USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Naugatuck > History of Naugatuck, Connecticut > Part 3
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
Other sections of Judd's Meadows prospered only less. At least three powers on Hop brook were early put to turning water wheels in a grist mill, a sawmill, and, probably at a somewhat later date, in a mill making small wooden wares. On the east side of the river near Fulling Mill brook a sub- stantial community grew up before mid-century. The tavern set up by James Brown in the Ebenezer Hickox house must have brought in some hard cash, although "Bishop" Brown sold the property before long to the Terrill family who followed him as inn-keepers. Brown may have been too un- popular to succeed as a host, as his pomposity was a by-word and his Church of England affiliations, which earned him the label "Bishop," doubtless annoyed his Congregational neighbors. About 1735 Thomas Porter, son of the first phy-
26
SETTLEMENT OF JUDD'S MEADOWS
sician of Waterbury, left his large house in Waterbury cen- ter to build his home on land allotted his father in 1686. Here or close by about 1752 his son erected the house which, after the John Lewis house, is today the oldest house in Nau- gatuck. Thomas Porter's brother-in-law, James Baldwin, came about the same time, purchased the original Warner house, and almost at once acquired the Hickox mill on the brook. The mill was not the first building erected by Samuel Hickox for fulling cloth in 1710, but a new one put up by his son after 1730. Here Baldwin, a carpenter by trade, success- fully operated a sawmill and a grist mill for some fifteen years until 1752 when he sold the mill properties together with two hundred acres of farm. Milling was obviously profitable. Before the Revolution the Hoadley family, one of the few old families whose name still is borne in Naugatuck, secured pos- session of the land and mills, and in a shop nearby Jude Hoadley in the 1770's was making spinning wheels.
Below the south branch of Fulling Mill brook on a great hill Stephen Hopkins, son of Waterbury's first miller, in the 1730's was established on a large farm. The exact date of his removal from Waterbury is uncertain; nor is it plain by what means he acquired so large a tract of land. His father had been an important citizen of Waterbury and for his services in maintaining the town's first corn mill had been given extensive grants. Yet it was unprecedented to have in the hands of one man a farm of 959 acres lying all in one piece. The farm stretched north and south over a mile and seven-eighths and at its greatest width was slightly over a mile wide. Part of it apparently was given to his wife by her father. In addition to this unbroken domain Stephen owned some forty acres near the mouth of Beacon Hill brook. On the summit of Hopkins hill a few rods east of the New Haven highway he built his home, probably about 1734, and raised a large family. Progenitor of a line of distinguished citizens, Stephen himself was a man of great influence in the valley. His farm was reputedly a model and he was for years one of
27
HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
the three largest taxpayers in Judd's Meadows. On the stream that flowed south through his farm into Beacon Hill brook he built a sawmill in 1734.
The development of the area near Beacon Hill brook, Indian Wecobemeas, lagged somewhat until after the Revo- lution. For all their accessibility to markets in New Haven, the farms here were far removed from Waterbury center and the meeting house, although after 1729 three roads through Judd's Meadows ran as far south as the brook. Still the water power of the brook was doubtless put to use in mid-century, at least for grinding meal and sawing wood.
The number of sawmills scattered along all the streams indicates that even the first houses were clapboarded, not built of logs, and it is reasonable to suppose that plank floor- ing rather than earth was usual. Mortar for chimneys was made from oyster shells brought from the Sound, while glass for windows was imported from the seaboard also. Every farm had a barn, for every taxpayer but one in the whole township as early as 1730 had at least one horse or a cow, and most men owned oxen and swine as well. If the farm wife did not raise chickens or geese and turkeys, her family could still count on eating wild game every fall, when it was a simple matter to decoy birds from the great flocks of wild geese and pigeons that darkened the sky in their flights southward. Orchards surrounded many of the early houses, and every man had a few sugar maples to tap in the spring. In summer wild blackberries and blueberries could be had for the picking. By mid-eighteenth century, though life in Judd's Meadows was not easy, neither did it lack substantial com- fort.
