USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > Bristol > Our Yankee heritage: the making of Bristol > Part 4
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On an April day Steve turned his horse down a new cart track opened up through the woods on the east slope of Chippins Hill. Not far from this spot, Chief Cochipianee, dead now, who had led the Indians here, used to have his wigwam. His name, in its garbled 'White Skin' form, had been given to the hill.
Steve turned into a leafy glade where several men were breaking up stone with heavy sledges.
"I'm Stephen Barnes," he told one of the men, in a fringed leather jacket.
"Glad to meet you, sir," the other said, eyeing Steve's well-greased boots and linen breeches, his white collar stock, held at the back with a silver buckle.
"I hear you're looking for iron ore," said Stephen.
"Yes, we're looking the ground over for Captain Ladwick Hotch- kiss in New Britain."
"He's the one who hammers out nails?"
"Yes, and a lot of other things, too. He's got quite a shop now and half a dozen apprentices."
Steve picked up a fragment of rock. It was a granular pinkish granite, flecked with black eight- sided crystals with finely grooved faces.
"It's pure magnatite," explained the man, "but it's quite a chore cracking it loose."
Steve rode away, thinking of Chief Cochipianee and his fleet moccasined hunters, how they had sat here before their camp fires not knowing about iron, using only stone arrowheads and stone knives, as their people had done before them - how long? For a hundred years, maybe thousands of years, here on this very spot.
New Cambridge ought to have an iron furnace. It would be a great thing if the colonies could make their own metal goods and tools which cost so much to import. But England did everything to prevent that. If it were not for British taxes and restrictions on colonial free en- terprise, all sorts of industries would spring up in the colonies.
Steve rode on to see Ebenezer about it. His father's inn had a new sign. From a curved iron arm and
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FIRESIDE IN COLONIAL TAVERN (Reproduced from Beyond New England Thresholds by Samuel Chamberlain, by permission Hastings House, New York City)
PIONEERS BUILD A SOCIETY
hook on an outside post was sus- pended a tin ball painted BARNES TAVERN and showing a decanter, foot-glasses and punch bowl.
Ebenezer had not been feeling well, and he explained that he had had Doctor Samuel Richards over from Plainville.
"He gave me some rhubarb-root for my indigestion."
"I don't put much stock in those old-fashioned Indian remedies," said Steve, frowning.
"It worked. I'm feeling fine again."
"Is he better than Doctor Samuel Porter in Farmington?"
"Porter has a fine reputation, but he's too far away."
Steve asked his father what he thought about starting an iron foun- dry.
Ebenezer shook his head. "We aren't sure of an iron supply. When we get more people here and some roads opened up, things will begin to happen, and life will be easier for everybody."
"I've got a little money saved up. I'd like to put it into something promising," said Steve.
"Why don't you buy Jim's and Mary's half share in the sawmill? Jim has too many irons in the fire."
Steve's half sister Mary had mar- ried James Naughton in 1745 and they were living at the inn. Eben- ezer had bought a half interest in the Plum sawmill as a belated wed-
ding present for them. Jim was a good business man and proved a great help with the tavern.
"Now this sawmill business," Eb- enezer continued. "With me not always so spry, Jim's got all he can handle here at the inn."
Jim told Steve he'd be glad to sell. "You'll have an honest, level-headed partner," he added.
Some years before this, William Rich, a brother of David, had bought into the business.
And so for £160 Steve became the owner of 'one half part' of the sawmill, the yard and 'appurte- nances thereunto appertaining.'
He got real pleasure watching the logs being sliced up into smooth lumber by the water-driven up-and- down saw. He enjoyed the clean sweetish smell of the fresh-cut wood and watched the hill of sawdust grow. He liked to ride about New Cambridge and make deals for cut- ting stands of timber. He and Rich soon had more crews at work and teams of oxen pulling the great trunks down the hillsides to the mill.
Since everything had gone well, he decided to buy into the old grist- mill. This was a more expensive proposition, but it had more busi- ness than it could handle and was bound to make money. Adkins was willing to sell his half-share, and Steve bought it for a thousand pounds in May 1756.
As he stood watching the turning
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THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
wheels on the Pequabuck, the steady curl and splash of the water, the white foam on the racing cur- rent, he remembered the days be- fore he was married when he had brought grain to be ground, how he had courted Mary here and how the Plum children had always run shouting to meet him. More than ten years had flowed by as steadily and inevitably as these same flowing waters of the Pequabuck.
