USA > Connecticut > The Connecticut River and the valley of the Connecticut, three hundred and fifty miles from mountain to sea; historical and descriptive > Part 32
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The Springfield Home of George Bancroft.
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being in Sparta, New York. It was the alarm which this rebellion occasioned in the country at large that led Jeffer- son to the expression of his theory as to the wholesome- ness of periodic revolutions : "Calculate that one rebellion in thirteen states in the course of eleven years, it is but one for each state in a century and a half. No country should be so long without one."
The Armory and Armory Square are now at the finish of a beautiful walk of half a mile up broad State Street lined with magnificent trees. Midway are the City Li- brary and the Art Museum, admirable institutions nobly set ; and along the side street by the Library grounds are some houses interesting from their literary associations : notably the house in which George Bancroft lived during his three years' residence in Springfield (1835-38). The arsenal as it appears to-day, with its impressive line of buildings set back in handsome grounds, is the growth of a century. It developed from the works for repairing arms carried on through the Revolution when Springfield was a depot for military stores.
West Springfield and Agawam, to which the bridges across the River lead, and Longmeadow, connected by a trolley line, are intimately associated with Springfield, part of which they originally were. They remain rural towns of much beauty, each with its rich historic background.
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The Lower Valley.
Enfield and Suffield at the Connecticut State Line - Windsor Locks and Ware- house Point - Site of Pynchon's Warehouse of 1636- Ancient Windsor to-day and its Landmarks-Charms of the East-Side Windsors- A Ro- mance of the Colony - Roger Wolcott and his Homestead - Birthplace of Jonathan Edwards -Timothy Edwards and his Remarkable Family - Modern Hartford : Yet a "Gallant Towne " - Its Historic and Literary Landmarks - Trinity College.
E INFIELD on the east side and Suffield on the west side, at the point where the River again narrows, at the Connecticut state line, naturally mark the north bound of the Lower Valley. Both are charming in situation yet markedly unlike in physical features. Enfield's surface is generally level above the River; Suffield spreads over a succession of broken ridges. Enfield has a busy manu- facturing centre in Thompsonville, where are long-estab- lished carpet-making works, and where power-presses and other important things are produced. It is yet the abiding place of the Enfield Shakers, whose society dates back to 1788, and their neat colony on their own lands in the northeast part of the town is unique. But the community is fading out, and finis is likely soon to be written to its history. Suffield remains principally an agricultural town much devoted to tobacco culture.
Windsor Locks was the Pinemeadow of old Windsor and assumed its present name upon the establishment of the Enfield Canal. Now it is a busy manufacturing centre, with substantial paper mills, silk mills, and other factories. Warehouse Point, connected with Windsor Locks by a
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suspension bridge, is within the bounds of East Windsor. The place of William Pynchon's warehouse of 1636 is ixed by the local antiquaries as " probably about fifty rods below the present ferry landing."
In old Windsor we find to-day a small town with a great past, charming in its maturity. The central village preserves the lines of the original settlement. The tree- fringed Palisado Green is the historical centre. Here and in its neighborhood, on either side of the Farmington River, were the home-lots of the pioneer settlers, - Roger Ludlow, who lived in his Windsor stone house for five years, and then founded Fairfield on the Sound, John Warham, the minister, Henry Wolcott, the magistrate and ancestor of magistrates, John Mason, the first captain of the colony, and the rest. At the mouth of the Farmington is the site of the Plymouth Trading House, with the neighboring " Plymouth Meadow " still holding the old name. About the Green remain a gambrel-roofed mansion or two of the period, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centu- ries, when Windsor merchants were prosperously engaged in foreign commerce and the town was a port of entry. But Windsor's proudest landmark is the " Ellsworth man- sion," originally the home of Chief-Justice Oliver Ellsworth, one of Connecticut's two great revolutionary and constitu- tional statesmen. It is on the homestead lot of the emigrant Josias Ellsworth, dating back to 1665, and is within the tract upon which Francis Stiles attempted to make a foot- hold for the "Lords and Gentlemen " in 1655, when the Dorchester men elbowed the " Stiles party " off the " Great Meadow." Judge Ellsworth occupied this mansion at the height of his fame, and here, with his gracious wife, a great-granddaughter of Henry Wolcott, dispensed an " ele- gant hospitality." Washington and Lafayette were among
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his intimate guests. The spectacle of Washington in this family circle " delighting the judge's children ... by sing- ing to them the 'Darby Ram'," which Dr. Stiles presents in a footnote to his Ancient Windsor, reveals another feature of the real George Washington.
