USA > Connecticut > Tercentenary pamphlet series, v. 1 Connecticut and the British Government > Part 15
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With the course of events in England Mortlake as a refuge for Irish dissenters lost its purpose, for the Revo- lution of 1688-1689 and the Act of Toleration brought reli-
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gious peace to the Irish, recalled Blackwell to England, and left Mortlake once more a wilderness. The manor, a tract of 6,000 acres, with but four families of white people living in a clearing, was left to Blackwell's son, who sold it to Jonathan Belcher, Blackwell's attorney and later a governor, first of Massachusetts, and afterward of New Jersey. Belcher ordered John Chandler to lay out the land for him, to prepare two large farms, known as the manors of Wiltshire and Kingswood, to construct a highway north and south leading to Woodstock, and to sell off what lands he could. All this Chandler did, leaving a space adjoining Kingswood for a training field and 1,200 acres to be disposed of in the future. Mortlake's position was anomalous, for it was neither a plantation in the usual sense, a parish, a manor, nor even a town. It never had town officials or a town government. The General Court had given it leave to be a separate township and this permission Belcher construed literally and kept his tract entirely independent of town or colony control. Many years later the court, finally refusing to give it a patent of incorporation, annexed it in part to Pomfret and in part to Brooklyn. Belcher, who had been unsuc- cessful in his efforts to dominate the region and in constant conflict with the Pomfret authorities, sold out in 1739 a part of the manor of Wiltshire to Israel Putnam, who was living at that time in Mortlake, and the remaining part with Kingswood to Colonel Godfrey Malbone, whose son, a loyalist and an Anglican, and the richest merchant in Newport, Rhode Island, suffered reverses in later years and, inheriting his father's farm and stock, took up his abode in that part of Mortlake which had been annexed to the town of Brooklyn. There he caused to be erected an Anglican church, the first and for long the only one in northeastern Connecticut.
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This discussion of Mortlake, one of the most interest- ing of Connecticut's areas of settlement, leads naturally to a consideration of some of the other peculiar begin- nings of habitation, which do not fall entirely under the definition of town or parish, though in origin bearing a resemblance to other Connecticut towns. The cases of Groton and Glastonbury and their long existence as par- ishes or societies before reaching the status of towns have already been cited. Between 1635 and 1760 there were one hundred and seventy ecclesiastical societies formed in Connecticut, of which sixty-seven eventually attained the dignity of incorporated towns. Of the rest many, being within a town and known by a variety of local denomina- tions, never received political recognition. On the other hand, some, such as Meriden, South Norwalk, Norwich Port or City, and the like, are today fair sized cities, while their parent communities are comparatively in- significant. The causes for such changes are, of course, to be found in the rise of manufacturing in the nineteenth century, the growth of the railroad, and the convenience of location at the head of navigation.
There were several steps between separation from the mother church society and the attainment of full eccle- siastical estate. It was a rule of the General Court that no society should assume independent church status without leave from the court itself. After a distant quarter, village, or petty plantation had obtained permission both from the town within which it was located and from the Gen- eral Court, or if lying outside a township and uncon- nected with any ecclesiastical society from the court only, it was required to call a minister for trial, who need not always be a fully ordained clergyman. He was "listened to" for a few weeks or a few months by the congregation which had to include the voting members, who after 1728
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were all male communicants, possessing fifty shilling freeholds within the society's bounds and £40 rating in the common list. These members would by majority vote decide whether or not to issue a call. A favorable decision was usually accompanied by a vote to tax un- improved land or non-resident proprietors for the min- ister's support, if the General Court agreed. Plans were also set on foot for building a house for the minister on land set apart for the purpose, and references of approval were obtained from one of the consociations, which, after 1708 and the adoption of the Saybrook platform, were provided for groups of churches, one or more in each county, to help upon all occasions ecclesi- astical. The minister, if approved and recommended, was then "called," that is, asked to come, and definite agreements as to salary and housing were entered into. The court generally granted the town for a time freedom from country rates that the money might be spent in settling the minister.
