USA > Connecticut > Fairfield County > New Canaan > Readings in New Canaan history > Part 15
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By the spring of 1816 it was possible to provide better accommoda- tions, a "suitable two-story building" in a location described as "a little south of the meeting house in the field," a rod or two south of Henry B. Rogers' dwelling house, with the front of the building in a line with Mr. Rogers' west fence. As Mr. Rogers' dwelling is now the Community School, the first Academy was on almost the same spot where now stands another private school. Here for nearly twenty years the privileged youth of New Canaan, both boys and girls were daily summoned by a bell in the cupola to a "sound classical educa- tion" interrupted by two short weeks of vacation in the spring and the same in the fall. Now again, under James Linsley, young men began to be fitted for college, "college" being inevitably Yale. (The above described location is the site of the present Public Parking Lot - 1949.)
THIRTEEN ACADEMY TEACHERS
The succession of 13 teachers in 18 years does not imply that they were unhappy in their work, still less that they failed to give satisfac- tion. The policy was to employ young men fresh from Yale and make the most of their energy and enthusiasm for a year or two before they moved on to larger fields. Perhaps only in this way was it possible to pay a salary out of an income made up of tuition charges of five dollars a quarter for "the languages" and less for English, as much, it was thought, as people would be willing to pay. According to William
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St. John, son of the chief proprietor, "the teaching was complete and sound, embracing a finished English education; Latin and Greek, higher mathematics, philosophy and chemistry, etc., were also faith- fully taught." Surely the records in the archives of Yale University show that excellence of teaching was not sacrificed to economy. The thirteen pupils who were fitted here for Yale made such a creditable showing on their entrance examinations that they were said to be the best prepared of all the applicants of that time. This high standard seems to have been maintained throughout their university careers. All thirteen graduated, one of these, later the eminent Professor Samuel St. John, standing highest in his class, another being second and salutatorian of his class.
Of some of the thirteen young men from Yale who began their teaching career here, we have more than a bare record of name and date. Milton Badger in his short year at the Academy so endeared himself to his pupils that "few could keep from shedding tears when he left." With him there were no "whips or ferules" or "long tedious rules" or "any wet blankets" to be afraid of. Nevertheless the children regarded him with respect as well as affection and, if the absence of whips and ferules was exceptional, we do not wonder at the tears of the students as they looked forward to an unknown and probably harsher regime. Mr. Badger's successor, however, was Theophilus Smith, and although we are not informed of his attitude towards whips and ferules, we may be sure that there was no lowering of standard in regard to character or intellect for this is the man who after presiding over the Academy for two years and studying for the ministry, spent the rest of his life, 22 years, in the pastorate of the Congregational Church. It was during his ministry that the present church was built. His is the face, grave, intellectual, serene, which looks down from the walls of the lecture room.
FOLLOWED BY JULIAN STURTEVANT
The eighth master, whose two years at the Academy came just after our first quarter century, also made this experience the stepping stone to a career of eminent usefulness. Julian Sturtevant joined the famous "Yale Band" organized to found colleges, churches and schools in the Mississippi valley, then an outpost of civilization. He founded Illinois College at Jacksonville, beginning with only nine
THE
PHILOPÆDEAN SEMINARY, NEW CANAAN, CONNECTICUT.
This Institution formerly known by the name of the NEW CANAAN ACADEMY, is situated in New Canaan, Fairfield County, Connecticut, about half way between New-York and New-Haven, and six miles from the Norwalk SteamBoat landing.
The location is healthy and elevated, commanding a view of Long Island Sound, and embracing the conveniences of a small village with three Churches, Post Office, &e., and daily intercourse, by Stage and Steam-Boat, with New- York.
'The object of the Institution is to give to pupils a thorough English and Classical Education, fitting them for any of the Amer- ican Colleges, Mercantile pursuits, or to enter upon Professional studies.
The year is divided into two terms, of twenty-three weeks each, commencing on the first Wednesdays of May and Novem- ber, and preceded by a vacation of three weeks.
TERMS, including Board, Washing, Bedding, Fuel and Lights, with tuition in English studies, $160 ;- Latin, Greek and French, $200 per annum, exclusive of vacations. No deduction made for voluntary absence during term time. SILAS DAVENPORT, Principal.