East Windsor and South Windsor, on the east side of the River, were included in the "Windsor Farmes " of early colonial times. South Windsor is especially interest- ing from its associations with the Wolcott and the Edwards families. Here lived the greater part of his long life of eighty-nine years that picturesque character in Connecticut colonial history, Roger Wolcott, born in 1679, who, " never a scholar in any school a day " of his life, rose through his genius and self-culture to early distinction in affairs, and to such achievements in belles-lettres as to mark him for first place in the line of Everest's Poets of Connecticut. And here, in 1703, Jonathan Edwards, the metaphysician, was born.
Roger Wolcott's father, Simon Wolcott, was a pioneer in the settlement of "Windsor Farmes," moving across from old Windsor, in about 1680, to a domain below the mouth of the Scantic River. He was the youngest son of Henry the emigrant, and his marriage to Martha Pitkin was a romance of the colony. Martha Pitkin was a sister of William Pitkin of Hartford, attorney-general and treas- urer of the colony. Handsome, accomplished, and twenty- two, she had come out from London to visit her brother, intending to return. But her beauty and accomplishments "put the colony in commotion," and it was resolved that she should be detained through a suitable marriage; the " stock was too valuable to be parted with." So the wise heads gravely set about to discover the most suitable young men to pay court to her. The choice, after due delibera-
A Connecticut Valley Tobacco Farm.
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tion, fell upon Simon Wolcott, then a widower (his first wife, a girl of eighteen, had died a month after their mar- riage) and living on his own estate in Windsor; and to the joy of the matchmakers he succeeded in securing her hand. They were married in 1661. The first fifteen years of the married life of the London beauty were passed on a frontier farm up the Farmington River, where she bore her husband eight children. Then came King Philip's War, when the family were driven off by hostile Indians and the farm destroyed. At this depressing period, when they were back in Windsor village to make a fresh start, Roger, the ninth child, was born. Simon died seven years after the move to Windsor Farmes, and two years later Martha became the wife of David Clarke, sometime secretary of the colony, and returned to old Windsor with her younger children. Of her nine Wolcott children seven lived to maturity. The daughters all married well, and the sons became men of leading, established at the "Farmes " on their own estates, along the winding path which devel- oped into the broad tree-shaded town "Street."
Roger Wolcott took up his permanent residence here in 1702 upon his marriage to Sarah Drake, his second cousin. . He was now twenty-three and had been in his " own business " for three years. He had learned to read English and to write when he was twelve, and at fifteen had begun work as a weaver's or clothier's apprentice. Within two years after his marriage he had his land cleared, his house and farm buildings all up, his farm run- ning profitably, and had become a man of affairs in the community. His house being finished in the year of the Sack of Deerfield, that gruesome scene was depicted among its wall " decorations " - a rude painting extending above the dark wood wainscot of the "front room." Panels in
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other rooms displayed paintings of animals and men. Here Roger and Sarah Wolcott lived "joyfully together " for forty-five years, bringing into the world a family of sixteen children, of whom thirteen lived full lives, and making this house one of the distinguished homes of the Lower Valley. Starting into public life when he was twenty- eight, Roger Wolcott served successively as town select- man, representative in the General Court, councillor, county court judge, superior court judge, chief justice on the superior bench, and finally governor of the colony. He was also a soldier in colonial wars: at thirty-two, in the expedition of 1711 to Canada ; at sixty-six commander of the Connecticut troops in the affair of 1745 against Cape Breton; and major-general, second in command of the united colonial forces at the conquest of Louisburg. His last years were spent serenely in retirement, largely devoted to literary pursuits, at the home of his eldest daughter, wife of Captain Roger Newberry, in old Windsor. His nar- rative and descriptive poem on Connecticut was of this period, but his first ventures into verse were of much earlier date, his little book of Poetical Meditations appearing in 1725.
