USA > Connecticut > Tercentenary pamphlet series, v. 3 The Beginnings of Roman Catholicism in Connecticut > Part 31
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IX
FROM Boston, it is believed, Fitch returned for a visit to his old home in Connecticut, but of that visit no pre- cise record remains. Whether he met Samuel Morey, who was actively engaged in steamboat work on the Connect- icut river, is a matter of conjecture, but Fitch's own steamboat days were over. He seems to have spent about two years in East Windsor with his brother-in-law, Timothy King, and then he set out on his final journey to the West. He passed through Trenton and Philadel- phia, renewed old acquaintances, and finally reached Bardstown, Kentucky.
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The only account by an eye-witness of his last days in Kentucky is that which the Honorable Robert Wick- liffe wrote over a half century later at the request of Thompson Westcott, Fitch's biographer:
I remember to have seen John Fitch during his residence in Bardstown, Kentucky, but had no particular acquaintance with him personally. He was pretty far advanced in life and intemperance when I first saw him, and he was then residing in the house of Alexander M'Conn, a tavern keeper, in Bards- town, where he continued to live during the remainder of his life .... Before he reached his land it had been seated and possessed by adverse claimants. He brought suits against the trespassers, and after long and protracted controversies, was successful. Those who were intimate with him assure me of their belief that Fitch's profound mortification in being com- pelled to abandon his steamboat discoveries, and the new difficulties and legal controversies about his land titles, broke down his spirits and disgusted him with life. McConn ... informed me that it was the constant burden of his conversa- tion when free from intoxication that he should descend to the grave poor and pennyless, but should leave in his dis- coveries a legacy to his country that would make her rich. ... Fitch continued to live with McConn, as I have before stated, until his death; when McConn caused him to be decently interred in the public burying-place at Bardstown.
On July 2, 1798, at the age of 55 years, John Fitch swallowed poison and brought to a close the life of the man who first constructed a successful steamboat. "The day will come," he had written, "when some more powerful man will get fame and riches from my invention; but nobody will believe that poor John Fitch can do any thing worthy of attention." The first half of that proph- ecy proved only too true, but history has been kinder to his memory than he anticipated. A century after his first successful demonstration, his native state placed a tablet at the entrance to its capitol in memory of "The genius,
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patience and perseverance of John Fitch, a native of the town of Windsor, the first to apply steam successfully to the propulsion of vessels through water."
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THE work of John Fitch marked the opening chapter in the history of the practical development of steam navi- gation in the United States. Subsequent experimenters were indebted to him less for the details of their machin- ery than for the impetus which his success gave to the growing realization that in steam lay the solution to the problem of navigating the rivers of the continent. Before the close of the eighteenth century numerous inventors from New Hampshire to Georgia were actively engaged upon that problem, several successful steamboats had been constructed, and substantially all the methods of applying the steam engine to marine propulsion, includ- ing hydraulic reaction, mechanical oars, paddle wheels, and the screw propeller, had been tried.
Several natives of Connecticut made practical contri- butions to this development. The work of Samuel Morey, Elijah Ormsbee, and Daniel French has been neglected by historians, for it had neither the spectacular novelty of Fitch's pioneer efforts nor did it result in notable commercial success, and present-day knowledge of the accomplishments of these men is consequently meager and, to a large degree, traditional.
Samuel Morey was born at Hebron, Connecticut, in 1762, but the family early removed to Orford, New Hampshire, where Morey was educated, where he acquired a taste for mechanical pursuits, and where, about 1790, he commenced experimental work with steam. By 1793 he had completed a small boat with an engine in the bow and had operated it successfully on
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the Connecticut river. He then removed to Hartford, constructed a stern-wheel steamboat, and navigated it from Hartford to New York, spending two or three years on further experimental work in the latter city. During this period he is reputed to have used a screw propeller. In 1797 he went to Bordentown, New Jersey, where he joined Burgess Allison and constructed a side-wheel steamboat which was operated on the Delaware river between Bordentown and Philadelphia. Morey and his partner Allison were both capable mechanics but finan- cial difficulties brought their experiments to an end. Morey was granted a number of patents, including a steam-operated spit in 1793, a rotary steam engine in 1795, further improvements in steam engines in 1803 and 1815, and one of the earliest American internal combustion engines in 1826. He died April 17, 1843.
