USA > Connecticut > Tercentenary pamphlet series, v. 1 Connecticut and the British Government > Part 14
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lands if at the end of the term the lands showed no evi- dence of having been improved.
The usual procedure of settling a town had now become well defined, as a matter of General Court practice. There were, however, two tendencies against which the court had to contend: first, the increase of absentee proprietor- ship, particularly in the case of new and struggling towns, which showed the passing away of the earlier idea, charac- teristic of the plantations belonging to the first seventy- five years of the seventeenth century, of making grants to compact groups of people, and the entering in of the practice of purchase and sale, which destroyed the unity, religious and political, of town life; the second was the human liking for accumulation, "engrossing" as it was called, whereby in colony and towns individuals gath- ered into their hands and under their control larger areas than were owned by their fellows and so were able to en- joy a monopoly that was destructive of the older Puritan idea of equality.
The first of these-absentee ownership-was foreign to the original idea of what a town ought to be and how it should be organized. From the very beginning it had been guarded against as pernicious. In 1636 the Springfield settlers inserted in their plantation agreement a clause designed to prevent, or at least to hinder, any such mis- fortune from taking place, by requiring every planter to settle within three months on the land allotted to him. Similar clauses appear in almost all plantation agree- ments and court requirements, though occasionally where the members of a purchasing company were sure of the interest and loyalty of their fellows no agreement was deemed necessary, as in Hartford, Windsor, Wethers- field, Milford, Fairfield, Stratford, Branford, Middle- town, Norwich, Haddam, and Danbury, or in cases where
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the settlement was scattered or very gradual, as in Say- brook, New London, Greenwich, Preston, Glastonbury, Groton, East Haddam, Durham, and Cheshire. Natu- rally such settlements as Groton would not require a time limit, as the settlers were all on the spot, before planta- tion privileges were asked for. Guilford and New Haven had plantation covenants, as did some other towns, which bound them to social and religious fellowships as a more or less permanent group. But in other and later towns plantation agreements or "articles of agreement" were well known documents, fixing a definite number of years within which land must be taken up, built on, and improved. The General Court adopted the rule as early as 1663, giving Lyme a four year period and following it up with similar limitations for Wallingford, Woodbury, New Milford, Ridgefield, and Newton. These requirements be- came popular after the Indian raids of 1675-1677, when all the new towns suffered from a large number of ab- sentees, who were still fearful of facing the wilderness. After 1700 absenteeism became a constant and menacing danger to the integrity of the towns. The number of non- resident proprietors increased by leaps and bounds, and the spirit of land speculation and promotion came upon the colony, and through all New England the selling of rights in the lands of a town was a mania that seized upon all classes, high and low, rich and poor. Inhabitants of towns tended to become merely fortuitous settlers, with- out common interests other than those of locality, and the actual owners of town lands might live in three or four col- onies. Winchester (1758) had 106 proprietors, not one of whom lived in the town. In Union (1734) three-fourths of the land was owned outside, and in Cornwall (1740) half the acres (12,000 out of 25,000) were similarly controlled.
The second danger, monopoly of land, was at first
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theoretical rather than real. The first Puritan settlers made equality of opportunity a basic principle in the dis- tribution of town advantages and endeavored to give every householder his fair proportion. Even bachelors were considered, and both Farmingham and Wallingford had "bachelor lots," on the ground that bachelors might marry and bring up families, and so would need a landed estate. Even when equal division was agreed upon, in contrast with division according to rateable estate, the decision as to the location of the share was left to the "judgment of God," by the casting of lots. Springfield prohibited any man from owning more than ten acres for a homelot, with his portion of woodland, pasture, and marsh proportioned to his estate. The Killingworth "ar- ticles" forbade anyone to put in more than £100 to the purchase fund; Waterbury's "grand committee" limited allotment to the same amount of estate. It was a law of the older towns that no one could alienate his land with- out first notifying the town and giving it the first right of purchase, and for this reason engrossing during the ear- lier period was not a common occurrence. As the same or a similar rule was enforced by the General Court it is evident that not until the era of real estate speculation began was monopoly a serious menace to settlement. But once entered upon it was destined to alter in many re- spects the character of the colony's life, in breaking up the old Puritan solidarity and the cooperative spirit of the earlier time. The subject is one of absorbing interest and affects materially the remaining part of our story.
