USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > Bristol > Our Yankee heritage: the making of Bristol > Part 8
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The Barnes tavern, across from the mill bridge, was now run by the Pierce family from Southbury - Anna Pierce tended to it, while Abraham and his three sons looked after the grist and sawmills which they had also bought.
Well beyond the early settlers' houses on King's Road, at Lewis Corner near the North burying ground, Widow Lydia Thompson had a store. Near there, George Mitchell, Almira's brother, in addi- tion to his store, was making tinware with one of his brothers. Still an- other brother had his own tin shop. Several more tin manufacturers
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BOTSFORD-TERRY HOUSE ON MIDDLE STREET (top) (Permission Mrs. Fred Fletcher)
ABEL LEWIS HOUSE (bottom) (Vault, Bristol Public Library)
CANDACE ROBERTS: GIRL OF THE NEW CENTURY
were at work in the North Bristol section, later known as Stafford and Polkville or Edgewood. At the pond on Edgewood and Warner Strects lived Martin Byington, son of Jo- seph, and his third wife, Amy Man- ross, daughter of Deacon Elisha. Martin had a shop on Mine Road where he manufactured framed mirrors. Across the street from his home was the gristmill, operated by the brothers Benjamin and William Jerome Junior in partnership with Isaac Graham. Well to the north, Thomas Yale - descendant of the wife of the first governor of New Haven and a relative of the great East Indian potentate Eli Yale - had put up a sawmill. Another gristmill was soon erected near it. Luke Gridley's copper mine was on Yale property.
North from the business center of Goose Corner ran ancient West Street where Doctor Josiah Holt had put up the most magnificent residence in town, with Biblical wallpaper - Salome bearing John the Baptist's head on a platter - baronial double doors and waist- high wood panelling. A special wing housed an apothecary shop with the sign:
DRUGS - MEDICINES Sold by Josiah Holt
He owned about a thousand cen- tral acres, the largest landholder in
the community. The Peck family north of him also had large hold- ings. Josiah Peck and his sons had built houses all along Divinity Street. On a slight rise of ground on West Street, in the great house that Hezekiah Gridley Junior had built, now lived Baptist deacon Austin Bishop, tavern keeper, for whom Candace sometimes worked.
Austin had made that Continental Army storehouse into one of New England's famous inns. Its big front room had white oak corner posts, summer beams, pegged oak Hoor planks and a mighty twelve- foot stone fireplace. A stairway of half logs hewn out by broadaxe led down to the ample cellar. Part of the eternal duty was to work the long well sweep in the side yard, with its balanced stones in a rope basket.
Near the river were Wildman's and the tannery, now run by Lemuel Parker, where Theodore Frisbie made shoes. The bridge there was swept away by a flood in 1804 and had to be replaced.
One road angled northwest past the property Candace's grandfather Elias had first purchased and on to Chippins Hill and Luke Gridley's iron mine. At the southern tip of the Hill, below the schoolhouse and the Caleb Mathews and the Jerome homes, Lemuel Carrington, a for- mer Tory, ran a big tavern.
Sometimes Candace worked there
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THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
for she was a good friend of the Carringtons. One of the boys was her own age. That first year of her Diary she went there for a Fourth of July celebration and to a birth- day party.
The tavern was to be the tollhouse as soon as stages started running, for it was on the through Plymouth- Farmington-Hartford route. The town authorized a stage-line turn- pike in October, 1802, 'provided that the Town be at no Expense of Pur- chasing Land, paying the damages, maintaining said road, Building the Bridges or repairing the same.' Thomas Barnes Junior helped pro- mote this. A tollhouse was to charge 25 cents for a carriage, 4 cents for horse and rider, and a penny each for horses or cattle. People going to and from their fields, or to church, town meetings or training-band ex- ercises would pay no tolls.
The real center of Bristol and its various separated little communities was still Indian Quarry Hill, now called Federal Hill, where the little schoolhouse faced the bright-col- ored Meetinghouse to which a stee- ple with a bell had been added. But the old Episcopal Church was gone, and the moss-covered brown stones in the old Episcopal burying ground, where lay half a dozen of Bristol's first settlers, were now clogged with weeds and clambered over by schoolboys. The Church
of England folk had suffered so badly during the war, they had built the new East Church in Plymouth. The fine old windows of the original edifice were now part of Abel Lewis's tavern and store across from the old Joseph Benton home. Can- dace attended many fine balls at the Lewis tavern, the most fashionable center in Bristol for such affairs.