Elijah Ormsbee, a Connecticut carpenter and mill- wright, experienced in repairing and operating the atmospheric steam engines used in pumping out mines, turned his attention to steam navigation about 1792. In cooperation with David Wilkinson of Rhode Island, an iron founder and machinist, he succeeded in building a steamboat. It is not known that the boat was actually placed in commercial service, but a number of successful trial trips were made between Providence and Pawtucket. Wilkinson, in his unpublished journal, wrote:
I ... made my patterns, cast and bored the cylinder; and made the wrought iron work, and Ormsbee hired a large boat of John Brown belonging to one of his large India ships- should think about twelve tons. I told him of two plans of paddles,-one I called the flutter wheel, and the other the goose-foot paddle. We made the goose-foot to open and shut with hinges, as the driving power could be much cheaper applied than the paddle wheel ... After having the boat in operation, we exhibited it near Providence between the two
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bridges .... After our frolic was over, being short of funds, we hauled the boat up and gave it over.
Daniel French of Berlin, Connecticut, an ingenious mechanic who at that time was engaged in perfecting nail-making machinery, examined Ormsbee's boat before it was dismantled and later carried on experiments of his own in the same field. In 1809, having removed to New York, he was granted a patent on an oscillating steam engine for propelling boats, and shortly thereafter he settled in Brownsville, Pennsylvania, organized the Monongahela Steam Navigation Company, and built the steamer Enterprise of forty-five tons. This vessel, placed in service in 1814, was one of the first steamboats successfully to ascend the Mississippi river. In 1816 it was destroyed by a boiler explosion which resulted in heavy loss of life. In 1814 French formed a partnership with Thomas Copeland and engaged in building steam engines on a commercial scale. He was an early advocate of the high-pressure engine and a rival of Oliver Evans in the business of supplying the machinery for Ohio and Mississippi river steamboats.
In 1797 Jehoshaphat Starr of Connecticut patented improvements in propelling boats and vessels by steam engines, but the extent of his practical work is not recorded.
Apollos Kinsley of Hartford, better known for the printing press which he patented in 1796, was soon after that date working with John Stevens in Hoboken, New Jersey, on the development of steamboats. The Phoenix, probably the first steam-powered vessel to be navigated on the ocean (June, 1809), was an outgrowth of this work.
It is significant that the Connecticut men who applied themselves most successfully to the early development
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of steam navigation carried on much of their work out- side the borders of the state. Mechanical skill, fostered by the diversified industrial needs of New England at the close of the eighteenth century, was directed to the solution of a problem of the utmost importance to New York, Pennsylvania, and the West. While the steamboat eventually found a modest place in the commerce of the Connecticut river valley, the needs of the growing West provided both the initial incentive for its development and the field of its immediate social utility. By 1819, when Moses Rogers of New London navigated the Savannah across the Atlantic Ocean, the steamboat had ceased to be an experiment.
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Bibliographical Note
JOHN FITCH left a more voluminous record of his work than any other eighteenth-century American inventor. The controversy with Rumsey over priority resulted in a mass of contemporary pamphlet and periodical com- ment. The regular operation of the steamboat on the Delaware river during the summer of 1790, and the interest which it aroused among the members of congress and of the American Philosophical Society caused it to be widely discussed in the private correspondence of the day. Fitch used every effort to bring it into public notice. Frequent petitions and memorials to the state and national legislatures, constant personal solicitations of the leaders of business, politics, and science, and a judicious use of newspaper advertising served to focus contemporary attention upon the enterprise. Finally, at the conclusion of the experiments, Fitch himself, with an eye to posthumous fame, prepared an elaborate his- tory of the project which he deposited with the directors of the Library Company of Philadelphia. That history is one of the most interesting documents of the kind in existence, but, although it has long been known to students of Fitch and of the steamboat, it remains to this day unpublished.