The location of a meetinghouse caused so much quarrel- ing and ill feeling that the court generally ordered the lo- cation to be decided by a competent and impartial com- mittee of its own appointment or later of the county court. This committee was selected when the society was ready to build and the clerk of the society was ordered to keep the General Court or the county court informed of its progress. Any delay had to be explained by the build- ing committee. In this way the colony kept a close watch on the religious welfare of its parishes.
Of the parishes which did not become towns before 1760 there are four that are distinguished for certain pe- culiarities, of interest in studying the progress of settle- ment. These are Meriden, East Haven, Stratfield, and Redding.
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We do not know just when the road from Hartford and Wethersfield to New Haven was built. Roger Ludlow probably used a rough road or bridle path when he went down by way of New Haven to view Fairfield. In 1660 there is record of a man on the road being forced to spend the night between Hartford and New Haven and in 1666 Edward Higley was given two years' freedom from public taxes to keep the road clear at Pilgrims Harbor, the name of a place near Meriden, and the evidence shows that the road was rough and dangerous and so poorly marked that encroachments upon it were frequent and had to be dealt with by the court. In 1661, 350 acres were given to Jonathan Gilbert as recompense for keeping an ordinary at Cold Spring (Meriden) for the benefit of travellers, as it was the halfway house, being seventeen miles from each end, and similar compensation was granted to others at various times. In 1686 Gilbert's heirs sold his farm, amounting to 1,000 acres, to Andrew Belcher, the father of Jonathan Belcher, who had married Sarah Gilbert, and Belcher put up buildings and other accommodations for travellers, built a wall around the farm, and called it a 'manor." In 1707 Andrew deeded all his property to Jonathan who thus became the lord of three "manors," two at Mortlake and the other at Meriden, and as he could not live there himself he rented the latter, as a manor, tavern, and farm in one, to Eleazer Aspinwall. But the venture was not a success, the rent fell behind, and by 1731 Belcher was trying to get rid of his Meriden properties. He was widely interested in mines and real es- tate in various places and these many promotions were proving highly speculative and largely unsuccessful. He finally deeded the manor to his son Andrew, who in turn sold it in 1742 in part to Wallingford men and in part to Middletown men. While thus the Belchers were strug-
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gling with their "manor," settlers were coming into the territory, which was now entered as the north society in the Wallingford list of estates and by 1728 was given the distinctive name of Meriden, probably from Meriden or Miriden, a little village near Coventry, England, from which Belcher's family had originally come. Thus in Meriden's case we pass from manor and farm to parish before entering the status of a town, a status that Meriden did not reach until 1806.
The society of East Haven grew up around the "iron works," which was started there in 1655 and gave to Lake Saltonstall its first name "Furnace Pond." There were also several residents there who had received their grants of land from New Haven as early as 1640, and the place came to be known as the "Iron Works Village" or East Side. Its history shows no unusual features down to 1706 when it sent in a petition to the General Court, say- ing that in 1680 New Haven had granted parish privi- leges and that enough had been accomplished to warrant its recognition as a separate town, "the better to carry on God's work and town affairs and avoid further incon- veniences," a phrase that had reference to certain dis- putes with New Haven. The court in reply "do see cause to order that they shall be a village distinct from the town- ship of New Haven and invested and privileged with all the immunities and privileges that are proper and neces- sary for a village for the upholding of the publick worship of God, as also their civil concerns, and in order thereunto do grant them libertie of all such officers as are proper and necessary for a town, and to be chosen by themselves in order and form as allowed by law for each or any town." This curious incorporation of a village with many of the attributes of a town is the only case of the kind in Con- necticut, where the incorporation of a place as a village
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preceded its incorporation as a town. The villages of Litchfield and Wethersfield were merely incorporated parts or centers of their respective towns, one in 1818 and the other in 1822, much as the cities and boroughs of Connecticut were at first territorially smaller than the towns within which they were situated. The village of Litchfield was changed into a borough in 1879 and that of Wethersfield evidently died still born. When in 1710 the General Court was called upon to explain wherein an incorporated village differed from an incorporated town it replied that the village had nothing to say about "prop- erty of lands" and had no right to send deputies to the General Court, both of which functions still lay within the powers of the town of New Haven. East Haven was not incorporated as a town until 1785.
