apportioned to each man according to his proprietary rights. All land was distributed by drawing lots for first choices, be- cause the Puritan believed that God so showed His will in human affairs. Every man accepted his assignment accord- ingly, though the least of the settlers might receive the most accessible and most fertile acres, the most influential man less good. But the committee of the proprietors conducting the division of land was empowered to "throw in" land to equalize the allotment, so that seven rods of poor land might be rated as three of the best. The assignment of land went on for many years as newcomers came and were accepted as inhabitants. As early as 1680 a miller, Stephen Hopkins, was awarded thirty acres on condition that he build and operate a grist mill. Later a carpenter to run a sawmill and in 1722 a blacksmith, by similar inducements, were brought into the community.
Once well launched, the development of Waterbury is in no essential respect different from that of other pioneer Connecticut towns. Duties of fence-viewing, road-building, tax-collecting, and participating in drilling with the militia to guarantee the defense of the settlement were shared by all able-bodied men. Danger from the Indians was by no means at an end in the last years of the seventeenth century and first decades of the eighteenth. In 1707 in a sudden raid the
15
HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
savages carried off a man and two of his sons to captivity in Canada, and the next year the colony gave the town fifteen pounds to expend on fortification. For a number of years thereafter the menace of sporadic Indian raids continued, and probably only unremitting vigilance on the part of the settlers prevented considerable loss in life and property. Self- protection as well as participation in the church life of the community forbade scattering the homes of the planters far from the village green.
Nor were hostile Indians the only threat to the new town. In 1692 a great flood destroyed the fertility of some of the intervales and led to the departure of some householders. By 1694 Waterbury could claim only twenty-five families. Nine- teen years later a "great sickness" carried off thirty of the two hundred inhabitants, and similar epidemics periodically visited the town with only less devastating effect. Life on this Connecticut frontier was arduous long after the older towns on the Connecticut river or the seaboard had arrived at security and relative ease.
Yet the community went forward. As early as 1689 a minister, Jeremiah Peck of Greenwich, was settled in the town and supplied with a house and lot, a propriety of one hundred fifty pounds, and benefit of all divisions of land al- ready made, together with a salary of sixty pounds-fifty pounds in provisions, ten pounds in firewood. Such a hand- some salary was clear proof not only of the supreme im- portance of the church to the devout Puritan settlers but of their faith in their own capacity to maintain such a stand- ard for their town even in its first struggling years. We must of course remember that money, hard coin, was not destined for another two generations to play any part in the every-day economy of any new settlement, and values of country produce, in which all men paid their taxes, were set from time to time in town meeting. So, even in 1724, wheat was rated at six shillings per bushel, rye at four shillings, Indian
16
FOUNDING OF WATERBURY
corn at the price agreed on when offered, and pork, "good and merchantable," at three pence per pound.
After Mr. Peck's death in 1699 Waterbury, because of In- dian disturbances and "the deranged condition of the town," was unable to persuade a successor to take up residence here until 1705. But then John Southmayd came, and thereafter the town was never without a minister of the Gospel. The first meeting house was completed in 1702, built in part with the proceeds of sales of "wild"-that is, unbranded-horses. Meanwhile, in 1698, the town voted to set up a school for four months in the year and late in 1709 a committee was in- structed to supervise the building of a schoolhouse. Some- times school funds were not sufficient to employ a school- master for more than three months, and the town eked out by hiring a "school dame" for a time.
By 1697 the first generation of proprietors recognized the wisdom of encouraging younger men to settle in the town. Accordingly they created "bachelor" privileges which en- titled a young man upon coming of age to receive thirty acres of upland swamp and boggy meadow together with a house lot and four acres of pasture land, and a propriety in the com- mon lands, provided that within four years he build a tenant- able house not less than sixteen feet square. The bachelors were to have no voice in the granting of the undivided lands and might sell only such of their allotted lands as they had cleared and improved. The bachelor proprieties were to be rated at forty pounds in the later divisions of the commons. Four years later the proprietors decreed that a bachelor might acquire absolute title in his lands only after he had dwelt in the town five years after building his house. A num- ber of sons of the first proprietors thus came into property of their own, and some men from other towns were also in- duced to settle here.