The " Windsor Farmes " homestead remained for some time after Roger Wolcott's day, a landmark on the " Old Governor's Road " which led up from the landing of " Wol- cott's Ferry" crossing to the Plymouth Meadow. An old stone-walled well is now pointed out as upon its site.
The Timothy Edwards house, birthplace of Jonathan Edwards, stood some distance south of East Windsor Hill. It was an unusually substantial dwelling for the time of its erection, 1696-97, having been built for Timothy Ed- wards by his father, a prospering merchant in Hartford. As described in Stoughton's Windsor Farmes, it was a
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two-story structure of fine timber, narrow and long, with a porch and door in the middle of the front. It occupied a slight eminence from which the land sloped toward a brook at the foot of a steeper hill, then crowned with a forest of primeval trees. It was in the groves of this hill that Jonathan, the boy of seven or eight, during a period of fervid religious revival, built his tent for secret prayer with his mates.
Timothy Edwards was in his way as remarkable a man as his son. He was of the third generation from William Edwards the founder of the family in America, settled in Hartford in 1645, and the next year married to Agnes Spen- cer, widow of William Spencer, an earlier settler. Whether the father of William Edwards was Richard Edwards, a London clergyman of the Established Church in Elizabeth's time, as has been assumed, or a clergyman at all, is in doubt. All that is definitely known is that his mother, when the Widow Anne Edwards, married John Cole in England, and that she came out to America with him and her son and step-children. William became a merchant in Hartford. He died before 1672, leaving only a son, Richard. Richard married first Elizabeth Tuthill of New Haven. From her he was divorced in 1691, when he mar- ried Mary Talcott of Hartford, a daughter of Lieutenant- Colonel Talcott. He had six children by each wife. Timothy Edwards was his eldest son by Elizabeth Tuthill, born in Hartford in 1669. Upon the cause of the divorce of Timothy Edwards's parents light is thrown in Mr. Stoughton's Windsor Farmes. The branch of the Tuthill (or Tuttle) family from which Elizabeth Tuthill came was erratic to the degree of insanity :
Mrs. Richard Edwards's brother was found by the colonial court guilty of murdering a sister, and another sister was found guilty of
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killing her son. Both of these persons would undoubtedly have been found insane by a committee 'de lunatico inquirendo,' but a plea of insanity was little favored by the early courts, and indeed in his case was not urged. The brother was executed, but the sister, through the confusion arising at the time in the administration of colonial affairs, escaped the penalty of the law, there being in point of fact no government that could lawfully execute her, owing to trouble growing out of Sir Edmund Andros's administration.
Timothy Edwards displayed none of the erratic tenden- cies of his unfortunate mother, whatever they may have been. Some of them, however, are said to have cropped out in his youngest daughter, Martha, who married into the Tuthill or Tuttle, family; a branch other than her grandmother's. She is said to have possessed a " very peculiar disposition," and a " refractory spirit," and to have given her husband, a good honest parson, an " unquiet life." Ample explanation of the vigor of the erratic pecu- liarities occasionally outcropping in the Edwards race, and, after their restraint by the strong will of Jonathan Ed- wards, renewed in his son Pierpont and his grandson Aaron Burr, which have been the subject of ingenious speculation by numerous writers, Mr. Stoughton suggests will be found upon physiological grounds by a study of the branch of the Tuthill line whose blood was transmitted to the Ed- wards line by the union of Richard Edwards and Elizabeth Tuthill.
Timothy Edwards's pastorate at the "Windsor Farmes" settlement was his first and only one, and lasted sixty- three years. Upon his first preaching as a candidate in 1694, he married Esther Stoddard, the Northampton par- son's daughter, and granddaughter of John Warham, Windsor's first minister. She was a woman of rare intel- lectual force and refinement of character. The parsonage
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was built before the meeting-house, and within it the minister's ordination services, in 1698, were held, followed by an unusual spectacle - an ordination ball. It remained the home of Timothy and Esther Edwards through his ministry, ending with his death at eighty-nine. Esther Edwards survived him thirteen years, reaching her ninety- ninth year. Their children, all born in the parsonage, were eleven, all girls save Jonathan, who was the fifth child. The girls grew to be exceptionally tall maidens, each six feet in height, which led their father to speak of them jocularly as his " sixty feet of daughters."