Soon the day set aside in New Cambridge for spring 'training' was at hand. It was always a gala cele- bration. The whole village - old men, women and children - turned out to watch the exercises. The New Cambridge Militia Band was now called the Sixth Farmington Company. Several years ago Steve had been made an Ensign by act of the Colonial Assembly, and he was now a Lieutenant.
Ebenezer was proud of this, and in spite of his eighty years and Steve's protests, insisted on going up the hill to watch. Ebenezer was the great patriarch of the family. All his brothers and sisters were now dead. His wife Mabel and some of his children had passed on. Thomas had left eight children, sev- eral of whom were with Ebenezer. Gideon and his nine children were living in Hampton. David's family was in Watertown. The rest were in Southington. The patriarch
could now count forty grandchil- dren and numerous great-grandchil- dren.
Ebenezer and Steve joined Mary and the three children on the hill- top near the church steps. Mary looked pretty today in her stiff starched petticoats and linen-muslin apron. Instead of the usual married woman's cap or sunbonnet, she was wearing a girlish cloak, with a short hood. Elbow-length mittens cov- ered her hands but left her fingers bare.
The Naughtons came along with Mercy, their oldest child, who was ten. Soon Ebenezer Junior's big family showed up, sons and wives and grandchildren. The women began cutting up the wide sheets of gingerbread, always made this day for the youngsters.
New buildings now gave the hill- top the appearance of a real town center. Beyond the church stood Joseph Benton's sturdy two-story house, the Episcopal burying ground, the two churches, the school and the red post where legal notices fluttered like white wings in the breeze across the hilltop.
To the south, like beehives, were the small clustered Sabbath houses with their rows of chimneys, and Aunt Deb's place.
Two new cross streets had been cut over the hill, and Queen's Road curled southeast down the slope toward the Pequabuck, past the
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PIONEERS BUILD A SOCIETY
houses of David Gaylord, Adkins and other newcomers.
To the north ran tree-shaded Peaceable Street, later called Maple and Burlington, where Pastor New- ell's house had been built. Beside it were the homes of his brother-in- law, Asa Upson, and of the Royces.
More and more people came trudging up the hill. The drums rolled and to the tune of a screech- ing fife, the men, armed with flint- lock muskets or half pikes, fell into two lines before the church door. The officers were clad in linen breeches with red sashes and blue coats with tufts of cotton on the shoulders.
A red hot iron was plunged siz- zling into large mugs of brandy egg- nog and the drink was passed from hand to hand, and Reverend New- ell, stately in his black gown, black cocked hat and silver buckles, gave his blessing.
The recruits practiced 'Facings and Doubling,' staged mock attacks and shot off volleys. Orders snapped across the turf. Swords clanked as officers ran up and down the line. The men were drawn up under the great venerable white oak before the church and chorused answers to questions about the 'Colours,' then dispersed for target practice. The best marksman was rewarded with a streamer of many-colored ribbons on his hat.
After the midday meal, wrestling
matches were staged, battles with staves and cudgels, foot races, broad jumping and a drum-beating con- test. They pitched quoits, and the girls took part in running and bat- ting games.
For all the festive spirit, this year's exercises had a grim note. Once more peace had been broken. The French and Indian War, going on for two years, had engulfed Europe in the dreadful Seven Years War. Stephen's young brothers, David and Abijah Barnes, and other New Cambridge boys, had left for the front. So had Joseph, Samuel and Ager Gaylord, William Jerome Jun- ior, Nathaniel Messenger Junior, and two of the Norton boys from Lake Compounce, Ashbel and Be- thuel. Captain Zebulon Peck, the innkeeper, was leading a company, and his son Justus was with him. Captain Moses Lyman was heading the forces from Goshen. One of his sons, still living on Fall Mountain, was also in the fray.
"I hear Asahel Manross and Sam- uel Gridley are going to go, and several more Peck boys," said Steve.
"I'm going soon," said Lieutenant John Hungerford, who joined them at that moment.
The Hungerfords were well-to- do folk - three brothers who had recently moved up from Haddam. One had started a third tannery.
The sun was already going down
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Russel Pock's.
Cannon House.
School House. First academy.
FEDERAL HILL GREEN (Vault, Bristol Public Library)
PIONEERS BUILD A SOCIETY
beyond Fall Mountain when people started to leave, the women in snug bonnets and long skirts, the men in knee length linen coats and breeches and wide hats - hurrying to get home before dark.
Ebenezer lingered with his fam- ily. He thought of all the things the people had done in these few brief years, the houses they had built, the land they had cleared and planted, the free life they had shaped. Once more he looked across at the two churches facing each other in friendliness now, at the schoolhouse and at the green meadow, worn and trampled by the many feet of men banded together to defend the things they cherished. This hill, with its great white oak,
a glorious crown against the glow- ing sunset sky, was the symbol of all they had done and all they hoped for.