West of Stratford and east of Fairfield there lay a fer- tile, loamy plain of about a mile and a half in width, cut by the Pequonnock River. This is the site of the present Bridgeport. The settlers who had come to Fairfield and Stratford had been attracted to the plain and the coun- try back of it, because of its freedom from the dense woods of other regions and its immediate availability as arable. Several families had gone there at the same time that Stratford was settled and had sufficiently increased by 1678 as to ask the court for leave to set up their own school. There were forty-seven children of school age in the plantation and the distance to Fairfield or Stratford was considered too far for them to walk. In 1690 a sepa- rate society was allowed to be known as Fairfield village, because most of the people lived on the Fairfield side of the Pequonnock. Four years later a church estate was ap- proved, and the name was changed to Stratfield in 1732, which, as was the case with a number of other names of Connecticut places (Wintonbury-modern Bloomfield-
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Harwinton, Hadlyme, and Winsted), was a composite of parts of the names of the mother towns.
Stratfield is peculiar in that special liberties had been granted in 1699. It was customary to allow all societies or parishes to meet and have a recorder as a matter of rou- tine, and this privilege had been given Stratfield in 1690. Nine years later the society was authorized to choose two or three persons annually to order meetings, levy the min- ister's rate, and look after all the needful concerns of a meetinghouse, to collect the rates and distrain for non- payment. As this was the first parish in Connecticut to become entirely independent of a parent stock, it was necessary to define its powers carefully. This was done in 1717, when in an elaborate order based on a committee's report the organization of a parish was based on pretty much the same principles as those which governed the formation of a town. Those ordering the affairs of the parish and the clerk and secretary were to be chosen at an annual meeting by the major vote of the inhabitants, just as the town officers were chosen, while the machinery for gathering the church and school rates was exactly similar to that employed in gathering the town rate. Stratfield was never more than a parish, until in 1800 it was incor- porated as a borough, the first in the state, under the name of Bridgeport, a town in 1821, and a city in 1836.
There was a "gusset" of land surrounded by Fairfield, Norwalk, Newtown, Danbury, and Ridgefield, a part of which belonged to the town of Fairfield and was occupied before 1680 by the Pototuck Indians and a few scattered Mohawks, of whom Chicken or Chickens was the chief sagamore. The first grant in this oblong was in 1687 to Cyprian Nichols for 200 acres. Two other grants of 200 acres each were purchased by John Read of Boston and laid out in 1714 as Lonetown manor. Two years before
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this the General Court had ordered that all lands not taken up in this tract by actual settlers be sold at public vendue at the Fairfield meetinghouse, but no sale was made until 1723 when without fair warning the com- mittee appointed by the court sold the land, most of it being bought by Samuel Couch and by Nathan Gold of the committee. Testimony showed that only ten minutes were allowed for the bidding and tenders were so brisk that the sales were hard to record.
John Read was a Connecticut man, born in 1680, who had married a sister of Governor Joseph Talcott. In 1712 he was appointed queen's attorney for the colony, and in later years in Massachusetts attained to great distinction as one of the ablest if not the ablest lawyer in New Eng- land. He had also a keen sense of humor, as when he drew up a patent of enfeoffment, couched in formal legal phraseology, of his Lonetown manor, with Chicken as the lord of the manor and himself the holder of the tenancy. He now complained of this forced sale, as involving land that belonged to others and as making no provision for a village plat or for highways. Read had had a great deal of trouble in connection with land sales in Connecticut. In a petition of 1710 he said that he had been to court sixteen times and "utterly discouraged and broken" he had found (at the age of thirty) that he was not able to main- tain suits forever, that Indian titles were held in the ut- most contempt, and that as the times were he must fall. "These things," he added, "make me weary of the world." In 1722 he removed to Boston, became attorney-general of Massachusetts and was one of the council during Shir- ley's administration. He died in February, 1749.
