USA > Connecticut > Litchfield County > Litchfield > Semi-centennial of the Litchfield historical and antiquarian society > Part 3
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The growth of the organization in Connecticut has been phenomenal; the record of its achievements is equally sur- prising. From the first, the Connecticut D. A. R. have recognized the dignity and value of their mission, and have fulfilled its obligations in a thoughtful and conscientious manner.
They have not allowed the social side of Chapter life to take precedence of their self-imposed duties. They believe their mission to be a vital one, and that the objects and aims of the Society touch upon the eternal verities, since they concern the highest and best interests of "Home and Country." They believe that they are putting new life into the dry and crumbling bones of a dead and almost forgotten past, and that they are making history which should be a help and inspiration to generations to come.
There is another side to this question of which we hear little, but it is a side not to be forgotten when summing up the good which has resulted from the organization of this Society. I refer to the benefits accruing directly to the Daughters themselves from the esprit de corps which has been cultivated among us, from the spirit of comradeship and good-fellowship which exists among us to-day, and from the sweet and gracious friendships which have come to so many of us through the pleasant medium of happy Chapter life and Chapter work. These are among the help- ful and healthful features of our organization and should be listed as one of our valuable, as well as valued, assets.
I am occasionally asked by the wayfaring sister or brother to whom I referred a moment or so ago, if Daughters of the American Revolution do anything except wave flags and glorify their ancestors. In other words, they wish to know if there are results to show for the time, energy and money we are putting into this movement.
The reply would necessarily occupy more time than the average listener is willing to give to any subject. Among
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other things it would include a history in detail of the kind of commemorative work the Mary Floyd Tallmadge Chapter has been doing. I refer to the fact that we have starred the State of Connecticut with wayside stones, tablets, memorial gateways, fountains, etc., nearly sixty such memorials to mark historic sites, or in memory of the heroes of the Revo- lution and what they represented. It would include the details of the restoration of many Colonial and Revolu- tionary burial places, and the saving to the commonwealth of much of its early history through the copying and pre- servation of fast fading and crumbling church and town records. It would include the story of our efforts to culti- vate a spirit of patriotism which need not depend for its inspiration upon flag waving, fireworks and the booming of cannon.
It would include the résumé of a far-reaching movement for the intellectual and moral training of the destitute children of the State and Nation-children of both native and foreign birth. It would touch upon our effort for the social and political education of adult foreigners-all of which make for peace and righteousness and good citizen- ship. In addition to their purely historical and com- memorative work, the D. A. R. have undertaken to grapple with certain hydra-headed sociological problems, and they are doing it with the same vigor and earnestness of purpose that was manifest in the methods of their forefathers. "Blood will tell"-and if any one thing is more obvious than another, it is that the blood of Daughters of the American Revolution has not been wholly depleted of its inherited proportion of iron and fire. I could easily fill the hours of this afternoon with merely brief mention of the achieve- ments of the Connecticut Daughters only-but even then the real significance of these achievements would still remain untold. Judged by their fruits, I do not feel that I over- state, or in any way misrepresent the attitude of the Con-
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necticut Daughters of the American Revolution, when I claim that in all their work for "Home and Country" they have been and are actuated by principles closely allied to those which influenced their forefathers and foremothers in Colonial and Revolutionary days; and if it were possible for them to do so, we believe those ancestors would set the seal of their approval upon the great patriotic movement which is even now attracting world-wide attention-a move- ment which is largely due to the women of our generation and which is sweeping like a tidal wave over our native land, rousing the masses and crystallizing patriotic sentiment and noble impulses into well-defined and forceful efforts to lift this dear land of ours up, and out of, and beyond the reach of the national and municipal degradation which sometimes threatens to overwhelm it, and to swing it far aloft and back again upon the high and broad tableland of political integrity upon which our forefathers founded this republic, and where they entered into solemn compact to give to the world a pure and honest government, of the people, by the people and for the people-and