The workaday world of both men and women in the primi- tive little settlement we must imagine as best we can. Fields
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HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
must be ploughed, planted, and harvested. Fences for cattle had to be built and maintained. Later only swine, when ringed in the nose, were allowed to roam the woods, recog- nized, as the town record in 1723 phrased it, as "Fellow Com- moners with other creatures." There was hay to be cut in the meadows, wood to be brought in for winter fuel and for cooking the year round. Candle wood, knotty pine to burn for light when tallow for candles was scarce, had to be gathered, after each householder had marked his trees by peeling the pine and branding upon them his name. Pork and beef had to be salted down or smoked. Tallow, not only for candles but for soap, had to be boiled down. Candles had to be dipped and soap made with lye drawn off from wood ashes. When sheep-raising was introduced, men owning sheep must tend to shearing and scouring the wool to be turned over to the housewife to spin and weave into clothing or blankets. Neighbor of necessity helped neighbor.
Articles that could not be made at home had to be pur- chased with any surplus the householder could produce- foodstuffs, pipe or barrel staves, tar, hides, or possibly furs. But purchases had to be kept to a minimum, if only because of the difficulty of transporting to the seaboard or to Hart- ford and Connecticut river settlements any marketable goods. Significantly one of the earliest undertakings of the town after its incorporation was laying out a road to New Haven. The first generation of settlers on the Naugatuck had to be almost wholly self-sufficient.
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CHAPTER III
The Settlement of Judd's Meadows
T HE distribution of lands in this southern section of Waterbury began some twenty-five years before any- one built his home here. Some time before 1679 the Committee for Mattatuck voted a first division of the meadows downstream and probably allotted "Judd's Mead- ows" to William Judd at that time. Later the name was to be applied to the whole region and included the land of many other men. Certainly we find in an order of 1679 called "The Devistion to the Straits," a record that a partitioning took place, and each man, in order drawn by lot, had his choice of location. Ten lots were assigned north of the Town Plot at Buck's Meadow. All the rest lay within what is today Naugatuck, fourteen on the west side of the river, nine on the east side. While most of the plots contained about eight acres, the Committee occasionally "threw in" addi- tional land to equalize allotments. Thus, because of its bar- renness and likelihood of being heavily washed by floods, what was known for a hundred years as the "Deacon's Meadow," laid out for William Judd, was called eight and a half acres, but by actual measurement contained about twenty. The "Deacon's Meadow" lay on the west side of the river in the very heart of the present-day borough. (See Ap- pendix I.) To the list of twenty-three men here recorded as the first individual landowners in Naugatuck a number of other names were added in various divisions after 1686. But not one of the first group made his home here. The labor of building up the new community fell to younger men.
As long as the owners continued to live in the town cen- ter, outlying lands like those at Judd's Meadows could only be used for pasturing cattle or cutting hay. Removal from
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HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
Waterbury center was unthinkable until passable highways could be built. Survey of a road along the east side of the river from Waterbury to New Haven in 1686 made Judd's Meadows more accessible than formerly, but we cannot sup- pose that the highway was for years more than a rough track traversible by ox carts. Even after "a passage to Judd's Meadows" was laid out in 1699 the journey from the down- stream meadows to the village must have been difficult.
It is surprising, therefore, that as early as 1696 several young men obviously contemplated building homes on lands in Judd's Meadows awarded them in that year, "provided they build and cohabit according to articles." Yet it was none of these men, but Samuel Hickox, Jr., the son of Sergeant Samuel Hickox, who first built his home here. In 1702 young Samuel erected a house on land adjacent to Hickox meadow and was promptly granted eight acres of land about the house. For, in keeping with frequent practice of the period, Samuel, Jr., had built his house before obtaining title to the land on which it stood. Two years later he exchanged with his brother Thomas his house and holdings in Waterbury center and elsewhere, in return for their deceased father's lands at Judd's Meadows. He then moved his family to the new home. The oldest son of one of the original proprietors of the town, Hickox was thirty-five years old when he estab- lished his wife and seven sons and daughters in Judd's Meadows. Here in September 1705 Gideon Hickox was born, the first English child born in the new settlement thus begun. One wonders whether, in moving so far from friends and neighbors, greater courage were not demanded of Eliza- beth Plumb Hickox, Samuel's wife, than of her husband.
But at least one other family soon followed their example. By 1706 Daniel Warner had built his house on a plot just north of Hickox. Daniel Warner had been only twelve years old when his newly widowed mother, taking up her hus- band's proprietary rights in Mattatuck, established her family there. As the oldest child in the fatherless family
20
SETTLEMENT OF JUDD'S MEADOWS
Daniel must have been inured to hard work, and it is per- haps not strange that when a man of nearly forty he chose to move his own family, wife and four children, to a new home. There may have been others also: the permission of the pro- prietors given in 1705 to "jud's meadow men" to set up a pound for their cattle suggests that other men as well had already taken up residence here. In 1709 a burying plot was set aside on land released by Hickox and the following year the proprietors granted Hickox "Liberty of that Stream called daniel worners Brock, from the East Side of the going over the sd Brook. Any place for Conveniency of Daming So Long as he Shall maintain A fulling mill and Conveniency of Land to pass and dry Cloth." In the light of these evidences of a community, it is hard to believe, absence of record not- withstanding, that before 1713 only two families resided in all Judd's Meadows.