ACADEMY OR SEMINARY ON CHURCH HILL
Reproduction of an advertisement of 1844 of one of the several private schools which operated for over fifty years after 1835 at the top of Church Hill.
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students. For 36 years he was president of this college. He is charac- terized as being "full of beautiful thoughts handsomely expressed." From an old "New Canaan Era" we learn that the Rev. Julian Sturte- vant preached here in the Congregational Church on a certain Sunday in 1870. We may imagine the memories of 40 years before which must have come thronging upon him as he looked down from the porch of the beautiful church which had taken the place of the "uncouth" building of his youth, toward the site of the Old Academy, long since gone, where as a young man he had labored all week im- parting a "sound classical learning" and again on Sunday, as super- intendent of the newly organized Sunday School, the young people had gathered about him in an upstairs room. Across the green he must have looked with still tender emotions at the old home (now the Ewing house) which had once belonged to Richard Fayerweather, one of the proprietors of the Academy, for it was here that Hannah Richards Fayerweather was living in the days when Julian Sturtevant was master of the Academy. Her father boarded Academy students from out-of-town and also carried on the manufacture of hats in a shop just north of his house. As Hannah was only a little girl of twelve when the young professor left New Canaan, nothing was probably farther from her thoughts than that she was destined to become Mrs. Sturtevant and spend her life gracing the exalted position of a wife of a college president. Hannah went west when she was sixteen and was married to Julian Sturtevent nine years later.
To still another master of the Academy, Alfred Newton, a student paid tribute in later years, saying that whatever he had achieved in life he owed to his teacher. He recalled also the dread with which he used to "parade on the floor" and speak his piece before the whole school. "I always was timid and bashful. The boys I did not mind much, it was the girls I most cared about - but I believe the mixing together of the two sexes was an advantage to both."
Surely the boys, although they alone could aspire to entrance into Yale, had some worthy competitors among the girls. We have as evidence, in the collection of old books in the Historical Room of the Library, a copy of "The Pleasures of the Imagination" by Mark Akenside, inscribed "From the preceptor of the New Canaan Acad- emy to Betsy A. St. John for excelling in English Composition. - L. M. Belden."
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Perhaps the girls took active part also in the inevitable feuds with their rivals in the little red schoolhouse just across the way. Consid- ering the constant factor of human nature, we can imagine how the public school children would jeer at the "Stuckups" among those little patricians whose parents could pay five dollars a quarter "or less for English" and in what plebeian terms the latter would retaliate. The war flourished best in snowballing times, when there was plenty of ammunition at hand.
And now after 1830 the children of the proprietors were all educated and numbers dwindled. At the same time teachers were no longer satisfied with the pittance the earlier regarded as adequate, and so the eighteen-year-old Academy came to an end, and the house was sold and removed - and most of us pass it every day without a suspi- cion that that dingy little building, which we have looked at a hundred times without really seeing, was just a century ago the center of intellectual nurture in New Canaan, the cradle of the Sunday Schools, the training school of ministers and teachers, and the first alma mater of many makers of New Canaan of the second century.
IMPROVING THE MIND
The little low house set back from Main Street between Comstock & Davis' plumbing shop and the block of stores just to the north is the old New Canaan Academy. It has had a checkered career since the era of its proud youth. We cannot trace its history all the way down the years, but we do know that at the time of the Civil War it was in use as one of the many village shoe shops. A man named Hall was then cutting shoes there and sending them out to be made up. He is described as a widower with a son named Percy. But a further decline awaited those classic halls: they became the setting for Richard Jones, a saloon keeper, and his famous high hat. This gentle- man, known as Dandy Dick on account of his taste in clothes, handed drinks over the bar until 1873. What a motley group of spirits must haunt the old place, now for two generations a dwelling house, whose timeworn walls give no sign of its classic beginnings, its industrial age, or its later degradation. In spite of its humble obscurity, we are tempted to apply to it Hardy's words about some old college build- ings: "They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men."
