USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Waterbury > The churches of Mattatuck : a record of bi-centennial celebration at Waterbury, Connecticut, Novermber 4th and 5th, 1891 > Part 12
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be appointed to prove and send to the master such scholars as be fitted for his tuition; that two men be appointed to take care of the school, to repair and supply necessaries as the case may require. After asking four things for the school, he makes a number of personal requests: That the school may begin but at 8 o'clock all the winter half-year (7 o'clock had been the hour); that the school-master have liberty to be at neighbors' meetings once every week; liberty to use any books that belong to the school. He solicits a week's vacation in the year. He requests that his person and estate may be rate-free in every town within New Haven jurisdiction. He also desires that a settled habita- tion be granted to him, not at his own charge. He petitions for liberty to receive and instruct in the school, scholars sent from other places outside the colony of New Haven, and the benefit of them; that half the year's payments shall be made and accounts cleared with the master within the com- pass of every half year; that forty pounds per annum be paid to the school-master by the colony treasurer and ten pounds by the New Haven treasurer. The next requests we give in his own words:
That the major part of the above payments be made to the school-master in these particulars: Thirty bushels of wheat, two barrels of pork, two barrels of beef, forty bushels of Indian corn, thirty bushels of peas, two firkins of butter, one hundred pounds of flax, and thirty bushels of oats.
He likewise desired to learn what was expected of him beyond instruction in the languages and ora- tory. His final petition is in the following words:
That the honored Court be pleased to consider of and settle these things, this court time, and to confirm the consequent
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of them,-the want of which things, especially some of them, doth hold the master under discouragement and unsettlement, yet these things being suitably considered and confirmed, if it please the honored Court further to improve him who at pres- ent is school-master, although unworthy of any such respect and weak for such a work, yet his real intention is to give up himself to the work of a grammar school, as it shall please God to give opportunity and assistance.
It is gratifying to be able to state that nearly all the requests of the school-master were complied with, and that Mr. Peck seemed to be very well satisfied. Nevertheless, neither the colony school nor the colony of New Haven prospered. Dark days dawned for both. The school was closed in 1662, and New Haven colony itself, the beloved of noble and excellent men, soon closed its unwilling eyes, to open them again, most unwillingly, under the jurisdiction of Connecticut.
How eagerly would we scan the pages revealing the life and acts of our pastor during his ministry at Saybrook, follow his return to Guilford, and learn from his own pen exactly why he was so earnestly opposed to the baptizing of children whose parents were not in church communion; fol- low him through all the eventful, stirring scenes and days that clustered around the last hours of New Haven colony and led that band of her devo- ted children, of whom Jeremiah Peck was one, to go forth into the wilderness of New Jersey, to found a new town-a town in whose government no man might have part until he had acknowledged the government of his God by visible membership in church union.
Mr. Peck became one of the first settlers of New- ark, the first minister at Elizabethtown, the first
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settled minister at Greenwich, Conn., and, eleven years later, Waterbury's accredited first pastor.
How the pages would glow with interest as we read of this man, much sought after by the early churches, as he drew near to this people, "dwelling in a corner of the wilderness," and in need alike of meeting house and minister of the pioneer order, as Mr. Peck undoubtedly was; for, as we have seen, he had an eye for business and personal advantage as well as spiritual insight.
And now we turn to our own town records, to learn what we may of his coming. There is no mention of his name prior to the year 1689.
The house on North Main street, with its histori- cal secrets, has yielded up the original minutes of the meeting of March 18th, 1689, from which we learn that the vote desiring Mr. Peck to " settle in the work of the ministry " was unanimous. The pro- prietors were generous. They gave him uncondi- tionally "the home lot and house built for the min- ister on his first entrance there with his family." They gave him the allotments and divisions belong- ing to the minister's lot, so called, provided he remain with them four years. And, to induce his sons, Jeremiah and Caleb, to live in Waterbury, in the generosity of their hearts they gave to them one of their three great lots, with all its grants and divisions, the only conditions being that they should, each of them, build a house and dwell four years in the town. Mr. Peck accepted the invita- tion.