The fulling mill which transformed Daniel Warner's brook into Fulling Mill brook is thought to have been a suc- cessor of one earlier set up on Great brook at Waterbury center, where Hickox himself may well have carried on the business. The process of scouring and shrinking the home- spun cloth was known as fulling. Hickox operated the mill in Judd's Meadows till his death. The inventory of his estate valued the mill at forty shillings. It may have been the first enterprise of its kind in the colony and was certainly the first in the vicinity. But after Hickox' death one finds no refer- ence to the mill until 1730.
The "Great Sickness" of 1713 carried off Samuel Hickox, his nineteen-year-old son, and Daniel Warner, leaving as the sole listed inhabitants of Judd's Meadows two widows, Ebenezer Hickox, not yet twenty-one, and twelve children, seven of them under eight years of age. How the two women and the three older boys contrived to tide their families over the next winter is hard to imagine. Yet in three years' time Ebenezer and John Hickox felt at liberty to build houses for themselves and turn over management of the homestead
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HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
to their mother, twelve-year-old Gideon, and his sisters. The fate of the Warner children was settled by their mother's remarrying and removing to Woodbury. The widow War- ner herself was a second wife; her predecessor, the mother of the four older children of Daniel, had been the first white person buried in Judd's Meadows.
In this pioneer settlement usually neither widow nor widower remained single long. A man needed a woman to take charge of his household and few women would will- ingly face raising fatherless children unaided. As elsewhere in early New England, men generally outlived their first wives and quickly remarried. But frequently women also were widowed, and then, like Mrs. Warner, married again. So the woman with stepchildren, her own children, any chil- dren of the first marriage of her new husband, and any now born to the two conducted a household as varied as a small village.
In 1713 another permanent settler had come to Judd's Meadows, although his choice of location on the west bank of the Naugatuck in these days before the river was bridged could give scant comfort to the Hickox and Warner house- holds. Joseph Lewis, at the time of his first coming to Water- bury from Simsbury about 1700, had been the first new- comer to be accepted as an inhabitant by the close little cor- poration of the proprietors. Doubtless his being a weaver by profession ensured his welcome. Ten years after his marriage into the family of a grand proprietor he set up his household in Judd's Meadows in a house south of Towantic brook, west of the present Ward Street. Here he and his numerous family prospered. In 1722 a brother-in-law from Walling- ford followed to buy land and settle in the neighborhood. As payment of a loan of four pounds, three shillings and six- pence to the town in settling a boundary dispute with Wal- lingford, Joseph Lewis acquired, in addition to his pro- prietary allotments, eighty acres of land and by 1734 was marked as the richest man in Judd's Meadows. Some years
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SETTLEMENT OF 'JUDD'S MEADOWS
later, in acknowledgement of another unique service, he came into possession of still more property, when the son of Abraham Andruss deeded him two hundred fifty pounds in land for having assumed the care of young Andruss' widowed mother in the last years of her life. At Lewis' death in 1749 he owned some seven hundred acres, valued one hundred and forty years later at about $50,000. So Lewistown had its be- ginning. Joseph Lewis, Jr., in 1728 built his house not far west in Towantic meadow, and his brother John in 1736 established himself in a house south of his father's.
In thumbing over the manuscripts of town and pro- prietors' records for the scanty entries about Joseph Lewis, the historian wonders how a humble weaver built up such a fortune. Did his wife bring him property? Did his weaving net him hard money and thus means to buy valuable land? The story runs that he and his sons put a large acreage into rye for export, probably to the West Indies. In farming for export, was he a daring innovator who had the Midas touch? Certainly good luck must have attended him at every turn, and his career marks one of the earliest success stories in the Naugatuck valley.