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(The above described location is the present S. N. E. Telephone property 1949)
The perennial interest of our town in proper training for the mind of youth reveals itself again in a very early attempt at establishing a public library. In December, 1811, nearly 75 years before what we commonly call our first library, "The Young People's Library of New Canaan" drew up a constitution which we may read today in a large but mostly blank volume in a collection of the New Canaan Historical Society. "The improvement of the mind in important knowledge," it runs, "is essential to usefulness, respectability and happiness, and the season of youth is eminently favorable to such im- provement." Also there is "a scarcity of books adapted to early life." The list of such books appended makes us wonder how an adult list would read. To be sure there were books of travel and memoirs, biography and history, by which, we trust, the youthful mind of New Canaan was not averse to being improved; but the nearest approach to light fiction seems to have been "Sanford and Merton;" "Pilgrim's Progress," "The Vicar of Wakefield" and "Robinson Crusoe."
On the last Wednesday of each month there was a meeting of the "Library" in charge of the standing moderator, the pastor of the Con- gregational Church. This was the Rev. William Bonney at that time, and it is his signature which is affixed to the Constitution. There was also a librarian, a treasurer and an examining committee to assess fines and stamp damaged books.
PROCEDURE OF MEMBERSHIP
We do not know where the meetings were held or where the books were kept,-perhaps at Mr. Bonney's house on Haynes Ridge where Mr. Mitchell had lived and taught. We have, however, some inter- esting details of procedure. One might become a member or "pro- prietor" by signing the articles and paying one dollar. At the meeting the librarian called the names alphabetically and each "proprietor" had one minute to choose a book. If, however, he wished to pay more than a dollar, he was entitled, not to more books but to more time for choice, each extra dollar or share enabling him to take one more minute to contemplate, for instance, whether he should prefer "Soli- tude Sweetened" or "Dielencourt on Death" as a companion for his
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leisure hours in the month ahead. After the young Benedicts and Carters, lucky in their initial letters, had made their choices, an unfor- tunate St. John or Weed might have difficulty in finding anything very alluring on the shelves, no matter how many minutes he might have at his disposal. Nor could a generous Benedict lend his chosen volume to an eager St. John: such an act was punishable by a fine of fifty cents. A provision to get a book back on time to give it out again at the regular meeting was the imposition of a fine of twelve and a half cents for the first hour it was kept over time; after that the of- fender must pay one cent a day. The other penalties remind us that the forbidding titles really were meant for the youthful mind, for the officers must have been thinking of youthful fingers when they imposed a fine of six cents "for turning down a leaf or greasing the margin," and the greater penalty of twelve and a half cents for the graver misdemeanor of "greasing the print." It is hard to imagine More's "Sacred Dramas" or Zion's "Pilgrim" thumbed by greasy hands or a page turned down to assure finding the place quickly in "The Force of Truth" or "Religious Courtship." Of the last there were two copies, one presented by Mr. Samuel St. John. Another work of which there was an extra copy, presented by Mrs. Bonney, was More's "Strictures in Female Education." Indeed there seems to have been ample provision for improving the feminine youthful mind of New Canaan, as our catalogue also includes "Memoirs of a Pious Woman," Burnett's "Letters to a Young Lady," Newton's "Letters to a Wife," and Gisborne's "Female Duties."
NOURISHING THE BODY
The 280 families of early New Canaan who provided so well for the education of their children were mostly simple farmer folk to whom the three primary needs of food, shelter and clothing had in the older days of Canaan Parish been each family's individual prob- lem to be solved separately on the home farm. But as the century progressed and with it the more modern system of the division of labor, the farmer became increasingly dependent upon his neighbor for all these necessities.
An early essential to every family was the grist mill. These were numerous in New Canaan so that no farmer would have to carry his grain very far to be ground into flour. Vivid in stories of that time
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shines the personality of Justus Hoyt, blind miller, whose time-worn machinery is still to be seen rusting away in the underbrush on the shore of the Mill Pond near the cemetery entrance. We suspect that the blind miller did not share the fiery convictions of his father, the older Justus, a licensed Baptist preacher, who held that none of a different persuasion could expect to go to heaven. The younger Justus, losing his eyesight by an accident when he was nine years old, acquired a wonderful skill-the sixth sense sometimes seen as compen- sation in the blind-which enabled him to keep all his bags of flour properly sorted. Customers came to him with their grain from Darien, Wilton and Norwalk, attracted by his honesty and faithfulness, also by his genial nature. The youngsters, always glad of an errand at the mill, came home with wonderful tales of the uncanny skill of "Uncle Justus."