The standard life of John Fitch is that by Thompson Westcott (Philadelphia, 1857). Important collections of Fitch's original papers are in the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Historical Society, and the Library of Congress.
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HISTORICAL PUBLICATIONS
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I HE keynote to the history of the United States in the nineteenth century is to be found in its westward expansion. The pur- chase of the Louisiana territory in 1803 doubled the area of the United States, thereby facilitat- ing the opportunity for new settlements. No state, in proportion to its size and population, played a more important rôle in this expansion than Connecticut.
In a previous study2 there has been shown the large emigration, after 1783, from Connecticut, western Massachusetts, and Vermont (both districts originally settled by pioneers from Connecticut) into central and western New York. This emigration continued after 1800, and was typical of later emigration into the North- west Territory. The restless and discontented elements often moved first; but the next settlers were a more sub- stantial group, farmers in the "meridian of life" whose families made up the settlements. Generally, they were
IThe author is indebted to Mr. Roland Mather Hooker for assistance in putting the manuscript into final form.
2See Lois K. M. Rosenberry, Migrations from Connecticut prior to 1800 (No. XXVIII in this series).
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supplied with enough money not only to buy farms, but also to make improvements, and therefore were exempt from the privations of the earlier pioneers who had sold out to these later comers and migrated farther west. Mechanics followed farmers, with the hope of attaining greater prosperity than they had enjoyed in their old homes, "by adding the business of a farm to their mechanic employment." Mills were erected, and the whole community took on an appearance of permanence, which it had lacked in the earlier days. Here, however, in consequence of the intermixture of emigrants, diversity in thought and taste was apparent; the churches, town meetings, and schools were no longer precisely of the Puritan type, though the traditions of all were preserved in the new institutions. With the arrival of the first emigrants from Connecticut, in the early days of New York, the incoming missionaries had been a great stimu- lus to education, and as the interior of the state offered them opportunity, churches were widely extended as the population increased. Yet, "Every new method in religion, every new suggestion in theology, found hospi- table reception there," though the theories were not always sane or practical.
Warsaw will serve as a type of the growth of a town in New York between 1812 and 1837. Settled in 1803-1804 from Vermont by way of Granville, it had not many inhabitants in its early years. One of the early settlers, at the age of forty, had already moved six times since, in his childhood, his parents had left his birthplace of Bozrah, Connecticut. In Colchester and Hebron, in Sandisfield and Great Barrington, in Green River and Genesee, he had tried his luck, and had finally settled in Warsaw. Many of his neighbors came from the Con- necticut towns of Canaan, Lebanon, Canterbury, Chesh-
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ire, Hartford, Warren, Guilford, Hartland, and Colchester.
After the War of 1812 the interest in settlement cen- tered elsewhere; "the West" moved on into Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The overflow from New England still carried settlers to New York and Pennsylvania; but the process was one of filling in those states whose organization had been perfected, and whose institutions had passed beyond the formative stage. The emigrants from New England took their thrift and enterprise with them, and contributed substantially to the prosperity of their adopted homes. It seemed to Timothy Dwight that the inhabitants of New York and New England were substantially one people, "with the same interests of every kind inseparably united." That observant traveler noted the increase in New York's population from 1790 when it was 340,120, through 1800 when it was 484,620, till 1810 when it had reached 959,220. He estimated that from three fifths to two thirds of this increase had originated from New England, and thought the population increasing continually; he considered New York would be ultimately but "a Colony from New- England," whose inhabitants crowded in for commercial as well as agricultural betterment. This Connecticut and New England invasion of New York, while well received by those who had lived there previously, had at least one interesting result in the founding by Washington Irving, in 1835, of a society of "old New Yorkers," which be- came known as the St. Nicholas Society, to combat the growing social influence of New Englanders in New York City.