As elsewhere in the New England settlements of two hun- dred years ago, the householders had to provide their cloth- ing and simple household goods from materials made at home. Hides prepared by the local tanner in Waterbury were kept for the day when the itinerant cobbler made his visit. Ordinarily the shoemaker came twice a year to each
28
SETTLEMENT OF JUDD'S MEADOWS
farm and stayed long enough to make boots for every mem- ber of the family. Children and grown-ups alike had to make their shoes last until the cobbler came again. Spinning wheels, for making yarn to knit into heavy stockings, were universal, and each little girl in the family had, as a matter of course, her daily stint of knitting to do. While the most well- to-do might employ the services of a weaver like Joseph Lewis, more generally every housewife wove some homespun for her own household on the heavy wooden loom at home; the cloth was then dressed at the fulling mill and returned to the housewife to make into clothing. Later in the century itinerant weavers and tailors appeared who, like the cob- bler, moved from house to house making clothes for each family.
A school for Judd's Meadows was a necessity long before 1750. The schoolhouse of 1709 in Waterbury was too far away to serve for the children of this outlying district, and their fathers, therefore, in 1730 persuaded the town to divide the funds derived from lease of school lands. Seven years later, by town vote school at Judd's Meadows was to be kept for six weeks, with seven pupils in attendance. When in 1749 Waterbury created four separate school districts, Judd's Meadows was expected to provide fifteen scholars for its school. Teachers apparently went from one district to the next, boarding for a month or six weeks in each. Pre- sumably for some years the schoolmaster met his pupils in one home or another in Judd's Meadows, until a schoolhouse was built on what is today the corner of May and High Streets. How children living on the west side of the river be- fore 1753 attended school is a mystery. After the bridge across the Naugatuck was built in that year travel, of course, became easier.
Difficulties of communication indeed were enormous all through the eighteenth century. The need of a bridge at Judd's Meadows was so clear that in 1753 Waterbury al- lotted "one hundred pounds old tenor" to assist in its build-
29
HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
ing, but at the same time exacted bond of well-to-do men of the neighborhood to guarantee that the town should not be put to further expense for either building or maintain- ing the bridge. The "Bridge account at Judd's Meadows" notes that eighty meals of victuals for the watermen at six- pence each were charged up, and a number of gallons of rum as well. Unhappily the "watermen" were unable to build a bridge strong enough to withstand the ice of winter and floods of spring. By 1759 the Naugatuck was once again bridgeless and the town was obliged to offer Thomas Porter five pounds to complete a new one.
Meanwhile every Sunday of the year, over ice and through deep snow, mud, or dust and heat, the families of Judd's Meadows must get themselves to Waterbury center for meet- ing. Carriages were still an unknown luxury, and probably no family owned horses enough to furnish man, wife, and every child with mounts. Perhaps farm carts were harnessed up for the trip, or, more likely, the children trudged on foot while their father rode horseback with their mother be- hind on a pillion. Arrived in the center, they looked forward to a long morning service in an unheated meeting house, un- heated, not because comfort was thought sinful, but because of the danger of fire. In midwinter footstoves filled with hot coals brought from home could just barely ward off chil- blains. After the morning service came an equally long, equally cold afternoon service. To ease the rigors of such a day, which belief in the glory of God and consolation of worship could only partly mitigate, the town in 1743 ac- corded permission to householders living at a distance from the center "to build Sabath day Houses, of setting them in the highway against the Sandy Hollow." Here families that could afford Sabbath Day houses ate their luncheons, and, after thawing out around the open fires, refilled the foot- warmers for the afternoon service.
The Waterbury Society, like her neighbors, was stirred in the 1740's by the "Great Awakening," that wave of re-
30
SETTLEMENT OF JUDD'S MEADOWS
ligious excitement that swept all New England. Launched partly by the fiery sermons of Jonathan Edwards who made his hearers sweat in an agony of terror of eternal damnation, the revival of faith preached by the "New Lights" made it- self felt in every meeting house in Connecticut. Converts were accepted as "having come to Christ" after merely an- nouncing their passing from distress of spirit to great joy and delight. The new preachers, the forerunners of a long line before Billy Sunday and Aimee McPherson, moved from town to town encouraging laymen, as lively zealous Chris- tians, to speak out "With all the air and assurance of minis- terial authority exhorting although altogether unequal to the solemn undertaking." The dismay the self-contained older generation of Puritans felt at the crying out in meet- ing and the wholesale conversions, in response to a tongue- lashing emotional appeal, caused violent dissensions in many societies. In Waterbury the town constable felt obliged to interfere in meetings he considered extremely boisterous and disorderly. The new young pastor of the Waterbury Society was himself a sympathizer with the new order, and for a time was suspended from the pulpit for his unorthodoxy.