Nearby on Summer Street, Weed's flour mill was in full blast about 1824, and Benedict Wood had a large grist mill also not far away. Here, as in the church registers, we find the names of Hoyt, Com- stock, Benedict, St. John, Raymond, ministering now to the physical nourishment of their townsmen.
The production and distribution of meat also had gone a step be- yond the individualism of pioneer days. We have already noted the shop of Hezekiah Jennings, the town butcher, just below the Ayres tannery on Carter Street Road (now East Avenue). "Kiar," as he was called, always killed three-year-olds and for the best cuts charged ten cents a pound. This shop, however, must have been a recent in- novation, as John Benedict, fifth of the fifteen children of Caleb, the boss shoemaker, of whom we shall hear later,tells how his father had to add the function of butcher to his other activities. There was then no meat market in town. One could kill his own beast or wait for the wagon to come around three times a week. With his household of some two score mouths to feed it was evidently more profitable to do his own butchering in an old barn to the west of his house. He used to buy his cattle of farmers, sometimes travelling a long way after them. He would kill a beef and next day start out in a wagon and peddle it. With so many shoemakers in town a good many of the "best families" kept boarders and demand for meat was considerable. As the usual price for board was about one dollar a week, it was well that porterhouse and sirloin could be had for six and seven cents a
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pound. Tallow brought the high price of ten cents a pound because in those days of home candle-dipping, before the whale oil lamp, this was the only source of light. A family could lay in about a quarter of beef and with their home grown pork would have enough to go through the winter. So Caleb Benedict butchered only in summer, and then must needs dispose of part of it, as even his great household could not use it all before it spoiled. At that time no one dreamed of using ice for warm weather storage.
As in the case of food, so in the case of shelter: the farmer had to rely upon the miller for the first step in preparation of the raw material for use. Before he could build his house he must have his logs sawed into boards - by the blind miller perhaps who combined this branch with his grist and cider mill - or, if he lived in Silvermine, at Buttery's sawmill on the river or at Daniel's sawmill on the place now occupied by Mr. H. B. Thayer (F. C. Noble).
There are interesting associations connected with one old sawmill on Mud Pond. This was replaced by a new mill, built in 1848 by Anthony Comstock, which later passed into the hands of Jefferson Barlow Ogden, father of Arthur B. and Stanley D. Ogden. Over west of this spot could be seen the cellar of an old building that was used as a "Pock House." An old account book gave a list of articles sent to the Pock House in 1770. One hates to think of the poor victims of small pox banished to such a solitary and primitive spot.
The patrons of Justus Hoyt, the blind miller, did not have to go far for their tools for carpentry. On the place on East Avenue, occupied of late years by Dr. King, Joseph Watson and later George Young maintained a tool factory run by water power. Here were made chisels, crowbars, hammers, also most of the shoe knives used so extensively in town, and other edged tool so sharp that "you could shave your beard with them." One New Canaanite writing in his old age says he used to see many a farmer waiting his chance to unload his wagonful of grain to be ground by "Uncle Justus," then going up to Watson's factory to have his axe repaired.
50,000 PAIRS OF SHOES
But early New Canaan industrial history centers around the third of man's primary needs - that of clothing, especially footwear. It was in this first quarter century of its existence as a town that New
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Canaan with its output of 50,000 pairs of shoes a year, ranked third in this industry in the entire country, and first of all in the produc- tion of women's shoes.
It must have been of a more primitive stage of the industry that one old resident writes when he tells how usually the shoemaker worked until he had a dozen or so pairs and then embarked from Five Mile River (Rowayton) for New York. Arrived there, he walked up and down Cherry and Chatham Streets with a sack full of shoes slung over his shoulder in search of a purchaser. But even when he had disposed of his stock, he was fortunate if he got his money under two or three months, as the credit system was the prevailing one in the city as well as in the country. We have seen how the farmers and their families, working on shoes in the evenings and on stormy days, received not cash but "White Dogs" or orders on general stores. By 1830 there were two of these, one kept by Seymour Comstock and the other by Charles and Thomas Raymond. The one exception to the white dog system was the custom of a man named Hezron Ayres, whose "factory" was about opposite Dr. Humphrey's place on Brushy Ridge Road, (the present A. D. Wilt house). He alone, with six or seven cutters handing out employment to more than 40 workers, paid cash for this work. We find various men of this name engaged in the early manufacture of shoes and in the allied industry of tanning leather.