The school got its water at Dr. Titus Merriman's new house on Maple Street. He had come up from Wallingford to practice. One of his first calls was to attend the birth of one of Candace's brothers, whom Gideon gratefully named Titus Merriman Roberts. Across the street from the doctor, Ira Lewis was putting up a fine new house with two great stone chimneys and an end brick chimney with an oven for japanning tinware. In one wing of the corner house on the Green, pewter buttons were being made.
High above the Green and the church still rose the solitary great white oak that had become almost the symbol of liberty itself for the Bristol folk.
Such was the world in which young Candace lived and worked. Sometimes she baked for Thanks- giving - 'four times' in one day, she wrote in her Diary - or culled ap- ples and made applesauce, almost a full week of it. She went berrying, picked peaches and hunted for win- tergreen for tea and 'simples,' much
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CANDACE ROBERTS: GIRL OF THE NEW CENTURY
as Stephen Barnes had done three quarters of a century before. .
Not all of her life was hard toil. The people for whom she worked were her good friends. She visited their homes for tea, for parties and musical gatherings, quilting and sewing bees. They came to her home on similar occasions.
There were weddings: her sister Falla, her best friend Almira Mitch- ell, two of the Rich girls, sisters of John, the clockmaker, who married members of the Ives family, cousins of Candace. There were house- warmings and a gay house-raising bee with singing and cider and doughnuts, little parties where Can- dace 'spoke her pieces' learned at the Mountain school, and sang 'George Washington Dead and Rise of Jefferson' and 'Crazy Jane.' They played Dodge the Devil and danced hornpipes and jigs and Bonny Jay.
When the snow was deep and crisp they went on sleigh rides, often for days across country. On trips to Hartford they stopped for coffee in Farmington, rested at Simpson's Inn, had dinner at the Old South Hotel, perhaps came back by way of Simsbury to have a look at New- gate prison. Various stops were made at taverns to drink hot brandy flips and get warm before the fire.
In fair weather, as hacks and chaises became more common, gay parties set out in four or five vehi-
cles over the few passable roads, often not getting back till late at night. Candace went on one long jaunt of many days that started from Sheldon Rich's house on the upper Pequabuck to Southington, Water- bury, Wallingford and beyond.
On one occasion, Candace hired her friend Bill Thorpe's carriage - the town's only public hack - to carry friends from the Newell tav- ern, where she was then working for her brother Elias, to her father's home on Fall Mountain. She did not return it until the next day, but Bill scolded her roundly rather than charging her the usual $15 for such long use.
Mostly she went on horseback, either for pleasure or to get places. Once, coming down Fall Mountain, she was thrown - 'like to have broke my neck' she wrote in her Diary. Another time, not feeling well, she rode to East Haven for the salt- water swimming; sometimes to West Hartford to visit with a cousin and see the sights. She thought nothing of riding more than thirty miles in one day to New Milford to visit her married sister Falla.
She liked long hikes, especially in the evening, and once walked to a tea party in Plymouth, 'a little ways from her house,' she called it.
There were many fine balls and at Lewis's tavern where she was hope- fully expecting the arrival of a young man in whom she was deeply
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THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
interested, she reassured herself her dress and her spangles were as effec- tive as those of any other 'Lady' at- tending. Such affairs began early afternoon and lasted till three or four in the morning, so people who had to ride home many miles on their horses were apt to see the dawn coming over the hills.
One August day Candace rode as far as Plainville to Cooke's. "I had a verry verry good ball in the after- noon and evening," she wrote in her Diary. She did not leave until 3 a.m. and recorded that the next morning she felt like 'a stewed Quaker.'
Cooke's home, originally built as a tavern, was a fine place for a dance, with ample upstairs and downstairs ballrooms, a great stone fireplace and ovens. Cooke no longer kept it going as an inn. He was too busy at his basement forge with its great leather 'lungs' or bel- lows and had gone into the business of breeding mules which were grad- ually replacing oxen.
In his Day Journal, he jotted down that Lamberton Roberts, Candace's cousin, had agreed to sell him a bred mule colt at the end of five months for the sum of £4. As yet folk were not used to figuring amounts in the new American cur- rency of dollars and cents.
Candace always went to the train- ing-band exercises - not so different from those of Stephen Barnes's day
- except the uniforms had more adornment and the guns were bet- ter, but the officers still wore clank- ing swords, crimson sashes between blue coat and white trousers, and tufts of yellow cotton served as epaulettes. Stands were set up to sell hot oysters, cakes and grog. There was always a ball afterwards.