In this rare household Jonathan Edwards developed early a prodigy of learning. All the girls were well grounded in Latin, and several of them in Greek. The par- sonage was an educational workshop, and the minister was a leader in his generation in promoting the higher educa- tion. He is said to have fitted some fifty boys for Yale. Sometimes the learned elder daughters assisted him in the preparatory school. Jonathan was studying Latin at eight years of age, and at thirteen was in Yale. His gradua- tion at seventeen with the highest honors testified to the thoroughness of the father's training.
Jonathan Edwards's life in the parsonage practically closed with his graduation from college. He began to preach in his nineteenth year, and was twenty-four when he became established in Northampton, first as a colleague of his Grandfather Stoddard. Of his ten sisters three be- came ministers' wives. The parsonage remained till the early nineteenth century.
Other pleasant old estates of South Windsor still in the families who established them, are those of the Stoughtons and the Grants. The first Stoughton here was Captain Thomas, son of Thomas, a leading man in the Old
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Windsor settlement. He was a brother-in-law of Timothy Edwards, having married Timothy's sister Abigail for his second wife. The first Grant here was Matthew, a son of Samuel Grant of Old Windsor, the ancestor of General and President Grant. Down close to the East Hartford border of South Windsor is the birthplace of John Fitch, the steamboat inventor; and in the near neighborhood Eli Terry, the originator of the cheap " Yankee clock " indus- try of Connecticut, was born.
The Windsors now are centres of importance in the Connecticut tobacco "belt." It is interesting to hear that the first cigars made in this country were produced in South Windsor, and by a woman, thus reversing the custom of the original tobacco growers, the Indians, who held the plant too sacred for their women to handle. She was a Mrs. Prout, a South Windsor farmer's wife. According to the tobacco historian of the United States Census, her enterprise was begun in 1801. Soon other farmers' wives joined her, and their product was peddled from village to village in wagons. The earliest brands in the market and lingering for more than half a century were "Long Nines," reminiscent of juvenile experiences of old smokers of to-day past the fifties. The " Windsor Particular " was also an early brand. Later on the "Clear New England Cigar " was a familiar Connecticut product. The tobacco now grown in the Valley is the wrapper leaf exclusively.
To modern Hartford fittingly applies Samuel Maverick's characterization of the Hartford of the mid-seventeenth century. It is now as then "a gallant Towne and many rich men in it." Setting forth its advantages in material things, one local writer dwells upon its wealth, " greater in proportion to its inhabitants than any other city in the country." He apparently overlooks the rich Boston suburb
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The Connecticut State Capitol and Bushnell Park, Hartford.
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of Brookline, but that is a town, not a city. Another, more engagingly, presents it as a place of " comfortable homes, of beautiful parks, of lovely drives," where "wealth, comfort, and refinement combine to make life almost ideal in its possibilities." The reasonableness of this view im- presses itself upon the visitor as he strolls along the cheer- ful thoroughfares and observes the city's outward aspect ; the more so if it be his pleasure to cross the thresholds of some of its comfortable homes. If his approach be by railroad, as he reaches the street below the station his eye will at once be charmed by an elegant park directly across the way, rising symmetrically to a height crowned with the ornate state capitol. Along the business streets and in the heart of the city he will note the interesting blend of old-time and modern architecture. He will find notable libraries and literary institutions, with the intellectual flavor that attaches to a college town. The city's wealth comes through its association with large and varied manu- factures, and great insurance interests centering here. Its refinement is an inheritance from a succession of cultivated generations.
City Hall Square, the heart of the city, and the older streets toward the River front, retain generally the lines of the colonial town. Main Street, back from the River and running parallel with it, has evolved from the " Road from Sentinel Hill to the Palisades," the first town way, origi- nally finished with a fort at either end. The Square was the first "Meeting-House Yard " or Green, the centre of the colonial town. State Street, opening from the east side, was the first " Road to the Landing " on the River. Front Street, nearer the River front, was the first main travelled road connecting Wethersfield, Hartford, and Windsor. City Hall Square, with Main Street and its neighborhood
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below to Park River, comprises the historic ground. Park River, - most commonplace of names, -is the "Little River," or " The Riveret " of the first settlers, meandering through the city and emptying into the Connecticut at the Dutchmen's old preserve of Dutch Point.