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BEFORE discussing the migrations to the Western states, mention must be made of Connecticut's influence in the
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South. Lewis Judson of Stratford founded in Mobile, Alabama, soon after 1795, the trading establishment of John Forbes and Company, and Josiah Blakeley of New Haven moved to the same place about 1806, after a six- year residence in Santiago de Cuba. Joseph E. Sheffield, a native of Southport, Connecticut, and the founder of the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, was the leading cotton merchant in Mobile for some years prior to 1835. Significant, for the education of Southern women, was the incorporation in 1831 of the Huntsville Female Semi- nary at Huntsville, Alabama, an institution which has had a long and successful history. It was organized and carried on for a time by Miss Frances Strong and three other members who had been on the faculty of Miss Catherine Beecher's school, the Hartford Female Semi- nary.
Farther to the south and west lies Texas. In 1820 Moses Austin made plans to remove his family and others in a colony to this Spanish outpost which lay on the extreme southwestern border of the great Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Born in Durham, Connecticut, in 1761, reared in Middletown, Moses Austin moved, as a young man, just at the close of the Revolutionary War, to Philadelphia. He had become interested in lead min- ing and smelting as he had seen it in Middletown, and, after a short sojourn, removed to Virginia, where oppor- tunities in this industry seemed larger. In 1798 he moved . to Missouri where he established the town of Potosi "to which his own contribution was an improved fur- nace, a shot-tower and a mill for making sheet-lead, a saw-mill, a flour-mill, a store, and a house for his family." Here he prospered, and in 1816 he joined with others in organizing the Bank of St. Louis. But the panic of 1819 swept away everything he possessed, and it was then
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that he made plans to move to Texas. He died before the transplanting of his colony was completed, and it was his son, Stephen, who became known as the founder of Texas.
III
TURNING again to the North, the settlements of Marietta and of the Western Reserve in Ohio belonged, in their inception, to the period before the election of Thomas Jefferson, although the greatest emigrations came after that event. A typical pioneer was James Kilbourne, born in New Britain, Connecticut. In 1802 he formed a com- pany, with seven associates, to move to the Northwest Territory. Kilbourne went ahead to explore the country and to pick out a tract for forty families. Upon his return a Scioto Company was formed, forty persons admitted, and the articles of association signed. In 1803 a school- house, a log church, a blacksmith shop, and twelve cabins were erected where Worthington now stands. A hundred persons settled there that year. Here was founded the first Episcopal church in Ohio; and Worthington College, with Kilbourne as president of the board of trustees, was chartered in 1817. Nor did that energetic pioneer confine his labors to his own town; he also served in the Ohio legislature and in congress.
By 1810 the frontier line in Ohio extended in a curve from the shore of Lake Erie to the western border of the state. Connecticut men and women had built homes in half of the Western Reserve, in the Marietta region, and were scattered throughout the central and southern parts of the state as well. The War of 1812 retarded settlement in Ohio, due to fear of the Indians, but with the signing of the treaty of peace new lands were opened up and economic conditions in the East attendant upon the war
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also stimulated emigration. The last years of the conflict had borne hard upon the population of the New England coast, what with the embargo, the seizure of numbers of coasting vessels, and coastal attacks such as that at- tempted upon Stonington. Prices had risen, in conse- quence of the war as well as from a succession of poor seasons for agriculture. Many persons who had been fairly prosperous before the war found themselves beg- gared and forced to begin life anew. Stimulated by re- ports of returning settlers and travelers, emigrants hastened again into the wilderness, pushing the frontier out to the Mississippi. The sales of public lands increased up to 1819, when the panic of that year caused a tem- porary decline; after 1822 the sales again increased; speculation reached a climax just before the panic of 1837. The abandonment, by the Government, of the credit system of land sales in 1821 probably affected the Connecticut emigrants but little, for they were accus- tomed to pay for their lands at once, and to make improve- ments with their remaining capital.