While Stephen Hopkins of Judd's Meadows was among the fervent believers in the "New Light," his neighbors, the Gunns and Osborns, were bringing their influence to bear in the opposite direction, namely, the recognition of an Anglican community. Whether or not reaction from the comparative extravagance of some of the converts of the "Great Awakening" strengthened the Episcopal position, it was at this juncture that the Waterbury Society saw fit to permit the Anglican families to break away and build their own church. It was consecrated in 1743 as St. John's. But whatever their church ties, all men in the town in these days were sustained by their belief in God's watchfulness over them.
Faith in the Lord's loving care for His own was never more needed than in the summer of 1749. In spite of the
31
HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
steady growth of the valley, marked by increase in popula- tion and improvement of the land, Judd's Meadows together with all Waterbury suffered severely that year. Unprece- dented drought withered the crops in the fields and the hay in the meadows. No rain fell until July 6 and the cattle, "poor, lowing things," wandered in search of food where nothing green was to be seen. One hundred pounds of hay sold for three pounds, ten shillings, about $18, and the barley and oat crops gave at most only seed. The next spring butter cost seven shillings, sixpence, nearly $2 a pound, at a time when the purchasing power of money was many times what it is today. In midsummer came a visitation of a "Remarkable and Sore Sickness," which made many whole families in- capable of helping themselves in the least degree. In the town's petition to the General Assembly of the colony for abatement of taxes the extent of the disaster is vividly described. Few households escaped untouched, and many families lost three and four of their members. It was impos- sible to tend the fields, as most of the able-bodied in every family "from the middle of Harvest to the last of September" were busy nursing the sick. What name modern medicine would give the epidemic is unknown; inaccuracy of descrip- tion of symptoms makes translation into twentieth century terminology impossible. Perhaps it was a return of the "dis- temper" which had swept the countryside in 1713. We only know that the afflicted ran a low, nervous fever and, if they survived the ninth day, usually recovered. Town bills pre- sented by persons caring for their stricken neighbors mounted enormously and, while the town was forgiven its county tax, it received no school money for the year.
God-fearing and often kindly though these people un- questionably were, they also showed at times an uncom- promising severity that startles us today who are taught to look upon the helpless as a public responsibility. Free charity was not considered an act of virtue, and men demanded pay- ment in full for services rendered others. The charges sub-
32
SETTLEMENT OF JUDD'S MEADOWS
mitted by Waterbury for assistance given strangers during the "Great Sickness" omit no least item. Particularly harsh in the modern view was the treatment given the orphaned son of Joseph Lewis, Jr. The thirteen-year-old boy, whose father and grandfather died in the epidemic within a few days of each other, was accused of having picked corn in a field and building a fire to roast the ears on the Sabbath Day. For this crime he was publicly whipped and in consequence lost his reason. Yet several years later the admittedly witless young man was tried for the theft of a small sum of money, heavily fined, and again "whipped on the naked body ten stripes," and then bound out as a servant to the plaintiff until the fine was paid off. He never regained control of his inheritance, a considerable tract of valuable land in Judd's Meadows, but he was allowed to serve as a soldier in the Revolutionary War!
A single exception to the rule that every man pay in full for any help given him or his family occurs in the will of Stephen Hopkins, probated in 1769. Whether his was an unusually kindly nature or whether grief at the death of three of his children within a week's time had softened the sternness of the old Puritan, Stephen departed from custom in setting aside from the estate willed to his children twenty pounds to be "in bank for the use and benefit of the poor in the town of Waterbury." The selectmen, trustees of this gift, were limited only by the request that the annual income never be "perverted for the use of such poor as are slothful, vicious or unwholesome members of the society," but be given only "to such as are in the full communion in the regular orthodox churches in the town. .
Of sharper effect than the "Great Sickness" upon the growth of the community was the constant removal of families to other towns. Other men purchased the land and set themselves up in the places of their predecessors, but the departure of old neighbors and the coming of new disrupted somewhat the steady development of the region. While the
33
HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
great exodus to Ohio and other western lands beyond the Appalachians took place after the Revolution and in the early years of the nineteenth century, long before that we find recurring notices of families selling their lands here in order to take up residence elsewhere. A series of new names appeared in the town list.