Election Day - called 'proxin day' - was another great occasion. The folk streamed to the Federal Hill Green from all sides, making it a big picnic and market festival. Rever- end Cowles preached a special Elec- tion Day sermon, and the wives baked a special Election Day cake. On the Green were grunting pigs and bawling calves, cows and oxen, horses and mules - all for sale or to be bartered off for hardware and tools, or maybe pewter, tinware or silk goods. Chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys made a great racket. There were stacks of grain and 'In- jun corn,' beans and pease, chest- nuts and hazelnuts. The women brought the cloth they had woven, the chairs they had caned, the twig brooms they had made. In the eve- ning Candace attended the usual Election Day ball at Nancy Lang- don's, a friend near Plymouth.
It is of such things, her work, her daily tasks and simple joys, that Can- dace wrote in her Diary. Presently she began working in taverns in Bristol and Wolcott. Taverns were not the rough saloons of Carrie Na-
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URI
CORRI
"TAVECH
PLAINVILLE LONG
COOKE'S TAVERN IN PLAINVILLE (Permission Cooke's Tavern)
THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
tion days, but places for family re- unions, weddings and balls. The spacious tavern room, with its great roaring fireplace, was a cheerful spot. One Bristol tavern was being run by a widow of one of Reverend Samuel Newell's sons in the old homestead, built by the first Pequa- buck settlers on Peaceable Street or Burlington Avenue. Tavern regu- lations - a holdover from Colonial days - required that at least one bed and a shed for not less than two horses must be provided.
Later Candace started working in tin shops. The first tinware was pounded out of sheets by wooden mallets, a work introduced into near-by Berlin in 1738 by the two Irish brothers, the Pattisons. Tin plate at first was merely thin sheet iron, shaped to the desired form, and dipped into hot tin, but tech- niques improved. Since it was so bright and shiny compared to pew- ter, and could be used for so many more things, it was soon in great demand. It was shaped into pots and pans, fruit canisters, bread boats, graters, teakettles, match- boxes, sconces, cookie cutters and the cast boxes for stoves, anything from ale 'tasters' to 'speaking trump- ets' and 'bathing machines.'
The first tinmakers peddled their own wares in fifty-pound tin trunks, carried on their backs or by horse,
to be sold in neighboring villages and to forest cabins.
But as roads and turnpikes im- proved, most tinware and clocks were sent out in wagons. Almira's brother, George Mitchell, was build- ing up a great network of peddling business in the Carolinas and the Ohio region. Often such wagons went 1,500 miles into the South and West with loads valued at several thousand dollars. Soon the tinmak- ers and clockmakers, as Gideon did, set up branch shops, especially for making clockcases, agencies where large stocks of wares could be shipped in by water and where ped- dlers could replenish their supplies without having to return to Connec- ticut.
Often peddlers traded wares for linen rags for the paper factories and wood ashes for the potasheries. Many of them ended up the season at New York where they sold their teams and wagons at a good profit, then came home by boat.
Much of the tinware in Candace's day was 'Japanneď' - double-baked with asphaltum in outdoor ovens, then painted. The inflammable ma- terial sometimes resulted in bad fires. William Alton Mitchell, Al- mira Mitchell's younger brother, was burned to death japanning tin.
The coated tin was painted or 'sprigged' with bright flower and fruit, bird or elaborate figure de- signs, even complicated panoramas
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CANDACE ROBERTS: GIRL OF THE NEW CENTURY
of lakes and medieval castles. The - Gideon Roberts's name is among decorating was done either free- those who hired animals at that rate. hand or by first tracing a pattern. Elijah's account book tells us that on May 1, 1803, Candace was paid $2.00 or 13 shillings. May 16 she took on credit: Sometimes stencils were used, but many adept workers gave their im- aginations free rein. Bristol tin- ware carried paintings of tulips, fish, roosters, cats, dogs, horses, sheep, 1/10 basting yarn 1 sh deer, donkeys, half moons, angels Ring 4 p and stars. Stocking yarn 1 sh 9 p
Candace showed talent for such work and easily found employment. There were eleven tinners in Bristol, others in nearby communities. She worked for Josiah Peck on Divinity Street near Deacon Austin Bishop's inn; at the Mitchell shops; and in Plainville and on Red Stone Hill. There was quite a community now on the southeast hill where many Baptists had settled, and Candace made friends with the first settlers there and on 'the Great Plains,' the Bishops, Lowreys and Phinneys.