The towns mentioned thus far had the common char- acteristic of being settled by those who purchased their lands of the Indians or received them on petition from the General Court. As a more or less uniform plan of control was adopted the towns tended to be regular in form and
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similar in appearance, the homelots grouped on the main street, roads laid out, and the farming lands divided into nearly equal portions. From this time on, though the chronological order is of no special importance, town de- velopment entered a new phase, which is radically differ- ent from that which appears in any of the towns thus far described, the practice of granting lands for towns as a means of profit, an object that would have been repudi- ated by the older generation of the Puritan fathers.
With the opening of the northeastern section of the colony, where now lay the most important area of public or colony land, a change took place in the procedure adopted. The proprietors were no longer representatives of a compact body of people who definitely wanted to lo- cate on the soil as a group of Christians or a group of neighbors, or both. They were in the business on their own account, buying the land as an investment to sell to anyone who could be induced to purchase. Such a sale would bring very considerable profits, as land could be bought in large areas from the Indians for very little and sold off in small lots at comparatively high prices. The entire controversy over the Mohegan lands, which lasted for more than half a century, can be understood only when viewed from the standpoint of the scarcity and ris- ing value of land in the colony. In the notorious case of Captain James Fitch, son of the Rev. James Fitch, who had led the men and women of Saybrook to the settle- ment of Norwich, who owned practically all the land in Windham county, the profits must have been enormous. He had gained possession of large tracts of country, by the Mohegan land claim, and probably did more than anyone except the agent for the Indians, Samuel Mason, to in- volve the colony in trouble and litigation. He wanted to secure possession of the entire Pequot and Mohegan ter-
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ritory and refused to relinquish any part of his claim. This kind of land-promoting, with which the court ex- pressed its entire dissatisfaction, was brought to a system in the handling of the western lands of the colony, cover- ing over 300,000 acres, in what is now Litchfield county, during the years from 1719 to 1755, and the same eager- ness for land speculation is to be seen in the activities of the Susquehannah Company (1753-1803), whose opera- tions in northeastern Pennsylvania have been recently disclosed in three volumes of documents issued in 1930.
This activity in real estate, in no way peculiar to Con- necticut but characteristic of all the colonies, north and south, had a disastrous effect in weakening the authority of the court and of scattering population and settlement. The court lost control of the land, for the conditions of settlement were left in the hands of the purchaser; while in the towns any settler might take up land without knowing who his next door neighbor was to be or when he would arrive. Usually, the proprietors, if enough shares had been sold, met and laid out the land, as in Windham, but when this was not the case the groupings were scat- tered and accidental and town organization was long in coming. The later period of Connecticut's colonial history shows no such integrity of purpose and concentration of interest as does the period of the seventeenth century with its strong religious motive underlying the founding of towns. The eighteenth century, as far as the treatment of the land is concerned, is without the spirit either of cooperation or of mutual interest.
The Wabbaquasset country, covering townships now along the Massachusetts line, was claimed by Uncas and held by him as a Pequot conquest. At his death he gave the western half to Joshua, and the eastern half to Owen- eco, his sons. Joshua died in 1676 and left his share by
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will to Captain John Mason and fifteen others in trust for a plantation. In 1679, as a punishment for allowing a drunken bout in New London, during which the jail was broken into and damaged, Oweneco was ordered by the county court to transfer his claim of 600 acres of land to the English. This land James Fitch was ordered to choose and sell for the benefit of the colony. In 1680 he did this, disposing of the same to three Tracys and Richard Bush- nell for £40. Oweneco gave Fitch land for a farm at Peagscomsueck (later Canterbury) on the Quinebaug River, and at the same time made over to him his entire right and title. In 1684 the deed was drawn up, giving him the whole of what is now Windham county, except Joshua's tract and a strip of land east of the Quinebaug. Thus one man "of great business shrewdness and capac- ity" came into possession of an area that was to cover six full sized townships. To Massachusetts Fitch sold his first installment.