City Hall Square is of first interest. On its east side stood the little meeting-house before which, in the open air, the freemen of the colony adopted that first written consti- tution of 1639. The open space where now many lines of trolley cars centre, was the popular gathering-place on all public occasions in colony times. Here the freemen assem- bled yearly to elect the colonial governor and other public officers. Here Captain John Mason's Lilliputian army for the Pequot War were lined up, and thence marched down to the Landing and embarked with Hooker's godspeed. Here was the rendezvous of the Connecticut soldiers for King Philip's War. Here in 1687 Andros was received with much show of courtesy, when, as governor of New England, he came with his councillors, his guard, and his trumpeters, to demand the colonial charter which Captain Joseph Wadsworth afterward hid in the "Charter Oak." Here, a half-dozen years later, when Governor Fletcher of New York came to assume command of the Connecticut militia, assigned him by the crown, the same Captain Wadsworth, with the Hartford trainband lined up, defied him, drowned his proclamation with the roll of the drums, and threatened to " make the sun shine through him " if he further interrupted their exercises. In after years here were celebrated victories of the French and Indian War and of the Revolution. The City Hall, facing the Square, a structure of late eighteenth century architecture, was originally the State House. Begun in 1794, it was two years in building, from slow-coming funds raised in part
Main Street, Hartford.
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through a lottery. Its chief interest lies in its having been the place where the Hartford Convention during the War of 1812 assembled.
In and about the Square are also found landmarks of early literary Hartford. Here was the printing office of Joel Barlow's weekly gazette, The American Mercury, begun in 1784, to which the "Hartford Wits," of whom he was one, contributed. And Barlow's bookstore, where together with books, rum, teas, coffee, pepper, sugars, and English goods, were sold his Vision of Columbus, first pub- lished in Hartford in 1787, and his Psalm Book, an adap- tation of Watts's Version. In near neighborhood was the home of John Trumbull, the author of M' Fingal, the epic of the Revolution, and chief of the " Hartford Wits," where the club often met. With Trumbull and Barlow contrib- uting most to the club's effusions were Dr. Lemuel Hopkins, the " bludgeon satirist "; Richard Alsop, of Middletown, poet of gentler pleasantry ; Colonel David Humphreys; Theodore Dwight, senior; and Dr. Elihu H. Smith, of Wethersfield. Their serial political satires, - The An- archiad, The Echo, The Political Green House, - produced in the period immediately following the Revolution, and foremost in its literature, appeared first in the weekly jour- nals published here and in New Haven. Near the old State House was printed Theodore Dwight senior's Con- necticut Mirror, begun in 1809. This was the gazette which afterward John G. C. Brainard, "the gentle poet of the Connecticut," edited through five years, from 1822 till shortly before his death at only thirty-two. Slighting its politics, he gave it a distinct literary flavor with his own writings. On Main Street, a little north of the Square, was the office of the New England Review, which the poet George D. Prentice first edited, and after him John G.
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Whittier, whom he most generously introduced to its readers. Prentice was Connecticut born, versatile, pol- ished, debonair, his fame afterward blooming in Kentucky in his Louisville Journal. Whittier came to his editorial chair at twenty-two in Quaker homespun fresh from the Amesbury farm. With many associates, Whittier made last- ing friendships during the less than two years of his Hart- ford life, - between 1830 and 1832. Of his circle was Frederick A. P. Barnard, then a young instructor in the Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, whom, when president of Columbia a half-century after, Whittier recalled in his dedication of Miriam :
"The years are many since, in youth and hope, Under the Charter Oak, our horoscope We drew thick-studded with all favoring stars. Now with gray beards, and faces seamed with scars From life's hard battle, meeting once again We smile, half sadly, over dreams so vain."
Another was Lydia Huntley Sigourney, that most volum- inous of early American women writers, then at the height of her popularity, whose verses and "moral pieces," eventually filling more than sixty volumes, were produced before the acceptance of women to full fellowship in art and letters. This is the keynote of the lines which Whittier wrote after her death in 1865 for the tablet placed by her pew in Christ Church, on upper Main Street :
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