sealed this compact with their precious blood. The motto of our organization is "For Home and Country." The Society stands for ideals. It stands for a lofty standard of social, political and personal ethics. It stands for loyalty to the flag that floats over us, and for a country with a conscience. To save the warp and woof of the Nation's history as bequeathed to us by our ancestors, and to inculcate the principles of a Christian patriotism in the hearts of the people, is a part of our mis- sion. To do our full share toward making the world a little brighter, a little better, and a good deal more patriotic than we sometimes have reason to believe it is, is also a part of our mission. But, after the manner of women, we must do our work in our own fashion. We may not go into the legislative halls on Capitol Hill in Washington and cast votes for this, that or the other helpful measure for the good of
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mankind, but we may and are bringing strong educational and moral influences to bear upon our dangerously large foreign population, with the hope of making good American citizens and worthy patriots out of possible foes, who may, even now, be shielding themselves in the folds of Old Glory while they strike at the laws of the land, and attempt to belittle the value and strength of a nation's loyalty to its flag. We may not go into the pulpit and preach our creeds to a little coterie of men and women whose beliefs are the same as our own, but we may, and do, carve our sermons upon stone, or mould in bronze our bits of local history, and set them up by the wayside where they may be read by men and women of all creeds or no creed at all; or we may follow the example of the Mary Floyd Tallmadge Chapter and in noble symbolic form and splendid color give outward expression to the faith that is in us, that our ancestors represented the highest type of manhood, that the principles for which they fought were the foundation stones for the highest and best form of self-government, and that their sacrifice embodied the acme of human suffering, of heroism, of personal effacement, for the sake of what, to them, was a sacred cause.
Were the men whose memory the Daughters of the American Revolution are honoring to-day actuated by motives of personal aggrandizement when they turned their faces from home and loved ones and gave themselves over to the horrors of war? Not one of them. They may not have been conscious of it, but every one of them, even the humblest, was prompted to the step by his own sense of duty, by what seemed to him right and best for Home and Country, rather than by what might be pleasant or profitable for himself. Not in so many words did they say it, but in their lives and deaths there is ample proof of their eager- ness to dare to do and to die for the cause of civil and religious liberty.
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"Of what avail the plow or sail, Or land or life, -if freedom fail ?"
In placing this beautiful and significant memorial to the memory of Litchfield County's Revolutionary Soldiers, the patriotic women of the Mary Floyd Tall- madge Chapter have honored not only their ancestors, but themselves and the State of Connecticut as well. They have set up in this goodly place a fadeless vision, symboliz- ing the glory and beauty of faithful doing and noble self- sacrifice. This splendid page out of the history of our State should be, and will be, an object lesson to this and to future generations and a sufficient answer as well to those who stand outside the fold and wonder what the Daughters of the American Revolution have been and are doing.
I bring to you, Madam Regent, and to the Chapter which you have the honor to represent, the felicitations of Sister Chapters throughout the State, upon the completion of the historical and commemorative work which has engaged your attention for the past two years. We are proud of it, and of the Chapter which has so worthily discharged a share of the debt of gratitude which we all owe to those who fought to make us a nation.
After all, it is the women who give much of the tone and color to the sentiment of a people and through home and social influences wield a quiet but pervading force in public affairs. In devotion to the principles which actuated the makers of this mighty nation, in love of country, in loyalty to the flag, in wise and legitimate effort for municipal reform, in a vigorous stand for the preservation of Ameri- can customs and the permanency of the American Sabbath, we may, if we will, be supreme.
If a patriotic and ethical renaissance should receive its impetus through our loyal efforts for Home and Country, then will Daughters of the American Revolution know that
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they have not failed either in their duty to the past or their obligations to the future.
The next speaker, Miss Clara Lee Bowman, spoke on "Ideals of the National Society, D. A. R.," and was introduced as follows :
Among the twenty Vice Presidents-General of the National Society, D. A. R., Connecticut has several times been represented by one of her distinguished Daughters. To receive proof of the confidence of 50,000 women repre- senting every State in the Union, is a distinction not to be despised.