The people of Roxbury in Massachusetts had become too numerous for their bounds and needed an enlarge- ment of territory. The matter was taken up by the town and the Massachusetts General Court gave it liberty to purchase a section seven miles square in the Nipmuck country, provided they settled within three years, could provide thirty families, called a minister, and gave those owning land there already first choice of land in the new town. Committees were sent to view the tract and after some parleying the tract was purchased of James Fitch and a deed secured. The Connecticut General Court had no part in the transaction. Roxbury relieved the "goers" of rates, provided they were paid in the new town and several men went ahead to prepare shelter for those that were to follow, who hesitated because of Indian attacks and the wild nature of the country. In the summer of
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1686 the last of the "goers" arrived and held their first meeting on August 25 of that year. There were forty signers to the plantation agreement, many of whom were young men with growing families, of an average age of thirty years. In 1690 the General Court of Massachusetts conferred town privileges upon the plantation and gave it the name of Woodstock, it having been known as New Roxbury.
Windham was a bequest of Joshua to sixteen men of Norwich. In 1678 the General Court of Connecticut ad- mitted Joshua's will to probate and a committee from among the legatees was ordered to survey and run the bounds. Among them were many men whose names are associated with large land deals-Captain John Mason, Samuel Mason, Daniel Mason, the Rev. James Fitch, Captain James Fitch, Thomas Tracy, Thomas Leffing- well, and others. In 1682 these legatees met and agreed to erect a plantation within four years, lots in which were to be sold to "wholesome inhabitants." Lots were to be drawn entitling the purchaser to a homelot, upland, and meadow. There were to be forty-five proprietary shares in all, each containing 1,000 acres, thus giving each legatee 3,000 acres to use or to sell. Most of them preferred to sell, only a few improving their lands through their sons. The first settler arrived in 1686.
It required no little courage to go out to such a settle- ment as this, in the unbroken country, and to take a wife and children also. One of the young Backus brothers, a legatee, speaks of "removing to that nameless town springing up in the wilderness, ten miles northwest of Norwich." And the locality, eventually named Windham from Wymondham in Norfolk, England, enjoyed unusual advantages. Its lands were cheap and accessible, the In- dian neighbors were friendly, there was a good water
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supply and few dangerous animals, and Norwich as a source of provisions was not far away. When the time came to ask the privileges of a town, the General Court hesitated whether to give its sanction to a transaction of so manifestly speculative a character, but finally yielded and gave its consent, and in 1692 ordered the town to be called Windham. Another locality was settled at about the same time, four miles away at Ponde-place or -town, with a dangerous river, the Shetuckit, between. This was not of very great consequence as long as Sabbath day worship could be held in each place in turn, but it became a source of heated controversy when the question of a permanent meetinghouse arose. The knot was cut by Windham's allowing Ponde-town to be a separate eccle- siastical society as soon as it could support a half-time min- ister, and an arrangement was entered into whereby each was to have a meetinghouse and to meet alternate Sun- days to hear the same man preach. In 1701 Ponde-place became an entirely distinct society and the following year the General Court separated it from Windham and granted it full privileges under the name Mansfield, after Major Moses Mansfield, one of its largest proprietors.
A third town settled within the limits of Windham county was Plainfield on the east side of the Quinebaug River. Fitch had chosen a very fertile spot a little to the south of this, for the 600 acres that Oweneco had for- feited to Connecticut in 1679. This land was sold to the Tracys and Richard Bushnell of Norwich. Oweneco had given to Fitch Peagscomsueck, but the title to the whole Quinebaug country was disputed by Fitz John and Wait Winthrop on the ground of an earlier Indian deed. In consequence, settlement was retarded, because there was no desire on the part of anyone to enter upon land that might be subject to litigation. In 1690 the Winthrops
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asked the General Court to confirm their claim, for the benefit of a group of people who were about to settle a plantation there. As the Connecticut court ignored the petition, a number of Massachusetts men bought land of the Winthrops and started a plantation. Soon after this others from New London and Stonington came upon the scene, some buying of the Winthrops, others of Fitch and the Tracys. Disorder reigned. The proprietors set up no organization, made no highways, provided no defenses, and did little or nothing to improve their lands. Fitch was charged with having "neglectful tenants," and his adherents and those of the Winthrops were at open war with each other. But despite these disorders the planta- tions grew on both sides of the river, Plainfield and Can- terbury that were to be.