Nothing was done about the oblong, after Read's de- parture, until in 1725 the sixteen proprietors who were settled on the tract petitioned the General Court praying
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relief. Again Read, now in Boston, petitioned on behalf of himself and the rest of the inhabitants of Lonetown that the place be erected into a parish, and this time the court granted the request. "Lonetown, Chestnut Ridge and the peculiar thereof" were made a parish by themselves, un- der the name Reading, a name which was altered to Redding, when in 1767 a town charter was applied for, because, as local tradition asserts, Colonel Read had be- come so unpopular that the people asked that the name be not Reading but Redding. There is probably no truth in the tradition. From 1729 on the proprietors were able to organize the scattered inhabitants in more orderly fashion and to prepare them for independent town life. Redding was one of the first tracts of land to be sold at public vendue or auction and so to be the forerunner of the group of western and northwestern towns that were sold by that method in 1733 and later.
The settlement of Lebanon (1700), Colchester (1703), Hebron (1707), and Coventry (17II), involved a group of real estate transactions that date back at least to 1663. These transactions were accompanied by claims and dis- putes and counterclaims and counter disputes that at times became acrimonious and greatly retarded planta- tion, but furnish nothing that is new in the way of variety of method or in the results accomplished. Tolland re- verted to an earlier type of group settlement, and had its origin in the petition of fifty-four Windsor people, 'straightened in their circumstances and without enough land to make a livelihood," who had seen good lands on the other side of the river. After some delay the General Court promised to grant a six-mile township, occupation followed, and the plantation life developed until in 1715 the place was ready for township privileges. In 1722 the inhabitants were authorized "to imbody into church es-
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tate with the approbation of the neighbouring churches, and to settle an orthodox minister amongst them."
The last section of ungranted land in that region, the site of the township of Bolton was taken in hand by the colony, as its property, and laid off into fifty allotments of 200 acres each, which were put on sale for the benefit of "honest and well minded inhabitants." Settlers came rapidly and by 1719 forty-five people were there, and others, non-resident, had rights in the township, which was seven miles square. They applied for town privileges in that year, which were granted, with the restriction that they were to have no power to dispose of any land within the township, all that remained unsold being retained in the control of the colony. They were raised to church es- tate in 1725. Ashford went through grievous times before a peaceful settlement was attained. The land was not very valuable, being rocky and wooded, but the position of the place, on the road between Boston and Hartford (via Pomfret, Mansfield, and Bolton) gave it a certain ad- vantage. Ownership of the land involved a number of transactions, in which Fitch, Chandler, James Corbin of Woodstock, and others were concerned. The place was first called New Scituate, but titles were so uncertain and bounds so unreliable that the General Court stepped in and settled what promised to be endless confusion in the matter of ownership and overlapping claims. The settle- ment became a town in 1714 under the name of Ashford.
Regarding the settlement of Killingly we have very little information. The land was sold by the colony in I720 to certain men of Fairfield, Derby, Milford, Windsor, and Hartford for £510. They sold to others. Settlers from various parts of Connecticut and Massachusetts flocked in and took up lands in a very helter-skelter fashion. The locality was made a town in 1717 and church estate was
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granted the next year. New Fairfield was granted by the General Court to eleven men of old Fairfield in 1707, and to these were added later a number of "associates and copartners." After a series of parleys with the court over proprietary rights and privileges, in the course of which a reservation was specially made for the Indian Chicken, of whom John Read once "held his manor," and the pro- test listened to of the actual settlers, who thought so large a tract (35,840 acres) should not be in the hands of a few men for sale, a decision was reached to appoint an inves- tigating committee to straighten things out. This was done to the sorrow of many claimants, but the court re- fused to alter the committee's report. In 1740 New Fair- field, with but thirty resident families, was granted the status of a town. Stafford arose in this wise. Throughout the early period of land granting the General Court fol- lowed the policy of giving the land freely to any suitable person or persons who applied for it, all expenses involved to be met by the grantee. But later the court conceived the idea of selling its ungranted lands for revenue to meet certain special emergencies. In 1717 money was wanted for a new state house and other purposes, particularly the encouragement of Yale College. At first it was decided to sell lands along the frontier of Rhode Island (Voluntown) but the next year other lands were substituted, next the Massachusetts line, where was established the town of Stafford, north of Voluntown and west of the Housatonic River. Stafford became a town in 1719, after a long and involved controversy, in which "ill humor and private grudges" were exploited and charges were raised of "en- grossing the undisposed lands under pretence of mere na- tive right-the bane and ruin of our ancient order." Settlers came fast and a church estate was allowed in 1723.