With a pang, noting his father's weariness, knowing this might be his last trip to the top of the hill, Steve helped him mount his horse for the ride home through the deep- ening twilight, down Queen's Road to the Pequabuck, with its eventide noises of insects and birds, the peep- ers loud in the swampy ground, along the foot of the ridge to the great house they had built in the wilderness that was now part of this community of friends and neigh- bors, the new society they had formed here on the Connecticut hills beside the flowing waters.
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NEW
Rive
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LITCHFIELD
HARTFORD
WINDHAM
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POUGHKEEPSIE
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LESANON
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WYOMING VALL
CAMBRIDGE
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KINGSTON PLYMOUTH Q
FORTY
Lang
DINGMANS FERRY
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GREAT WATERGAP
NEW
GREAT YSWAMPY
JERSEY
EASTON
- MAP SU M.G. AND AW. -
LVANIA
Shades of Death
SIN
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FORT
WILKES-BARRE
moosic
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DANBURY
NEW
ROUTE OF THE "FIRST FORTY" TO WYOMING VALLEY, PENNSYLVANIA
ROUTE OF FIRST FORTY FROM CONNECTICUT TO WYOMING VALLEY
»5
THE great land rush
ELIAS ROBERTS and his bride Susanna, both nineteen, came to New Cambridge in the summer of 1746. As they rode down the trail from Compounce Lake, past Eben- ezer Norton's solitary cabin, they were enchanted by the winding river and the houses nestled among the trees on its fair hills.
Elias was one of three unusual brothers in Middletown where the Roberts had lived for three genera- tions. Susanna was the eleventh offspring of 'The Mighty Hunter,' Gideon Ives of Waterbury, whose prowess in killing bears, deer and wildcats in the Great Forest of the Pequabuck had become a legend far and wide.
Elias went to see his friend David Rich on Wolcott Street, where he lived with his wife Mehitable and the two children, a two-year-old boy and six-month girl. He asked Da- vid what land he could buy.
His friend took him to see Ste- phen Barnes at Goose Corner. They rode along the Pequabuck past the gristmill and sawmill, had a look at
the whole settlement from Joseph Benton's new house on Indian Quarry Hill, then went over to see John Hickox on Chippins Hill, where they had a talk with Samuel Messenger, who had just surveyed the village.
The rich valley spread out below. To the west were the never-tamed 'Thousand Hills.' Far east, the Plainville gap opened toward New Britain. The great hump of Rattle- snake Mountain loomed over long purple Talcott Range above Farm- ington. In the hazy distance rose the loftier blue-gray crest of the Bolton mountains beyond Hartford.
The southeast slope fell away to a rushing brook in the deep cool woods.
"This is Paradise!" exclaimed Elias. This was the place where he wanted to live.
A son, Elias Junior, was born in February, but early in the spring Elias came back with Elnathan Ives, his wife's oldest brother, and bought the tract at the foot of Chippins Hill. Elnathan bought a place on Middle
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THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
Street south of the Pequabuck River.
Elias culled out good timber for lumber for a cabin and burned over the scrub stadlings for potash. Those first years he sowed his rye and 'Injun corn' between the stumps.
He was a fine mechanic and woodworker, and in 1750 he bought more land south of Goose Corner for a shop.
In midwinter when there was a pleasant thaw, his older brother Jabish, who was a tanner, and his wife Abigail Cooper visited them. When Jabish saw the dam site where the mills stood, he exclaimed, "Just the place for a tannery. All I need is an acre or two."
From Joseph Adkins, a relative by marriage to the Rich's, he was able to get a few acres on nearby South Street.
"We want to get our younger brother Jacob up here, too. He's just come of age," Jabish remarked.
When Jabish and Abigail moved up permanently in the Fall, Jacob came along and bought land. Soon their Uncle William Roberts also came and settled.
The three brothers worked hard. In spite of Frisbie's tannery, Jabish had all he could do. In a few years the growing demand for leather goods and shoes induced Thomas Hungerford to come with two brothers from Haddam and set up a third establishment, but Jabish,
skilled in English methods, could always dispose of his almost water- proof leather to surrounding towns or Virginia and the West Indies.
Jacob, aided by his wife Eliza- beth Turner, was a steady farmer, tilling twenty-one acres near the river. He was a jack of all trades and a shrewd business man.
In 1758 Elias was able to buy Daniel Mix's old house and black- smith shop on Wolcott Street - the old Lyman place - and gradually bought more property. By then he and Susanna had three more chil- dren, Gideon, Seth and little Phebe.