Candace worked longest at Elijah Manross's shop in Forestville, where she boarded out or perhaps lived at his house, the more customary way. Nehemiah Manross had moved east to that section very early, buying a great deal of land there, and his sons and grandsons had laid out new farms and started shops and stores.
Elijah, his grandson, had fought during the American Revolution. Besides his tin shop, he had a gro- cery and dry goods store and a livery stable. Three shillings were charged for overnight use of a horse
6 sheets of paper 3 p
The 17th she bought two handker- chiefs for half a shilling. Other pur- chases and payments follow. July 8 she returned home to her father's with $26 in her purse.
For a time she worked for Mr. Asa Andrews in Farmington, a fa- mous craftsman who specialized in ornate wooden and tin chandeliers. She lived at his fine home and worked at his red brick shop across the lane, not far from the Meeting- house. There one of her girl friends, Sally Curtis from Plymouth, came to see her during a visit to an uncle, Lewis Curtis, who was making chime clocks that played different tunes and recorded the phases of the moon.
Candace's talent led her on to painting clockfaces and decorating the cases. For a considerable time she worked for James Harrison, a notable clock manufacturer in Wa- terbury, painting enameled dials. She made many pleasant but some- times gruelling trips, back and forth over the mountain from Bristol to
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THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
the Naugatuck Valley, in snow and rain and fair weather, by open 'ehariot' or on horseback. Once, on reaching Waterbury, she fainted from weariness.
She lived at the home of Colonel John Leavenworth, a notable new Waterbury industrialist and pro- moter, who ran the tavern, and had numerous faetories and other enter- prises. One of his sons took Can- dace on many a gay party. Most of her friends there were Baptists, and it was there she got her 'sousing.'
Afterward she went to work for famous Eli Terry in Plymouth, but presently moved to the Newell tav- ern on Peaeeable Street to help her brother Elias who had set up his own eloek shop there.
Bristol kept on growing, though in May 1806 Burlington split off to become a separate town. Many new small industries were getting started. Even before Gideon's death in 1813, his son formed Elias Roberts and Company. Thanks to sueh pioneering, soon there were many eloekworkers and cloek com- panies busy in Bristol.
Just as Gideon Roberts's eloek factory had grown and started using water power, so the little tin shops had grown, often turning to making many other needed products, par- ticularly for the clock trade. The same change was overtaking the blacksmith shops, the little sheds
where draftsmen made pewter and other metal goods, the carpenter shops where utensils and furniture were turned out. Presently more machinery was found that could be run by water power. Little mills poked their roofs from the trees on every little brook. These 'manufac- tories' grew in size and presently beeame great industries to serve the country and make the tasks of all men easier, providing leisure and comforts and a better way of life.
New roads were being built. By 1805 stageeoaehes from Danbury and Litchfield were passing through Bristol, bound for Farmington and Hartford. When the driver on the high seat of his new yellow-wheeled coaeh sighted the new Gaylord tav- ern and George Mitchell's store on the North side, the stops where horses were changed, he snapped his long silk-braided lash over the horses' ears, lifted a six-foot tin horn to his lips, and came roaring in with a tooting screech and a last spurt of gravel and dust.
Probably no one watched more eagerly than Candace, when she was working at Mitehell's or Car- rington's, to see who was arriving or who might be going on a trip. It was a great moment when the pas- sengers stepped out. The women wore wide skirts and quilted silk 'pumpkin hoods.' The men were dressed in tall hats and swallow- tails. Through-travelers sat down
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CANDACE ROBERTS: GIRL OF THE NEW CENTURY
to one of the baked oyster dinners for which the Gaylord Inn was al- ready famous. Those bound for Bristol took down their willow-twig linen-lined bags.
Candace had many a funeral to go to - the unhappy time when Al- mira's father, William Mitchell, died and Candace sewed her friend a black bonnet, or when Sabra Rich - wife of John - died suddenly, when expecting a child. Sometimes there were many funerals in a row, for epidemics in those days of poor sani- tation and open well water - ty- phoid, spotted fever, yellow fever, pneumonia, smallpox and dysen- tery - swept off whole families, as happened when Noah Byington lost his first wife Lydia Upson and five children. Typhoid was so common it became known as 'the Bristol dis- ease.'
The Mitchell family was dread- fully hit during the years when Can- dace wrote her Diary. In the Fall and Winter of 1803-4, George Mitchell lost his four younger chil- dren. The next year his oldest sis- ter died. The year after, his father died, and several years later he lost another child and his wife.