Some of the meadowland of the intervales of the river, to be sure, were inexhaustibly fertile and so readily adaptable to farming. But a glance at a topographical map shows in- stantly that much of the terrain was too hilly, too rocky, to be cultivated without enormous effort. The men who stayed on or moved into the Naugatuck valley were men for whom farming had less interest than development of the water power of the mountain streams flowing into the river. Al- ready a process of natural selection was starting whereby the farmers were being sifted out from the tinkers, the craftsmen, and the mechanically gifted, so that the settlers of Judd's Meadows and other sections of Waterbury township by the 1770's were beginning to be marked for their mechanical ingenuity. Sawmills, grist mills, and the small shops where water-driven wheels turned out a variety of household wares were owned by men who were farmers still, inasmuch as every household had to be as nearly self-sustaining as possible. But the emphasis was ready to shift from the farm to the shop.
34
1135837 PART II The Day of Yankee Notions
CHAPTER IV
The Salem Society
F OR two generations after the first settlers made their homes in Judd's Meadows, the people of the region loyally supported the church in Waterbury center, and made the uncomfortable trip to meeting every Sunday, rain or shine. Even the greatly improved roads of the 1760's and the bridges over the Naugatuck river left the weekly journey an undertaking which only conviction plus custom could have made tolerable. But in the fall of 1765 Judd's Meadows had a sufficient population to encourage its inhabitants to seek a "winter privilege," permitting them to have from the first of December to the end of March a service held nearer home. The General Assembly of the colony granted the re- quest for a period of three years and at the end of that time renewed the privilege for an indefinite period. Nathan Hale, among others, was invited to preach for a time in Judd's Meadows. The convenience of the winter privilege soon overcame any scruples about deserting the first church of Waterbury, and in 1772 Judd's Meadows' men petitioned to have a separate Society set off with all its attendant rights of self-government. The winter parish in 1767 could claim nearly a third of the taxable property of all Waterbury, so that, while it was evident that withdrawal of that much sup- port from the church in the center must leave it greatly weakened, it was also plain that Judd's Meadows could well afford to maintain the year round its own ministry. The new ecclesiastical Society was accordingly created in 1773 under the name of the Salem Society. Somewhat later all the region included came to be called Salem Bridge and the name Judd's Meadows ceased to be used.
The Salem Society for a number of years was unable to
37
HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
induce a minister to accept a call to the new parish, and the pulpit was filled temporarily by one pastor after another. In fact, of the sixty-three years of the existence of the Salem church, in only thirty-nine was there a settled minister. But during the troubled years of the Revolution the Society made no attempt to draw up a Covenant. It was in 1781 that sixteen men and women were formally organized into a church. Heading the list of members was the first white man born in Judd's Meadows, Gideon Hickox, now a man of seventy-five. Upon his land the meeting house was built, com- pleted in 1782.
Among the bills presented for building the meeting house two survive which give a fair idea of how the job was done :-
May, 1782, for work done towards the Meeting-House since the two-penny Rate.
For going to Goshen for a lode of clapboards.
For carting timber a day.
For a day to West Haven to get shells.
For carting a load of shells and paid for them.
For two days making pins (for the frame).
For my cart to cart stones a day, by Philip.
December 20, 1782-Paid twenty pounds toward the Meeting- House which was my signment.
Beside what I found raising.
June 17, 1782. Things that I provided for the Raising of the Meeting-House and Steeple.
For a Barrel of Sider.
For a Bushel of Ingen Meal.
For a Half a Bushel of Malt.
About nine pounds of salt pork.
About thirty pounds of fresh pork.
For two the best sheep I had.
Somewhat over two years later, the first Thanksgiving Day was celebrated in the new meeting house. In January 1785, the first settled pastor, the Reverend Abraham Fowler, was
38
THE SALEM SOCIETY
ordained and installed over a church now grown from sixteen to thirty-one members. Here he and his successors conducted services for the next forty-six years. The bell in the steeple rang out for Sunday meeting and other public gatherings held in the building, and tolled the curfew at nine o'clock every night of the week except Saturday.