As a boy Gideon sometimes went with his Uncle Jabish to the Pequa- buck forests to gather hemlock to treat sole leather, oakbark for softer uppers, sumach for linings and fine soft leathers. Later on when school was out, he worked at the tannery and often came home with his fore- arms dyed mahogany red from the tannin.
Tanning was no easy job. The green hides had to be soaked and shaken about in a 'tub wheel' to re- move the alkali. They were put over a beam and laboriously scraped, then rewashed with barley water or an acid solution called 'butts.' After being split down 'the back-bone,' they were put into a tanning solu- tion made by crushing oakbark, chestnut wood, gall nuts or sumach under stone wheels. The hide was then dried on sawhorses.
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THE GREAT LAND RUSH
Watching Gideon clean a hide, Jabish remarked, "The Indians scrape it with sharp bone. I learned a lot from them. No one has ever improved on their way of making soft white buckskin."
But best of all Gideon liked to work with wood. He turned into a skilled craftsman and found great pleasure helping his father make furniture and cabinets and carved chests.
Other fine wookworkers had moved in near the Roberts, and Gid- eon learned a great deal from them, too. Most were Baptists, consid- ered queer Satanic folk. Joel Bald- win on Fall Mountain made furni- ture, and proudly branded all his work J.B. Joseph Byington, north of the Jeromes above Kings Road, was also a skilled joiner.
Making wooden clocks might be a profitable business, Elias thought. Samuel Rockwell, with whom he had grown up in Middletown, had gone off to New London to learn clockmaking and had become a wealthy business man, shipowner and trader. Elias went to East Hartford to see Benjamin Cheney's noted clocks made and visited the shop of his brother, Timothy Che- ney. Though the brothers proved secretive, Elias picked up good pointers. He visited other clock- makers in Wethersfield and Wind- sor.
With Gideon's help, he started
cutting out wheels and pinions, ar- bors, barrels and pillars. But not many people could afford to pay ten or twelve pounds for a clock, or else were satisfied with their sundials and 'sand robbers,' as hourglasses were called.
"Even so, when there are more people to buy, somebody here in New Cambridge is going to make a real business turning out clocks," Elias told Gideon.
The years sped by. Susanna died. Elias grew restless. Though he was over forty, and one of the most prosperous members of the community, the adventurous urge to strike out and seek new opportu- nities came back to him strongly.
The chance came when the Sus- quehanna Land Company - a Con- necticut concern organized in Windham - sent out a call for set- tlers to go out to the Wyoming Val- ley in Pennsylvania. This was part of the land 'from sea to sea' - from the Atlantic to the Pacific - claimed by Connecticut under its original Royal Charter. The company of- fered each of the first two hundred and forty settlers 400 acres free. The first forty settlers could choose the best of the five townships laid out, and would be provided with £200 of food and supplies. The stockholders also voted £50 to build a road 'to the said Susque- hanna River.'
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THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
Aladdin's-lamp tales of the mar- velous beauty and richness of the Wyoming Valley on the fair Susque- hanna had already stirred the imagi- nation of everybody in Connecticut, farmers, shop workers, business men and poets, and Elias determined to be one of the first forty. The boys and Jabish were to come out later. Altogether they would have a whole kingdom out there. The fever of the land rush took hold of every- body.
Ever since the company had been organized in 1753 it had been trying to get the colony started. Full en- dorsement by the Connecticut As- sembly had been easily secured, but the British Crown did not want its New World subjects slipping off to the frontier where they would be freer of colonial controls and taxes. The lumber and minerals were con- sidered a royal monopoly, and it had taken years for the company to get grudging consent from London to proceed.
There was also a grave Indian problem. The Wyoming Valley was claimed by the Six Nations, a powerful Indian confederacy, and the first Connecticut settlers who went out were massacred. For seven years war had flamed along the frontier from Canada to Geor- gia.
Now peace had returned, but the Penn family, whose vast land grant overlapped the earlier Connecticut
grant, bought off the Indian Sa- chems and started leasing out the area in great manors.
Though it was the dead of winter, the Susquehanna Company sent out a hurry-up call for the 'First Forty' to leave before the end of January, 1769. Two hundred more would go out in May.
At once a small Connecticut group, led by well-known Captains Eliphalet Dyer and Vine Elderkin started out from Windham. This little cavalcade of a dozen horse- men was the beginning of a mighty migration that was to subdue and populate the whole northwest to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. They rode over the snow-capped hills to ancient Lebanon, where eight more adventurous souls joined them at the famous Alden tavern in front of the Indian School and the counting room of Jonathan Trum- bull, soon to be governor.