From 1713 on other bachelor proprietors came in increas- ing numbers. Within two decades there were homes in the meadows near Beacon Hill brook which the county road to New Haven made accessible, houses on the west side of the river near Hop brook, and the beginnings of settlements west of Joseph Lewis' along Towantic or Long Meadow brook, on Twelve Mile hill and Straits Mountain, and in the rich lands where "Gunntown" was to arise. While most of this growth stemmed from Waterbury itself, as its young men with bachelor accommodations moved their families to the outlying lands, some "outsiders" added their strength to the development of Judd's Meadows. In 1717 Hezekiah Rew of Milford and James Brown of New Haven purchased land of the Hickox brothers and came to live here not long after. Rew in time bought of Ebenezer Hickox the old fulling-mill
23
HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
site and operated a grist mill for a year or two, while Brown opened the first tavern in the vicinity.
So the Judd's Meadows pasture lands of the first genera- tion of Waterbury planters became farms where men lived on their land. The proprietors' records after 1714 abound in entries noting permission granted to the inhabitants to relinquish lands acquired in earlier divisions in order to substitute acres contiguous to their homes, and exchange and sales of land further hastened the process of consolidat- ing men's holdings into less broken units. Moreover, at about this time, despite the protests of a minority, the pro- prietors began to allot the undivided common lands in very much larger parcels than formerly, as much as one hundred acres to each original proprietor, often in plots of sixty acres or more. Thus concentration of land and wealth became possible.
But in spite of the wish of every man to have his farm in one piece about his home lot, up to the middle of the eighteenth century almost every proprietor had woodlots and pasture land scattered about in various sections of the town. Uncertain landmarks make it impossible to trace the loca- tion of each man's grants and purchases, and division of property among heirs of the first generation further com- plicate the picture. Let us look, therefore, only at the gen- eral distribution of inhabitants and endeavor to reconstruct their mode of life.
By 1740 there were thirty-one families living here. Several well-to-do householders from neighboring towns had bought land and moved into the southwestern portion of the region. So the sons of John Weed, hatter of Derby, established them- selves on Twelve Mile hill and Straits mountain. Soon after the Osborn brothers came from New Haven, and Thomas Osborn, unabashed by the remoteness of Twelve Mile hill, built a house on the summit and made his home there for seventy years. What the old man at the end of his life could see from his mountain top must have been a sharp contrast
24
ISAAC BRONSON
· SILAS JOHNSON
-
1
· CALEB THOMPSON (FROM SAMUEL BARNES)
JOHN ANDREWS
BROOK
,
JOHN BARNES
THOS. PORTER
JOSEPH LEWIS, JR.
EDMUND SCOTT 3RD
LIEL1 10 AYMMOLHO
SAMUEL WARNER (SON OF DANIEL) \
. ABRAHAM WARNER
2
CEMETERY
TWELVE
MILE HILL
SAMUEL WARNER" (SON OF THOS)
GH
I
GIDEON HICKOX 1 (ORIGINAL SAMUEL HICKOX NOME)
12
JONAS WEED
SAMUEL SCOTT
JOSEPH WEED
JOSEPH LEWIS
ID
-
JOB PIERSON
JAMES BROWN (FROM JOHN HICKOK)
9
. DANIEL WILLIAMS
-
STEPHEN'S HOPKINS
RB
-
THOS. RICHARDS
I
Y
JAMES WAKELEE (FROM OBADIAH SCOTT)
C
ON
HIII
ROAD TO NEW HAVEN --
8
ROOK
SKETCH MAP OF APPROXIMATE LOCATION OF SETTLERS OF JUDD'S MEADOWS IN 1735
25
BROOK
RANCH FUSSING MILL BROOK
EBENEZER HICKOX
BROOK
JOHN WARD
HEZEKIAH REW (HICKOX MILL SITE)
FULLING HILL
E
SPRUCE BAOOK
HOP
HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
to the view at his coming. Beyond his own four hundred and eighty acres of farms and woodland a whole village had grown up. In 1733 the first of the Gunn family, haling from Derby, bought land west of the present-day Millville where Nathaniel Gunn began to build up a large property. In 1739 he had built a sawmill on Long Meadow brook and in time developed several other water powers nearby. For the next thirty years the Gunn family bought more and more land, purchasing from the earlier settlers round about, until at the death of Nathaniel, Sr., in 1769 he owned eight hundred acres in "Gunntown" and had outstripped in affluence every other man in Judd's Meadows. In fact, so eager for power and prestige were the Gunns that one of the sons, hearing that the family was falling into second place as landowners, hastened to buy another farm and so re-established the family's importance. At the outbreak of the American Revolution Gunntown more nearly resembled an English manorial estate than any other settlement in the vicinity, and, while the sons of the first Nathaniel, like other Judd's Meadows men, farmed their lands with their own hands, their Tory convictions together with their wealth set them apart from most of their anti-British neighbors.
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