Not the least honored among those who have held this high office in the gift of the National Society is she who is to speak to us to-day of its ideals of service to "Home and Country." In her person the National Society to-day pays tribute to the memory of our Revolutionary patriots of Litchfield County. It is fitting that not only Connecticut, through our loved State Regent, but that the National Society as well should share in this grateful commemoration of the patriotism of our Litchfield County men in their struggle for national independence. Therefore it is with great satisfaction that I present to you this very dear and honored guest amongst us-one who is loved in Connecticut and whose name is held in high esteem wherever it is spoken-Miss Clara Bowman, Vice President-General for Connecticut of the National Society, D. A. R.
Miss BOWMAN spoke as follows :
It gives me great pleasure to bring to you greetings and congratulations from the National Board of the Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Congratula- tions especially that the Mary Floyd Tallmadge Chapter has
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given to us such a perfect illustration of the aims and ideals of that Society, in this beautiful memorial which we all delight to honor, and in whose honor we are gathered together to-day.
Memory and reverence for the past, beauty and joy for the present, example and inspiration for the future-are they not all united in the varied colors, the symbolic figures, the grace and dignity of form and outline which combine to make this memorial window tell its story to the children of to-day, who are to be the citizens of the future? A story which will keep alive in the hearts of men the good name and great deeds of those heroes of old, who by serving their day and generation gave to us a nation, and to whom we owe a never to be forgotten debt of gratitude.
But for the efforts of this Chapter many of those 3,000 Revolutionary soldiers of Litchfield County would have slept in unmarked and forgotten graves. Now their monu- ment beautifies and adorns their early home and their memory is kept green among us. .
Sixteen years ago, when our Society was first started, a spirit of iconoclasm had swept over the land, vandalism was abroad, the tide of prosperity was gaining in strength every day and sweeping before it, not only old landmarks, but all sentiment regarding them. Old homesteads were being torn down, old records lost sight of, the priceless contents of grandmothers' attics with letters and journals of past generations were being turned over to the ubiquitous rag- man ; a flood of immigration threatened to submerge us; a generation had arisen who knew not Joseph and who were only concerned with the fleshpots of Egypt.
Then it was that our ancestral Societies were born. As has always been the case in the world's history, the need brought the man ; this time it was both man and woman-for we yield precedence to the Sons of the American Revolu- tion-and their example was closely followed by that small
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body of earnest women in the city of Washington who in 1891 formed the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, with little idea of its far-reaching effects. To concentrate the pure stream of patriotism which is our natural birthright, "to perpetuate the memory and spirit of the men and women who achieved American inde- pendence, by the acquisition of historical spots and the erection of monuments, by the preservation of documents and relics and of the records of individual services of Revolutionary soldiers and patriots, and by the promotion of celebrations of all patriotic anniversaries."
These were the first ideals for which our Society was founded, but we have hitched our wagon to a star which rises higher and higher on our horizon. The spirit of our organization has flashed like a signal fire from State to State. Its members are hard at work in every State in the Union, in the islands of the sea and in foreign lands.
In our first ten years of action we strove to erect monu- ments on every hillside where the glory of history has set its mark. New England is dotted with our landmarks until it almost seems as if the supply of historical sites would become exhausted. The Western States envy us our many opportunities of service. It would take hours, instead of the few moments alloted me, to tell half the tale of the carrying out of our ideals. Connecticut alone has spent $125,000 in this work. We have reclaimed old ceme- teries in many towns beside Hartford, and can but feel that in the line of erecting memorials our mission is almost accomplished. All this gratifies our sentiment of loyalty to the past, but of late years our conscience has been aroused to a sense of our active duty to the present.