Captain Fitch fixed his own dwelling on a point formed by a bend in the Quinebaug River, the first permanent habitation in what is now the township of Canterbury. As time went on he lost a good deal of his popularity. His extensive land operations made many people jealous of his power and suspicious of his methods. "Certain loyal and dutiful subjects of his Majesty" presented a remon- strance to the General Court, in which they complained of his large land deals and "engrossing of territory" and called him a "land pirate" and very "pernicious" to the best interests of the country. Others charged him with being as willing to sell to strangers as to people of Con- necticut and some doubted the legality of some of his transactions. It was owing to a complaint that he had been guilty of an illegal entry of land that he removed to the Quinebaug in 1697. There at Peagscomsueck he built a large house, which often served as a stopping place for travellers going from Norwich to Woodstock. It was also a center for military plans, Indian councils, and land
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sales. A road connected it with Windham on one side and Greenwich, Rhode Island, on the other.
As numbers increased on both sides of the Quinebaug, fifteen east siders and seven west siders sent in a petition for town privileges in 1699, with a special request for the settlement of the land claims. These petitions were both answered favorably and the place was called Plainfield. In 1701 the land committee, after looking over the ground, considering the evidence, and hearing the claims, met, probably at Fitch's house, and listened to the full case of each claimant, but did not arrive at any final de- cision. Nevertheless, the town went ahead and exercised the usual functions of choosing officers, levying rates, etc. A site for a meetinghouse was selected, but before it was complete the people on the west side asked to be made a separate society, because the river was deep, often swift and dangerous, and involved the risk of lives in the crossing. They were not on the best of terms with the east siders, who upheld the Winthrop claims, while those living adjacent to Fitch were in his favor. A com- mittee chosen in 1702 to settle the differences wisely urged separation and the east siders, inhabitants of Plainfield, finally gave in. Relations improved after this, Plainfield settled a minister in 1703, and the west siders, confirmed in their status by the General Court, became a separate town by the name of Canterbury.
In spite of these improved conditions, population and town improvements moved slowly. In 1706 another com- mittee was chosen to settle the Winthrop-Fitch dispute and decided that the Winthrop title was defective. But inasmuch as certain deeds, on which the Winthrops rested their claim, were probably genuine, the court made peace by giving to each of them 1,000 acres-one tract in Canterbury and one in Plainfield. Fitch objected very
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strongly to this decision, insisting that it was an infringe- ment upon the integrity of townships to allow any one man to possess so large an estate in fee simple, and claim- ing further that the grants covered land already deeded separately by Oweneco. But the committee's decision was upheld by the General Court.
In 17II a highway was put through from Providence to Plainfield, thus binding the two colonies by an inland route, which greatly facilitated communication and in- creased commercial opportunities. As a result Plainfield and Canterbury began to recover from the deadening effects of the disputed land claims and Fitch was not seriously affected by the Court's refusal to uphold the en- tirety of his claim. It was said that in 1714 he still con- trolled all the best land in Canterbury and was himself the most serious obstacle in the way of rapid settlement. There were only ten independent proprietors in the town, although they made up in influence what they lacked in numbers. In order to prevent further quarreling, the court legalized all the acts of Canterbury from 1703 and, in order to make it possible for it to gather a church and pay a minister, freed the people from paying country rates.
Fitch now got into further trouble with the General Court, which on further investigation came to the conclu- sion that his title to land beyond Windham and Mans- field was none too good. In spite of this Fitch went ahead and sold the territory (later Ashford) to several persons who planned to erect a township there, but the court re- fused to confirm the act. Again when Fitch entered into arrangements for a town north of Tolland, Governor Saltonstall and his council cut him short, saying that the region was under the control of the colony and not open for settlement. Fitch replied to this order in a most dis-
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respectful letter, asserting that the land was his and that the colony government was composed of "self-designing and self-seeking men." Correspondence ensued between Fitch and the court, in which the former apologized for his ill temper on the grounds of poor health.