The circumstances attending the settlement of Union
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illustrate, as do those of Stafford, the determination of the General Court to make a profit out of its own lands. The running of the Massachusetts line in 1713 threw this area within the jurisdiction of the colony, and the latter sold its rights to a committee of its own, who in turn con- veyed them to a company of Scotch-Irish. The settlement became a town in 1734. It is thought to have been the only Scotch-Irish settlement in Connecticut, but there was another one in the parish of Scantic in East Windsor.
In 1696 Lieutenant Thomas Leffingwell and Sergeant John Frink of Stonington requested the General Court to make a grant of a township, six miles square, for them- selves and other volunteers in the Narragansett War of 1675, to be taken up in some of the conquered land. After a committee had viewed the area selected, the court made a grant of the township of Voluntown. In 1701 the com- mittee made out a list of 160 volunteers, residents of Norwich, Stonington, Plainfield, Windham, and New London and four years later laid out 150 lots of equal size (some receiving but half a lot). Very few of the vol- unteers ever took up their land. A large strip was sold to Thomas Brewster for £130, but most of the lots brought but £5 to £12 each. The first actual settlers came in 1708, but the ground proved poor and the country barren and men found better land to the north. Boundary disputes with Rhode Island, which were not ended until 1727, hindered settlement, and in 1718 the settlers, unable to support a minister, asked for a reorganization and en- largement of their grant. This was effected and the town was incorporated in 1719.
The problem of dividing up the area of Connecticut for settlement and the maintenance of its inhabitants, es- tablishing and confirming titles, settling boundaries, and securing men in possession of what they have acquired is
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one of the most important of the problems that have con- cerned the history of the state, particularly in the colo- nial period. This was peculiarly true of Connecticut because of its essentially agricultural character. The problem was an abiding one as long as land remained ungranted either in the towns or in the colony, and that was nearly down to the time of the Revolution. In this distribution of the soil a constant process of adjustment was taking place. Surveying instruments were imperfect, ancient boundary marks and merestones were constantly getting lost-rotted, washed away, or burnt-lands had to be surveyed and resurveyed, perambulations run, and the meanings of deeds and patents determined. Public controversies were common, but private controversies seemed to drag their slow length along interminably, with "many hard words and bad speeches," " until the county court records disclose little else than litigation regarding lands, fences, bounds, highways, and conflict- ing ground claims. Dissatisfaction with divisions, shares, proprietary rights, common and undivided lands, came frequently before the General Court; complaints of ab- sentee proprietors, land "pirates," engrossers, and monop- olists filled the air; and while Connecticut's life flowed smoothly on the surface, it was in a constant state of agitation beneath, in the effort to fit together into a har- monious whole these thousands of pieces of landed terri- tory and to satisfy, justly and equably, the claims and demands of rival and warring parties. A study of the conditions and circumstances under which the towns of Connecticut were settled offers a rare opportunity to understand the kind of people who composed the colony and to obtain an insight into their relations with each other.
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Printed at the Printing-Office of the Yale University Press
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EXPLANATION
The Colony of Conecticut is Bounded W". is the Tropince of X York . A" on the Province of the Mafsachusets Bay and E. on the Colony of Rhode Island .
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