In New Cambridge, Elias Rob- erts, Samuel Gaylord and Zerubba- bel Jerome Junior tied their saddle bags and guns to their horses, and Job and Benjamin Yale, descendants of the wife of the first governor of New Haven colony, came riding down from their farm in Wolcott.
"Come March," Elias told Gid- eon, "you will be twenty-one, and I'll expect you to come in the next expedition with Jabish. Maybe Elias Junior will come out too. This will give us all a fresh start."
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THE GREAT LAND RUSH
The New Cambridge men joined the Windham party in Hartford, and all rode off toward Litchfield, thirty strong now, facing the cold winter wind, the rain and the snow, day after day in the saddle whatever the weather.
They cut down through Dutchess and Orange Counties of New York where they enlisted more recruits, and reached the Delaware River at Dingman's Ferry near Milford. Then they journeyed downstream through the Minisinks, as the region was called, to the Great Water Gap. Here they picked up two Pennsyl- vania volunteers, and their quota was full, exactly forty - hopeful res- olute men, ready to face the wilder- ness, the Indians, whatever might lie ahead.
The hardest part of their journey began here. They climbed up through utter wilderness, range af- ter range of high mountains, strug- gling through deep snowdrifts and following shaggy forest-clogged ra- vines. But at last, with a great shout of joy, they topped the last ridge of the rugged Moosic Range and looked down upon the promised land of milk and honey. At this moment it was a white carpet of meadow and dark forest enclosed by massive mountain walls, except where smoke curled up from the tepees of an Indian settlement and a cluster of river cabins.
At the junction of the Lacka-
wanna and Susquehanna Rivers, where the valley started to widen, they followed southeast along Mill Creek, a small tributary -- that was on February 8 - and ran head on into trouble.
The Pennamites, as the followers of William Penn were called, were already on the ground. They had put up a sturdy block house and had staked off the choicest valley land.
Sheriff John Jennings, backed by the leveled guns of the Pennamites, thrust a warrant under the noses of the Connecticut leaders. "Gentle- men, in the name of the Common- wealth of Pennsylvania, you are my prisoners.'
Bitterly disappointed, the Con- necticut folk were too exhausted from weeks of difficult travel through mountain snows to put up anv fight. Until the other two hun- dred arrived, resistance would be foolish.
Jennings ordered everybody out of the valley, and marched three prisoners, Dver, Elderkin and a third Connecticut man, sixty miles through the snow and thrust them into the one-room log-cabin jail at Easton on the lower Delaware. Af- ter four days, bv promising a local merchant a tract of company land, thev managed to get bail.
They rejoined the other Connec- ticut settlers, who had retired to the Minisinks on the Delaware. Several wanted to quit the whole business.
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THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
"I have to see this through," said Elias stubbornly. "My boy Gideon and my brother Jabish are coming out."
"Our claim is just. We have every right," insisted Elderkin.
Encouraged by this double argu- ment, all but two resolutely set out for the Susquehanna again. Once more they toiled hip-deep in snow through the rugged wild mountains. Once more they reached the Lacka- wanna and Susquehanna. This time they managed to throw up tempo- rary log cabins.
"Those rash and incomprehensi- ble people of New England" mut- tered the Governor of Pennsylvania when he heard of it.
Sheriff Jennings and his 'low and despicable characters' (as Dyer called them) burst into the Connec- ticut cabins and dragged everybody out by the heels and set fire to every- thing. All were taken into custody. That evening, at the end of the first day's hard ride before the rifles of their guards, Zerubbabel Jerome crept over to where Elias was lying beside the fire and whispered he was not going to be dragged sixty miles to be thrown into jail.
The whisper ran through the lit- tle circle. "Escape! Get away!"
Sheriff Jennings reached Easton with only twenty prisoners who were squeezed into the tiny one- room jail till bail could be provided.
By a messenger whom Captain
Dyer was sending back to the Con- necticut Company, Elias forwarded a letter to Jacob telling about his arrest. He had no funds. Food was scant. "Sell my lots and send me the money."
By the time his letter reached New Cambridge, Gideon and Jabish were preparing to follow. Gideon had resigned from the new South School near the mills where he was teaching that year. Jacob gave him money for Elias. "I'll take the lots myself if I can't sell them."
Gideon and his uncle set out in April. Eight neighbors went along: William Churchill, son of the mill- owner; Zebulon Frisbie Junior; Ste- phen Hungerford; Joseph Gaylord; Ebenezer Norton; Benjamin Ma- thews; Samuel Hotchkiss; and young Elijah Lewis.
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