USA > Connecticut > Tercentenary pamphlet series, v. 3 The Beginnings of Roman Catholicism in Connecticut > Part 32
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An incident from Lake county history shows the Connecticut perseverance in gaining what the people of that section regarded as their rights. The settlers of Lake county, squatters upon unsold lands, were waiting for the passage by congress of a preëmption law which would insure them their homes. John Robinson, a native of Connecticut, called a meeting at his house on July 4, 1836, where he was appointed one of a committee to draft a constitution for a "Squatters Union." It was declared that actual settlers should have the lands at $1.25 per acre and that if congress did not protect the settlers, they would themselves take "such measures as
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may be necessary" to secure their just claims. Each signer was to use his influence to persuade his friends to join the union, "under the full assurance that we shall now obtain our rights, and that it is now perfectly as safe to go on improving the public land as though we already had our titles from government."
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FEW settlers entered Illinois from Connecticut until 1817. Among the first were three Collins brothers from Litchfield, Connecticut, who settled Collinsville, Madi- son county, opposite St. Louis, in that year. They used the same power for a distillery and a sawmill, ran a cooper shop, a blacksmith shop, a wagon shop, and a carpenter shop, and owned warehouses both in Collins- ville and in St. Louis. They were not wholly engrossed in money getting, however, as they, with their neighbors, built a union meetinghouse which was used for the public school during the week, and for a Sunday school after church service. When the father of these men arrived in 1824, he made the first substantial subscription for Illinois College. Yale graduates were the founders of this college at Jacksonville, and one of them, Julian M. Sturtevant, a native of Warren, Connecticut, was its president for over thirty years.
The Missouri Compromise directed Southern migration, which had previously flowed into southern Illinois, to the land across the Missouri river, leaving the fourteen northern counties of Illinois for the New Englanders and New Yorkers. Most of these later emigrants from the East were wealthy farmers, enterprising merchants, millers, and manufacturers with great public spirit, who built mills, churches, schoolhouses, and cities and made roads and bridges. A strong sectional antagonism sprang
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up, due to mutual misunderstanding between the north- ern and southern parts of the state, which came to a climax in 1840. A mass meeting was held at Rockford in Winnebago county, on the northern border, where one hundred and twenty delegates, some of them natives of Connecticut, met and resolved that the northern coun- ties should become annexed to Wisconsin. In August, 1842, the question of annexation was put to a popular vote and was favored 976 to 6. Nothing came of this plan, but it had its significance in indicating the length to which the northern pioneers would go rather than be dominated by an element foreign in aims and interest to their own.
The Wethersfield colony in Henry county was settled by a company formed of men from Maine to New York, but its impetus came from the pastor of the Wethersfield, Connecticut, Congregational Church. Each $250-share entitled its holder to one hundred and sixty acres of prairie land, twenty acres of timber, and a town lot. A committee of three set out in 1836, after $25,000 had been paid in, and purchased one hundred quarter sec- tions. The town was laid out with wide streets, one block was set apart for a public square, and one for an academy and college. Though only four of the sixty original mem- bers of the association ever came to live in the town, it was filled with New Englanders; a Congregational church was organized in 1839 with fifteen members; and the town of Kewanee perpetuated these pioneers by giving its streets such names as Dwight, Edwards, Tenney, Payson, and Hollis.
Cook county, which included the city of Chicago, drew many settlers from Connecticut, including some of its earliest clergymen, bankers, and merchants.
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VI
WHILE Michigan was still a territory, two men from Connecticut made their influence felt: William Wood- bridge and Isaac Crary. Woodbridge, who was secretary of the territory after 1815, was born in Norwich, Con- necticut. He became governor of Michigan in 1839. Crary, the territorial delegate and the first representa- tive Michigan sent to congress, was born in Preston, Connecticut. He had been educated at Bacon Academy, Colchester, Connecticut, and at Washington (now Trinity) College, Hartford, and had made a study of Cousin's famous report on the Prussian system of educa- tion. At the time of the Michigan constitutional conven- tion, Crary was chairman of the committee on education, and to him may be attributed, more than to any one else, Michigan's educational system, at the head of which stands the University of Michigan.