Unlike Plainfield and Canterbury, Aspinock (Killingly) was entirely free from conflicting land claims, for the ter- ritory beyond the Quinebaug River and north of Plain- field was the undisputed property of the colony. It was a poor region, covered with rough hills, intervening marshes, and sand flats, remote from the line of travel and an unfavorable place for a settlement. Nevertheless it was a place that Connecticut felt free to dispose of to her public servants and, like the region around New Lon- don, Durham, and Ridgefield, to be used to reward her civil and military officers. As early as 1652 she had begun to grant lands in the Pequot country and in the follow- ing years had honored with allotments Treat, Saltonstall, Fitch, Hooker, and a score of others, a majority of whom received their lands about 1680. Fitch and Captain Chandler of Woodstock, who had bought one of the sol- dier grants, were the first to take up their lands, consist- ing of 1,500 acres in the one case and 200 acres in the other. The first white settler, Richard Evans, came as a squatter in 1693. Then four inhabitants of Woodstock, attracted by the large quantities of turpentine to be gathered from the pine trees, bought land, and afterwards others, young men full of life and energy, penetrated the territory. Roads were cut through from Woodstock and from Aspinock to Providence, and plans for a bridge over the swift running Quinebaug were set on foot but not consummated for twenty years. Even then bridge after bridge was washed away and had to be rebuilt. The need of a town organization was soon felt, as the land records
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were widely scattered, wherever the owners had hap- pened to enter their titles-either in Plainfield, Canter- bury, or even Hartford-and many had been lost. There are no records of any kind for Killingly during the first twenty years. Considering the disadvantages of its loca- tion the place grew rapidly and in 1709 was incorporated as a town and named Killingly, from the manor of Kill- ingly near Pontefract in Yorkshire, owned by the Sal- tonstall family. The name Pomfret, the shortened form of Pontefract, came from the same source.
Pomfret or Mashamoquet was included in the Wabba- quasset country and so came into Captain Fitch's posses- sion in 1684. In 1686 six men from Roxbury, representing six others, bought 15,100 acres in this region for £30, on condition that they would select their tract within three years and add to the twelve shares of the grantees two more for Fitch and his heirs, so that the whole number would be fourteen shares for fourteen grantees, among whom the whole tract was to be divided equally by lot. The purchase was laid out during the summer and was known as the Mashamoquet or Roxbury purchase. It was confirmed at once by the General Court of Connecticut, which on July 8, 1686, issued a patent for the "new plan- tation." Its bounds comprised the present town of Pom- fret and the north part of Brooklyn or Brookline (not from the Dutch Breuckelen at the western end of Long Island). In the same year Fitch sold 5,750 acres to Cap- tain John Blackwell, a Puritan officer under Cromwell, who had come to New England in 1684, was influential during Dudley's presidency, and was complained of by Edward Randolph for his land-grabbing propensities. He was afterward lieutenant-governor of Pennsylvania from 1688 to 1690. He had been commissioned by some of the English and Irish dissenters to look around and see if they
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would be welcome in America and could obtain land there. He had received an eight mile grant for a township in Massachusetts, but apparently not satisfied with it he had purchased land of Fitch and applied to the General Court of Connecticut to give him a patent for a township in that colony. This the court did and called the place Mortlake, in memory of the village of Mortlake in Sur- rey, the residence of Blackwell's father-in-law, General Lambert.
Nothing was done about the Roxbury purchase until in 1693 one half of the land was laid out for buyers and the other half divided equally among the grantees. In 1696 Benjamin Sabin built a house for himself and served as a frontiersman against Indian attacks, warning the towns of possible danger, for which both Massachusetts and Connecticut requited him with gifts of money. Other set- tlers joined him, but they came slowly at first. Mashamo- quet had good soil and many of its hills were already cleared by nature, while the near neighborhood of Wood- stock was an encouragement to the timid and a support to the able-bodied. As soon as the Indian menace de- creased people came in greater numbers and by 1708 were ready to forward their lists to the General Court. Military organization was perfected by 1710 and three years later the inhabitants sent delegates to Roxbury to ask the non- resident proprietors, who had not yet disposed of all the lands of the township, if they approved of the plan of hav- ing the plantation made a town. The answer was favor- able and in 1713 the General Court of Connecticut granted them town privileges under the usual condition. The name selected was Pomfret.
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