This grand, splendidly organized body of earnest women is equipped and ready to enter into the great social problems that are facing our generation. 'Tis a case of noblesse oblige, and we could not escape from it if we would. Our
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ideals have become flesh and blood,-they have assumed gigantic proportions. We see visions and dream dreams. with the great problem of immigration in view, patriotic · education committees have been appointed by both National and State Societies. It is our dream that every State and Chapter shall have a hard-working committee to study and meet the needs of the foreigner in their midst, who has come to live among them as an American citizen. If each Chap- ter would enter into settlement work for their own locality, think what a transformation we might bring about for our own generation! Much is being done on those lines by Connecticut Daughters, as Mrs. Kinney has told us. Massa- chusetts, Ohio, Rhode Island, New Jersey and New York also have active committees at work.
Another line of service which appeals to us especially is the education of the descendants of Revolutionary soldiers, shut in for generations by the fastnesses of the great Smoky Mountains, until they are as far behind the life of to-day as if they were indeed in the generation of the War of Inde- pendence, when their fathers fought shoulder to shoulder with the best men and patriots any of us can boast in our ancestry.
It is another of our dreams that every Chapter in the country shall educate a mountain girl in some of the South- ern colleges, that they may go out among their own people as our representatives. What better memorial can we erect than to build into the characters of these young people a sense of devotion to country and to home, and offer them to our generation as worthy citizens of the future?
With every decade, in fact with every year, new ideals rise before us. We are earnest women, anxious to do our share of the world's work and to leave our beloved country better than it might have been without our effort. We aspire to be vestal virgins of patriotism, loyalty and service.
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If our ideals are far beyond our accomplishment, "if we have built castles in the air," our work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now let us put foundations under them.
In introducing Mr. Ellsworth, who spoke on "Litchfield County in the Revolution," Mrs. BUEL said :
Four years ago the descendants of Connecticut's great patriot and statesman, Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth, pre- sented to the Connecticut Daughters of the American Revolution the homestead at Windsor of their illustrious ancestor, to have and to hold forever. The day of presenta- tion was an eventful day for the Connecticut Daughters, and for the State as well. It gave us our Connecticut Mount Vernon. On that day, he whose name now honors our programme was the spokesman of those generous de- scendants whose deed of gift to the Connecticut D. A. R. was the first deed taken out on their patrimony since its con- veyance to the first Ellsworth in 1665. It is superfluous to introduce to this audience one so well known in the ranks of historians and literary men as this descendant of Oliver and Abigail Wolcott Ellsworth, who is to speak to us to-day about our own County (which is also his County) in the Revolution. It is also superfluous to say that in the hearts of the Connecticut Daughters of the American Revolution the illustrious name he bears will ever hold a warm and con- spicuous place. I have the very great honor to introduce Mr. William Webster Ellsworth of the Century Company.
Mr. ELLSWORTH, in response, spoke as follows :
Madam Regent, and you Chief Daughters of our State, Ladies and Gentlemen :- In the year 1774, eleven months before the first gun was fired at Lexington, the King's representative in the Province of Massachusetts Bay sailed
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for England on a much needed vacation. The passage of the Boston Port Bill and other equally obnoxious acts had given Govenor Hutchinson some strenuous days. Imme- diately on his arrival in England he held a long conversa- tion with King George regarding the rebellious colonists over sea. His Majesty, having sounded to its depths the perfidy of his Massachusetts subjects, passed on to Rhode Island, whose government, he learned, was "nearest to a democracy of all the colonies." "How is it with Connecti- cut? Are they much better?" asked the King. "The con- stitutions, sir, are the same," replied the Governor, "but Connecticut are a more cautious people ; strive to make as little noise as may be, and have, in general, retained a good share of that virtue which is particularly necessary in such a form of government."
It was to the foolish and mistaken policy of this same King that the American Revolution was due. Lecky, the English historian, says of one of the acts of George III against the Americans, that it was as criminal as any of those that led Charles I to the scaffold. "His hiring Ger- man mercenaries to subdue the essentially English popula- tion beyond the Atlantic," says Lecky, "made reconciliation hopeless and the Declaration of Independence inevitable."