Connecticut migration to Michigan was of slight importance until the publication of John Farmer's maps of Michigan, 1825-1830, which gave accurate informa- tion concerning that territory. Before that time Michi- gan was scarcely known at all, save as a rendezvous for Indians; the lands had not yet been brought into the market, and the man who determined to make a home in such a region must run the risk of being dispossessed as a squatter. By 1830 all this was changed; and by 1837 "it seemed as if all New England were coming" to the state.
A glance at Berrien county will show the character of the Connecticut settlements. From 1831 to 1842 pioneers came from Norwich, Stamford, and New Milford, Connecticut. One pioneer will serve to typify hundreds. John Perrin, his wife, five sons, and four daughters were
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the first settlers of Jefferson township, Hillsdale county. In 1835 they left their home in Woodstock, Connecticut, took a vessel from Norwich to Albany, and made their journey through New York over the Erie Canal. At Buffalo they boarded a steamer bound for Detroit, which they reached three weeks from the day they bade good- by to their old home. Leaving the rest of the family behind, the father and his two eldest sons started out from Detroit to locate a farm; they passed Bear Creek valley, traveling on till they found a spring gushing from a rock on the hilly slopes of Jefferson township. All the surroundings were so like the old Connecticut home that there the pioneer cabin was built-the first house in the township. Again and again did the settlers seek out wooded lands which bore a striking resemblance to the tree-covered hills to which they were accustomed in the East.
Migration from Connecticut continued to such an extent that the census of 1880 showed that 6,333 of Michigan's citizens had been born in Connecticut.
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IN Wisconsin, the last state to be organized out of the Northwest Territory, the early settlement was typical of what later developed west of the Mississippi river. Save for a few French settlers scattered here and there, Wisconsin was, until 1826, a veritable wilderness. Settle- ments were begun along the shore of Lake Michigan in 1834. The land in Green county was brought into the market in 1835. Scarcely any of the earliest settlers had come from Connecticut, but some were the children of Connecticut parents who had settled in New York state. Prairie du Chien, an old French town, had, in 1837,
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nearly one hundred French families, but only ten Ameri- can families and four unmarried American men. Among these Americans was an itinerant Methodist preacher from Connecticut.
Racine county is a typical New England region in Wisconsin, for it was, from an early date, a favorite with settlers from the East. Several of the newcomers were from Derby, Cheshire, Bristol, and Colebrook, Connecticut. The settlement of Beloit was formed by a group of families from Colebrook, New Hampshire, who had previously migrated from Colebrook, Connecticut. They planted their village in 1838, and laid out wide streets, which today remind the traveler instantly of a town in the heart of Connecticut. College Street was the name they gave one of the choicest, for they intended from the first to have a college. Beloit College is a memo- rial of the lofty ideals of these Colebrook emigrants. In its development the college has followed closely the lines of the organization and administration of Yale; many of its presidents and professors have come from that Connecticut institution.
One is certain to come upon Congregational churches wherever a large proportion of New England emigrants is to be found. The First Congregational Church of Janesville had fifteen charter members, eleven of whom came from New England; another had moved from Athens, Pennsylvania, but came from Plainfield, Con- necticut, stock. The Prairie church, with eighteen mem- bers, numbered five from Vermont and two from Con- necticut. Of the four deacons in the Bloomington church one was born in Stonington, Connecticut.
Into the building of a state goes always the character of those men who are most prominent in its history-as governors, judges, legislators, or men of business. A
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glance at some whose names are bound up with the story of institutions, political and commercial, which they have built will serve to illustrate what has gone before as to the influence exerted by Connecticut upon this Western state. Of the first eighteen governors of Wis- consin four were born in Connecticut, while another was of Connecticut paren tage.
VIII
BEFORE leaving the old Northwest Territory one must speak of the influence of one Connecticut family in par- ticular, that of the Reverend Lyman Beecher, born in New Haven, brought up in Guilford, and a graduate of Yale College. Beecher and his wife, Roxana Foote, also of Guilford, were the parents of a large family of sons and daughters. Their oldest child was Catherine E. Beecher, born in 1800 in East Hampton, Long Island, but when ten years old taken by her parents to Litchfield, Connecticut, which then became the family home. There she attended a private school. When she was about twenty-one she began teaching in a private school for young ladies in New Britain, Connecticut. She later taught in a similar school in Hartford and became the principal of the Hartford Female Seminary. When, in 1832, her father accepted the presidency of Lane Theo- logical Seminary just established in Cincinnati, Ohio, Catherine and her sister, Harriet, went with him and there organized the Western Female Institute on the lines of the Hartford school. Harriet married the Rever- end Calvin E. Stowe and exerted a wide influence through her book, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Catherine aided in found- ing "female colleges" in Burlington, Iowa, Quincy, Illinois, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The impress of her personality and of her influence upon the future of higher
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education for women in the Northwest Territory can scarcely be overestimated.