Knowledge of medicine and how to combat the more serious diseases was meager. A home recipe for cur- ing 'hooping-cough,' given in the 1801 Connecticut Almanac, was to apply hot lard, cooked with garlic,
to the soles of the feet. 'Astonish- ing' results were secured.
For some time, the town had been attempting to curb the dreadful cpi- demics, especially smallpox. In the Town Meeting of April 8, 1793, and again at the 1797 meeting, it was voted to set up a temporary 'pest-house' for Inoculation ('Onoc- kealation') with 'Sufficient Bonds (Bounds)' to prevent 'Infection Spreading.' People went to be in- oculated with smallpox germs made relatively inactive with arsenic and other drugs and thus acquire per- manent immunity.
Doctors Merriman and Holt un- dertook to maintain such a 'pest- house' in a house built by Ira Hotch- kiss in North Bristol on the north side of Shrub Road and the brook. Asa Bartholomew and eleven friends went into seclusion there to undergo the ordeal. The doctors' stern quarantine regulations for the build- ing and a wide zone around it were adopted by 'the civil authority and Selectmen' August 16, 1805. If any- one came into an extensive area - bounded by lines from a stone heap, a chestnut pole, a black birch tree on the ledge, a chestnut log, a peach tree by a rock, across a small orch- ard, various fences, and so on - they were to be interned until 'properly cleane' and until given 'lisence to depart.' All dogs straying within the bounds and any dogs within a mile radius not confined were to be
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THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
killed. All unused provisions had to be buried.
The pesthouse was set up the year before Candace nursed her sis- ter Catherine - 'Caty' - through ty- phoid. Several years before this, she and her mother had barely saved the life of little Ferdinand. An earlier child, also named Ferdi- nand, had died in 1797 when only seven months old. Now in 1806 her sister Falla was stricken just after losing her two-year-old son. Soon Candace was also sick.
She wanted to live, for lately she had recovered from the heartache of broken affection, and had found a new interest. She loved her friends, her reciting and her singing, her reading and her painting; above all, her quiet hours those evenings when she dreamed alone by the fire- place. She fought to live and did not want to die so young, but her life slipped away a few weeks before her twenty-first birthday, and Falla died the following day, bringing double tragedy to the Roberts family.
Such was Candace's life, labori- ous but gay, and in the end, tragic. Such was the new free town of Bris- tol in the early days of the lusty young nation that had won its free- dom. If the epidemics provided a somber note, the effort was already being made to bring about health controls to make life safer and hap- pier. New enterprise and opportu- nities were giving an impetus to fresh endeavor. It was a time of great hope and vision.
With new roads and canals, the West was opening up faster than ever now. Industry could scarcely keep up with the pace. Those first years of the nineteenth century, Bristol and Connecticut and the whole Republic were savoring their independence, feeling their new strength, learning new skills, rapidly inventing machinery and building manufacturing plants, making a bet- ter life and a stronger nation. Bris- tol was getting ready for greater things.
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»10
THE great canal
POLLY ATKINS MITCHELL folded her small blue silk parasol and arranged the many flounces of her wide chambray skirt in the new black carriage behind the span of sleek bay horses. George Mitchell, her husband, picked up the reins, and with a flash of yellow wheels, they whirled toward West Street.
Crowded in the back seat were her oldest boy of nine, one of her stepchildren and Candace, the grown daughter of George's sister, Almira. She had named her first child after her lost friend, Candace Roberts.
Polly was gay, this was her first real outing since her fourth child Julietta, born last year, and she had on a lovely flare-brimmed Navarino straw bonnet with a great crest of ostrich plumes.
She was George's third wife. The first two and most of his children had died in the early epidemics. But health conditions were better now, and those tragic events were only memories.
Polly smiled up at her husband,
so distinguished in his tall bell- shaped hat and swallow-tails. He was a prominent figure in Bristol, active in politics and business, school and church matters. For twenty years he had taken the lead with Pastor Daniel Wildman, Dea- con Austin Bishop, George Atkins and his numerous sons and daugh- ters, in caring for affairs at the Bap- tist Church on West Street. George's name headed nearly every subscrip- tion list with the largest amount, and he collected most of the funds. December 15, 1819, he gave $100 to buy a stove and stovepipe for the church. He was on the first Seat- ing Committee in 1806, and auc- tioned off the 'Slips' or pews. He sat on the Communion Committee that admonished or expelled mem- bers for failing to attend services or for intemperance or sinful conduct, and he labored long to help several walk the straight and narrow.
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