If the King could have looked forward for a little more than two years from the day of his interview with Governor Hutchinson, he would have seen the leaden statue of himself, which had been set up with great pomp and circumstance in the Bowling Green, in the city of New York, tipped from its pedestal by the Sons of Liberty and, later, borne in pieces to a little hill-town in northwestern Connecticut, where the ladies of the Wolcott family and their friends organized what might be called a bullet-bee, and from His Majesty's counterfeit presentment made up some 42,000 cartridges for use against His Majesty's soldiers.
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That little town in Connecticut was the county seat of an energetic people, engaged as we are to-day in tilling the granite rocks of the Berkshires. It had been named from a cathedral city in the motherland. In the years just before the outbreak of the Revolution, Major André, whose death was one of the most grievous incidents of the war, was a fre- quent visitor to the English Lichfield. There lived Anna Seward, his friend and later eulogist, and in the literary cir- cle of the town was Dr. Erasmus Darwin, author of "The Botanic Garden" and other works of prose and poetry, and grandfather of the great naturalist ; there, too, lived Thomas Day, who wrote "Sanford and Merton"; and the Edgeworth family-Maria was then a little girl. There, with the Sewards, Honora Sneyd made her home-the girl with whom André fell in love and whose picture was the only one of his possessions he was able to retain at the time of his first capture by the Americans, and, in that capture, which occurred in the early months of the Revolution at Fort Chamblis on Lake Champlain, Litchfield County troops, on duty in the district, were undoubtedly concerned. André, in one of his letters home, referred to "the dear Lichfield- ians," but it was not the people of our Litchfield he had in mind.
As there is some question how the letter "t" got into the American Litchfield when the English town of the same name is spelled without it, I may say, in passing, that a high authority in etymology-perhaps the highest in America- in response to an inquiry, tells me that in the seventeenth century, and doubtless in the beginning of the eighteenth, when our American Litchfield was founded, the name of the English town which, in earlier years, had been spelled in several different ways, was oftener written with a "t" than without it, and he assures me that this is more correct, according to the rules and analogies of English spelling, than its present form as now used in England.
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I have been asked to speak of Litchfield County in the Revolution. Reading over the roster of those who fought in that great struggle for freedom is like reading the tax- lists of the towns to-day, and it would seem as if every woman whose family has lived in Litchfield County for a hundred and fifty years needs only to be alive to be eligible for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolu- tion.
And what part did our County take in the contest? We find her represented in every campaign, in nearly every battle, and sons of Litchfield taking high honors throughout the war. She sent 3,000 men to share the privations of winter camps and the perils of the battlefield-about two- thirds of her male population between the ages of sixteen and fifty-and there were times when not a man or boy over fourteen years of age was left in some of her villages. No State sent more men than Connecticut in proportion to population-no State but Massachusetts sent more in actual numbers.
When the sound of the shot "heard round the world" reached Litchfield County, ninety men from New Hartford started at once to join "the embattled farmers" at Lexing- ton and Concord. Norfolk sent a little band of twenty- four. Within a week General Gage found himself besieged in Boston by a motley army of 16,000 sturdy farmers gathered from all over New England. Benedict Arnold, commanding the best equipped company on the ground, the Governor's Foot Guard of New Haven, suggested the importance of capturing the forts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point. But his suggestion had been forestalled by another Connecticut man, and Ethan Allen, born on Litch- field Hill, was already marching toward Lake Champlain. His little company, which grew in members as it advanced, began with a nucleus of sixteen men, of whom four at least were from the same County as its leader, and when Arnold
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arrived with a commission from the Cambridge Council of Safety he found Allen with a commission from the Legisla- ture of Connecticut, and, what was more important, the men to fight. They refused to serve under any other com- mander, so Arnold was forced to take the position of a volunteer under Allen. This was the first of a long series of disappointments and thwarted ambitions which ended finally in the treason.
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