Edward Beecher, the third of Dr. Lyman Beecher's children, a graduate of Yale, was the first president of Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois. His brother, Thomas K. Beecher, the twelfth of Lyman Beecher's thirteen children, graduated at Illinois College while his brother Edward was president, married Olivia, daughter of President Day of Yale, and was for forty-six years pastor and pastor emeritus of the Independent Congre- gational Church of Elmira, New York. Another brother, Henry Ward Beecher, was for several years pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana.
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ALL through the Colonial period the missionary spirit of the Congregational church had expressed itself in founding towns, churches, and schools. Just before the Revolution, in 1774, the Congregational churches of Connecticut in their general association voted to send missionaries to the latest settlements in Vermont and New York, whither Connecticut pioneers had been thronging. It was only when the Revolutionary War had become a matter of history, when the new national government had been set upon its feet, and when the peril from Indian aggression had apparently been over- come that the missionary spirit was born anew. The movement for sending out missionaries found expression almost simultaneously all over New England, though Connecticut3 in 1798 led the way. In that year the general association of Congregational churches in that state organized itself as a missionary society, "to Chris-
3 See Mary H. Mitchell, The Great Awakening and other revivals in the reli- gious life of Connecticut (No. XXVI in this series), pp. 36-38.
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tianize the heathen in North America, and to support and promote Christian knowledge in the new settlements of the United States." To stimulate interest in these home missions, an official organ known as The Connect- icut evangelical magazine was established in 1800, and in 1802 the society received a charter from the Connecti- cut legislature. Other similar societies in New England followed, but the initiative in the movement came from the Connecticut churches. It was in 1812 and 1813 that the missionary societies of Connecticut and Massa- chusetts united to send the Reverend Samuel J. Mills, Jr., of Torringford, Connecticut, and the Reverend John F. Schermerhorn on a tour in which they covered a long strip of territory along the western bank of the Missis- sippi. They found a few Baptists, a few Methodists, and one hundred or more families which had been Congre- gationalists or Presbyterians, many of them Connecticut born. Moses Austin himself sent for Mills to preach in his settlement. From 1815 to 1827 the Reverend Salmon Giddings of Hartland, Connecticut, did pioneer work in Missouri, and in 1817 gathered nine families, including five from Massachusetts and one from Connecticut, into the First Presbyterian Church in St. Louis. The one Connecticut family was that of the parents of Stephen Hempstead, second governor of the state of Iowa. Giddings and other workers paved the way for the Ameri- can Home Missionary Society, a general organization of the whole church which was founded in 1826.
One of the most interesting and important manifesta- tions of this "denominational awakening" was a move- ment for "lay emigration," as it was called. The Rever- end Asa Turner, the father of Congregational home missions in Iowa, felt strongly the need for Christian laymen on the frontier. Born in Templeton, Massachu-
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setts, of "migratory stock," he was educated at Amherst Academy, Yale College, and Yale Divinity School. Before he left New England to begin his first Illinois pastorate at Quincy, he urged that groups of families should accompany home missionaries to their new fields, to help in church, public school, and Sunday school, "fixing the character of towns, ... spreading the moral power of New England, and effectually aiding to save the West." He wrote to a friend in 1830: "It is of vast importance to settle a minister in each county as soon as possible. ... This is the object; to place one missionary in every county, and six or eight pious families . without any loss to New England. ... I mean to bring on a colony with me." And he did take about twenty people West with him in 1833.
The Reverend Aratus Kent, a missionary in the lead- mining region about Galena, Illinois, had the same idea. He, too, wrote in 1830: "A half dozen families of the right stamp, in company with the missionary, in many cases would render his labors doubly efficient. .. . Every new missionary then should have his little colony selected to accompany him, or pledged to follow and settle around him." Kent was born in Suffield, Connecticut, gradu- ated from Yale in 1816, and in 1828 appeared at the office of the American Home Missionary Society in New York City begging, it is said, to be sent "to the hardest place you got." Prairie du Chien, Fort Rock Island, Fort Dearborn, Dubuque, all knew him-the eager, devoted, tireless minister, hoping to influence the miners who ought to "be followed in their wanderings lest they forget the Lord and profane his Sabbath."