The Western Reserve was rapidly populated with Connecticut people, who not only carried old names to new homes, but who also transplanted the distinctive character of their earlier abode. The Reverend Timothy Flint found there a large and compact population, dis- tinct from any other in Ohio, and noted the "equal dispersion of farms over the surface," the tendency to support schools and churches, "exceedingly like the parent people from which they sprung." The Connecticut settlers of Medina county who had been accustomed to dairying soon introduced the enterprise. Agricultural societies, to which the settlers had been habituated at home, grew up here quite as a matter of course. By 1833 the people, who had before met rather informally to show
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the best cattle and products, had begun to form such societies; the permanent organization of these societies dated from 1845.
These settlers, having in mind the founding of Yale College, desired a similar institution of higher learning in northern Ohio. Western Reserve College, chartered in 1826, was modeled after Yale, both in its curriculum and in the organization of its governing board, the majority of which was to be composed of clergymen. Its first president was Dr. George E. Pierce, a graduate of Yale in 1816, who was said to have been thoroughly imbued with the Connecticut idea of a college. Most of the faculty were Yale men, and, from the first, there was an interchange of instructors, Yale graduates teaching at Western Reserve and the Western college sending its graduates to teach at New Haven.
Oberlin, in Lorain county, deserves more than pass- ing mention. In 1833, when the site of the future town was still a wilderness, a tract three miles square was secured. Here a number of families, mostly from New England, gathered to plant a town, a church, and a college. Philo Stewart, reared in Vermont but born in Connecticut, was one of the leaders in this movement which was especially designed to train young people as foreign missionaries. Stewart was anxious that the stu- dents might defray their expenses by manual labor and yet keep on with their studies. He had been educated in the academy of Pawlet, Vermont, where he had studied and worked during odd moments in his uncle's shop. In that academy young men and women had worked and studied side by side; his school must, then, he felt, include manual training and coeducation. A five-hundred- acre tract for a "Manual Labor School" was obtained, and the settlers vowed themselves to a life of simplicity,
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especial devotion to church and school, and to earnest labor in the missionary cause.
Nor were Oberlin settlers content with one missionary enterprise; Olivet College in Michigan, founded in 1844, was a child of Oberlin, as was Tabor College, founded in 1851 in Iowa. Oberlin graduates helped build Hillsdale College in Michigan; Ripon College in Wisconsin; Grinnell College in Iowa; Drury College in Springfield, Missouri; and Carleton College in Northfield, Minne- sota. President Fairchild said that the impulse of a new college, growing from small beginnings, had seemed to impress many Oberlin students, and that they had gone forth with the thought of undertaking a similar enter- prise.
The church in Oberlin was organized in 1834, with sixty-two members; its confession of faith was of the New England Calvinistic type, but the church never- theless connected itself with the Cleveland Presbytery, under a "plan of union" similar to that already in opera- tion in New York. The same plan was followed by practi- cally all the early settlers of the Western Reserve, whose churches, while Congregational in spirit, maintained out- ward fellowship through connection with some presbytery.
By 1840 Ohio's ungranted lands had been completely occupied, and the state had passed out of the pioneer stage. The population had become comparatively dense, the whole state more homogeneous, and New Englanders had settled throughout the state. The census of 1850 showed that 23,000 of Ohio's people had emigrated from Connecticut.
IV
UNTIL 1816, the chief migrations from Connecticut were to western New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, but
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after the panic of 1819, Connecticut emigrants began to filter into Indiana. One of the early settlers of Cass county migrated in 1826 from his birthplace, New Canaan, Connecticut. One reads sketches of men of Connecticut birth who came in these early days from Ohio and New York, where they had lived for a few years, but who, at this period, had moved on to cheaper land. The great influx of Connecticut settlers into Indiana began in 1830. Certain counties came gradually, in the succeeding years, to be known as New England counties. These lay generally along the northern border, dipping south on the eastern boundary, with scattered settlers in the center. La Grange county, in the northeastern part of the state, will illustrate this point. The leading spirit, for many years, in the town of Wolcottville was George Wolcott, born in Torrington, Connecticut, who came to Indiana in 1837. Early settlers, whose lives were woven into the history of the county, came from the Connecticut towns of Sherman, Lebanon, Fairfield, Hartford, and Windham. La Porte county drew some of its early settlers from Colchester, Wethersfield, Granby, and New Haven.
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