It was Amos Ayres who built the "Big Shop" so familiar to New Canaanites for just over a hundred years, on the corner of Main Street and Locust Avenue now devoted to the Firehouse. He had previously made shoes in an old building just south of there, and in 1824 this "shoe factory" - not the unsightly brick affair with smoke-blackened chimney that we have associated with the word since the coming of the machine age, - but a structure which, with its handhewn timbers and beautiful windows and fan lights, suggested the old New England meeting-house rather than a shoe-making establishment. Its builder did not once use it all as a factory but opened a general store in one of the front rooms. He is said to have had a hotel also, and to have been "much of a go-ahead man."
TANNERY ON MAIN STREET
Just south of where the Rosen shop is now, and running to the
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corner of the present East Avenue, was the property of Frederick Ayres, brother of Amos. His homestead, built a few years before the Revolution opposite where the bank now stands, had been occupied at the turn of the century by one Jacob Reed, who had vats dug in the rear and carried on tanning. Frederick Ayres took over both the house and the tannery, a calling which he pursued for many years, together with a large shoe business. He managed, however, to have time for a hobby: he had a number of beehives and was "suc- cessful in the management of these pets." We are told that he died respected by all.
William H. Ayres, the tanner, was the son of Frederick. He had a bark mill down the road very near Watson's Tool Factory, and 30 or 40 vats for tanning leather where Johnson's Garage now stands. We suspect from an account of a similar project in another part of town and many years later that this could not have been a very savory corner. (Evidently New Canaan began early to suffer from the lack of a zoning Committee). An Ayres of a later generation was associated with a man known as "Thunder and Lightning" Trow- bridge, in a tannery on Carter Street (the present Self property) and it is of this establishment that some one wrote in the New Canaan Messenger in 1883: "The drainage from his vats is not quite so repulsive as formerly owing to the fact that Mother Earth, so parched and dry, drinks it up, leaving only a dirty black scum on the surface to tell the tale."
There were still others of the Ayres family connected with the shoe business: Jared Ayres, brother of Amos, of Clapboard Hill, whose success is attested by the fact that his two sons were educated at Yale, one becoming a successful teacher, the other a prominent doctor; Edward Ayres, who had a small building for making shoes in what was later Mrs. Fancher's yard on Maple Street. (opposite the Catholic Rectory.)
But the name that comes even more readily to mind when New Canaan shoes are mentioned is the name of Benedict. We have had to go back to pre-Revolutionary times and out to Brushy Ridge to find the beginning of this industry so important in our village in all but the first few years and these last few of its history. On Brushy RidgeJohn Benedict, in a little shop attached to his home, began the calling that was to descend through so many generations as to
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become the oldest shoe business in America. He himself lived to the ripe age of 95. It was under his youngest son, "Boss" Caleb Benedict, that the business grew until it occupied a row of buildings 100 feet long and reached the figure of "100,000 a year."
PICTURE OF HOUSEHOLD LIFE
We have an interesting picture of the ample life of this household. Every morning after breakfast, Caleb Benedict gathered about him his family which included fifteen children and twenty apprentices and whatever "boarders" there might be, and each would read a verse from the Bible, taking turns according to age, until a chapter or two had been read. The father and"Boss" would then comment on the text and offer a prayer. A member, as was his wife, of the Con- gregational Church, he was a "stern, resolute, positive character" - a pioneer of the temperance cause and belonging to the thorough- going group that renounced wine and cider along with the stronger beverages. But although rigid rules and regulations were necessary to an establishment of such proportions this seems to have been a benevolent despotism. Caleb Benedict "had tender feelings and was easily touched," consequently his home was known by tramps as a place where they would find generous entertainment. The 40 dif- ferent boys who through the years made their home with him to learn the shoe trade knew him not only as a stern taskmaster, but as a friend. The story of Sid Selleck, who ran away and was pursued, brought back, and forgiven, must have been a favorite one with the apprentices. Neighboring farmers found Boss Benedict not too intent upon his business to help them cradle their grain, for as his son John says, "They looked upon father as an expert cradler of grain as well as cradling babies." The son here quoted, born in 1812, moved down into the village and lived in a house where the Catto and Thomas establishment now stands on East Avenue just below Main Street. It can have been no fault of a Benedict that this was later to become the saloon known as "The Red Onion."
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