X THE first sermon preached in Keokuk, Iowa, in January,
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1837, was delivered by the Reverend Julius A. Reed, a native of East Windsor, Connecticut, who conducted a private school in Natchez, Mississippi, from 1831 to 1833, and went to Iowa in 1833. A group of New Eng- land folk in Des Moines was shepherded by the Reverend A. L. Frisbie, a native of Danbury, Connecticut, and his wife, who was born in Connecticut and had gradu- ated from Mount Holyoke. Dr. Frisbie served this church twenty-eight years as an active pastor, and eighteen as pastor emeritus. Another Congregational missionary was the Reverend Reuben Gaylord of Norfolk, Connecticut, who preached in Iowa from 1844 to 1855, when he went as the first Congregational minister to Nebraska. One of the best illustrations of the practical working of lay emigration-which was, after all, only a later phase of the colony plan which New England pioneers had followed from time to time since 1620-is found in the settlement of Denmark, Lee county, Iowa. Shortly after the town was laid out there was established Denmark Academy in 1843. Already the little transplanted New England town thought of a college, but Davenport seemed a better location and in 1848 Iowa College was established there. The original teacher of the little college was the Reverend Erastus Ripley, a native of Coventry, Connecticut, and a member of the Iowa Band of twelve young missionaries from Andover Seminary who were perhaps the most potent force for good in the early history of Iowa. The first financial aid which set the college definitely on its feet was a sum of $5,080 given in 1853 by Deacon P. W. Carter of Waterbury, Connecticut. In 1859 the college was moved to Grinnell, Iowa, where Yale graduates stood squarely behind it. Grinnell College, as it is now called, has always felt the strong influence of its Con- necticut ancestor.
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Mention has just been made of the Iowa Band. This was the first of a number of such groups, some of which came from Andover Theological Seminary and some from Yale Divinity School, composed of young min- isters, often just graduated and just married, who went into the West and in a number of states laid the foun- dations not only for the Congregational churches, acad- emies, and colleges, but also for the lay emigration of which the Reverend Asa Turner had held such great hopes. The Iowa Band of twelve worked mainly in Iowa with such success that in 1890 there were three hundred Congregational churches in that state and over 30,000 members. On the Missouri slope of Iowa, in 1848, a colony from Oberlin, Ohio, led by Deacon George A. Gaston, who had served his apprenticeship from 1840 to 1845 as a missionary of the American Board among the Missouri river Indians, settled in what became the town of Tabor. There Tabor College was founded and there John Brown spent some time preparing for his work in Kansas, while two members of the Yale Dakota Band, missionaries to Dakota in 1881, came from that little colony.
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CONNECTICUT's part in the development of Minnesota may be said to have begun with Jonathan Carver, born in Massachusetts in 1710, but brought up in Canterbury, Connecticut. Carver set out on his travels in 1766 by way of the Great Lakes, crossed to the Mississippi river by the Green Bay-Fox-Wisconsin route, then up the Missis- sippi to the St. Peter's (now the Minnesota) river, which he entered. He reached Lake Superior by way of the Chippewa and St. Croix rivers, returned to Mackinac in the fall of 1767, and to Boston in the spring of 1768.
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But it was over sixty years later that there came to Minnesota, in 1834, two Connecticut missionaries, Samuel William Pond and his brother, Gideon Hollister Pond, born in New Preston, Connecticut. They both labored for many years among the Sioux Indians of southern and western Minnesota, and prepared the "Pond Alphabet," a spelling book, and a grammar of the Sioux language. By 1851 enough Congregationalists had made their homes around Fort Snelling for the formation of what is today the First Church of Minneapolis.
In Minnesota's first territorial legislature of twenty- four members, two came from Connecticut. Six of the early towns have Connecticut names: Hampton, Elling- ton, Winsted, New Haven, Meriden, and New Hartford. Into the history of Carleton College was woven the character and influence of Professor George Huntington, born in Brooklyn, Connecticut; while Dr. Cyrus Nor- thrup, for twenty-seven years president of the University of Minnesota, was born in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Other Connecticut pioneers have been prominent in the judi- ciary, and in the professional and business life of the state, especially in Minneapolis, which long felt a Con- necticut influence out of all proportion to the number of Connecticut settlers. The strength of the Congregational church in Minnesota, which at its greatest numbered two hundred churches, is a significant illustration of this fact.