In 1769 the Waterbury Society had voted the drastic in- novation of permitting men to share pews with their wives in meeting. Before that time the Waterbury church had adhered to the Congregational custom, established in the earliest days of Separatism, of seating men on one side of the meeting house, women on the other, with children at the back or in the gallery. Possibly the first Puritans believed that each individual's responsibility for his own conduct was thereby heightened; or perhaps, since direction of the Chris- tian commonwealth was the duty of the "Brothers" only, it seemed but proper for them to be seated in dignity apart from the "Sisters" and children. But inasmuch as the Salem church showed every sign of being far more rigid in its Puritanism than the parent society in Waterbury, it is not unlikely that Salem reverted to the scheme of segregation in seating the congregation in the first meeting house.
The Confession of Faith was an elaborate statement both of doctrine and of concepts of church governance. (See Ap- pendix III.) Stress upon the place of God's Elect in the cosmos and their duty to the Lord led the church to exclude from communion members of neighboring churches vouched for only by "letters recommendatory," "as many of the churches do not hold that credible profession of real Friend- ship to Christ and holiness of heart are necessary in Order to Persons being admitted to full Communion with them, & as there are many church Members in this Land both unsound in Doctrine, and immoral in their lives. .. . " Of such persons Salem wanted none. The pastor was to be acknowledged as going before the Brethren in all things, "no less in Matters of Discipline, than in Doctrine, Faith, and
39
HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
Practice, and that acting in this line the Brotherhood are to know him as over them, and obey, and submit to him in the Lord, but he hath no right to make Laws or prescribe Rules of his own, or to put a Negative of the Church in any case unless in matters merely official. . .
The strict Calvinism of the Salem church went so far as to demand of its members public confession of any breach of Gospel Rule and the guilty could only be restored to church fellowship by vote of the congregation. Although this in- quisitional ruling was not invoked in the early years of the church when its membership was still small, Salem relied upon the church rather than upon civil authority to regulate public affairs. Brethren were exhorted to settle their quarrels not by recourse to law but by appeal to the Brotherhood in meeting. For the Christian church, ordained of God, the fountain head of all justice, must be the mainspring of a well-ordered community.
Notwithstanding the vigorous convictions of the orthodox Congregationalists, and in spite of their patent distaste for anything British, there was no sign of objection in 1786 to the organization of an Episcopal church here. Doubtless the Salem Society felt it was losing nothing, as the adherents of the Church of England were mostly families in Gunn- town who had always attended St. John's in Waterbury after its establishment a generation before. The fourteen members of the new parish, St. Michael's, met in one private house or another until a building was erected in 1803. Once a month an ordained Anglican minister lent by a neighboring parish conducted services; other Sundays a lay-reader served. By the turn of the century, the antagonisms aroused sixty-odd years earlier by the episcopacy of "Bishop" Brown, the tavern-keeper, had largely disappeared, and in the course of the nineteenth century St. Michael's was, indeed, to be- come the rather more fashionable church of Salem.
While both church societies relied upon pastors' sermons and reading of Scripture to supply food for thought day by
40
THE SALEM, SOCIETY
day, at an astonishingly early date men in Salem exhibited a hunger for wider knowledge that led to the formation of the Salem Library. In 1783 some twenty-eight men or- ganized a proprietory library with the express design of pro- moting "useful knowledge." It was one of the very first library associations in Connecticut, and, if not a public in- stitution with free access for everyone thirsting for book- learning, it still marked a serious endeavor to furnish in the community means of extending its horizons through books. The twelve-shilling membership fee was high enough to bar some householders from admission and, moreover, every member of the company had to subscribe to the twenty-five articles of organization, rules which were explicit and drastic enough to exclude anyone considered by his neighbors un- desirable in tastes or influence. The proprietors, therefore, by no means included in their company all members of the Salem Society. The articles even stipulated conditions of be- queathing the rights of a proprietor to his heirs. That the enterprise was regarded as a solemn and responsible under- taking is shown by the requirement that the librarian and treasurer, as proof of their financial and moral rectitude, each give the committee a five-hundred-pound bond, a fabulous sum for eighteenth-century Salem. Thus safe- guarded by the articles and the high cost of membership, the library embarked upon a career of over fifty years.
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.