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WHILE Connecticut settlers were still moving into the old Northwest Territory and into the region bordering on both sides of the Mississippi river, far away over the mountains the tide of migration was beginning to flow into the slightly explored country lying north of Cali-
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fornia. The first Connecticut man to know anything about the Pacific Northwest was John Ledyard of Grot- on, who in 1776 accompanied Captain James Cook on his third and last voyage around the world. When Cook's ship touched that Northwest coast, Ledyard became interested in the possibilities of the fur trade, upon which the John Jacob Astor fortune was to be founded. Ledyard's endeavors to interest New England mer- chants in a project for tapping the wealth of that region and his meeting with Thomas Jefferson in Paris in 1785 were significant episodes in his thrilling career.
It was only in 1835 that the American Board sent out its first missionaries into the region that is now Washing- ton and Oregon. They had been preceded a year earlier by the Methodist, Jason Lee, whose undertaking was promoted largely by Willbur Fisk, the first president of Wesleyan University, at Middletown, Connecticut. The first teacher in Salem, now the capital of Oregon, was Mrs. Chloe A. Clark Willson, a native of Connecticut, who went to Oregon via Cape Horn in 1840. The Rever- end Henry H. Spalding, who with Dr. Marcus Whitman and their wives had established a mission near what is now Walla Walla, had led the way for later workers. Mrs. Spalding, who before her marriage was Eliza Hart of Berlin, Connecticut, and Mrs. Whitman were the first white women to cross the Rocky Mountains.
Connecticut settlers filtered into Washington and Oregon for over half a century. One of the early gover- nors of Oregon was Stephen F. Chadwick, from Middle- town, Connecticut, and a number of the Vermont and New York settlers were from families who had originally come from Connecticut. Six young men of the Class of 1890 in Yale Divinity School organized themselves into the Washington Band and chose the far-distant region
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of the Pacific Northwest for the scene of their labors. They were Stephen B. L. Penrose, who became president of Whitman College, Edward L. Smith, John T. Nichols, William Davies, Lucius O. Baird, and G. E. Hooker. Three of them were born in New England and all carried away from the institution where they were trained New England traditions of education, religion, and the service of mankind. All but one of the six remained in Washington for periods ranging from fifteen to twenty- five years. In 1920, three were still serving the churches and institutions of the state. Their influence upon eastern Washington has been marked and abiding.
XIII
FARTHER to the south lay California. All parts of the country felt the drain upon their population when, in 1848, gold was discovered in California. By all the old trails-the Santa Fé, the Salt Lake, and even by the Oregon trail, as well as by water to the Isthmus or around the Horn-emigrants poured into the territory so recently wrested from Mexico. The treaty of 1848 had given the overland approaches to the Pacific Coast entirely and without question into the hands of the United States, and the Mormon settlements in Utah, while not always friendly to emigrants, nevertheless afforded a halfway station that made the coast seem more accessible. But it needed an extraordinary reason to direct the tide of emigration strongly to California while good and cheap land was still plentiful in regions nearer the settled areas to the East, and this reason the gold discoveries supplied. Even before the rush from the East had begun, the Reverend Timothy D. Hunt, a Yale graduate, had reached San Francisco; but it was of the new arrivals that, in 1849, he formed the first
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Congregational church in California. The same year the second church of the denomination was gathered in Sacramento. In 1850 the Reverend Mr. Blakeslee, also a missionary, tried to interest people in the establish- ment of a Congregational college near San José; but the removal of the capital to Sacramento put an end to his plan for the moment. Daniel Coit Gilman, born in Nor- wich, Connecticut, was called in 1867 to the presidency of the University of Wisconsin, which he declined, feeling that he should remain in the East. He had had seventeen years of service at Yale, during which time he had drawn up a plan for what was to become the Sheffield Scientific School. In 1870 he was called by the University of Cali- fornia but did not accept until a second call came in 1873. His administration at California was of short duration, as he was chosen the first president of the Johns Hopkins in 1875. He was a fine example of the high type of Con- necticut men who helped develop the educational system of the Pacific coast.
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