All the way from Greenwich to Waterbury, in I689! There is something extremely winsome in that journey. It was in the spring-time, too! And
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there were Indian villages in the way. But Water- bury's discreet and stalwart proprietors-Isaac Bronson, a very pillar in the wilderness, as well as in the church; Samuel Hickox, usually found on the right side of everything, and Obadiah Richards, the father-in-law of more proprietors' sons than any other man in Waterbury-were there, as guard and guide to " Mr. Peck and family, and cattle and estate."
Time will not permit us to take that journey. It is safe to say that the minister's house was made ready; that much scouting by the boys, not down on the record, took place that day to discover the approach of the little cavalcade. There was the Rev. Jeremiah Peck, Mrs. Peck, the son Jeremiah, twenty-six years old; Anna, a daughter of twenty- four years, who went, the next year, a bride down the Farmington path with Thomas Stanley; and Joshua, a lad of sixteen, besides probable house- hold servants, with the " cattle and estate." The date of the arrival is unknown, but that it occurred prior to May 20th, 1689, appears by the fact that on that day the good-natured town permitted Mr. Peck's door-yard to extend a rod and a half into the highway, which extension is still visible to-day in the sloping bit of lawn lying between the house of Mrs. John C. Booth and St. John's church.
The year 1689, in which Mr. Peck came, was a year of great and special trials, both in Waterbury, in other towns and in the colony. There was a great drought, and there was an epidemic sickness in most of the plantations, so great that the "peo- ple suffered for want of tendance;" so great that in August no Court could be held at Hartford.
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Two of the twenty-five men who signed the agree- ment for Mr. Peck's salary died in that year. To add to this, the beating of the drum for volunteers to go forth to war with the Indians at the north was heard in every town, and Mr. Peck himself reminded the Court of the many soldiers that Waterbury had entertained, and the much scouting that had been done, without pay, when he peti- tioned for assistance in building the meeting house -at least, the petition was written by his hand and bears evidence in its style of his authorship.
It seems reasonable to believe that Mr. Peck was school-master in Waterbury, for we find no mention of schools until after he became an invalid.
Although there remains to us no pictured sem- blance of his personal presence; no word of ser- mon or of song to keep in memory, we have the assurance that the Rev. Jeremiah Peck, the accred- ited first minister of the First church of Water- bury, was a man of true courage, of great enter- prise, and of unfailing integrity; that in all his wanderings there is no indication that he wan- dered one step away from the path of a true and faithful minister of the gospel of Christ.
He remained the pastor of the church until his death on the 7th of June, 1699. Regarding the place of his burial, there is neither record nor tra- dition, so far as has been learned. He may have been borne at that early day over the then new road to New Haven, and there laid beside his father, Deacon William Peck (who died at the ad- vanced age of ninety-one years, three years after this church was gathered), or he may have been laid to rest in yonder late desecrated place of burial.
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JOHN SOUTHMAYD.
BY MISS SARAH J. PRICHARD.
In the year 1699, and before the death of the Rev. Jeremiah Peck, this church received the ministra- tions of a young man who became the most learned and distinguished lawyer in New England. When he came to Waterbury he was fresh from Harvard College. It is pleasing to know that this people appreciated the ability of the Rev. John Read, before opportunity had been given him to prove it elsewhere.
He made a deep impression. The town was stirred to activity. There was a determination and an earnestness in its efforts to secure Mr. Read " for the work of the ministry " that the years have not been able to obliterate from the records. It is almost pathetic to read of the inducements offered him by a people whose ratable estate was but sev- enteen hundred pounds, and the number of whose taxable citizens was but forty-seven. He was offered fifty pounds by the year, in provision pay, ten pounds in wood and twenty pounds in labor, in the same year that the salary of the governor of the colony was but one hundred and twenty pounds, in provision pay. It must be remembered that this town, as a town, was less than fourteen years old, having been incorporated in 1686, and that less than forty men had built one house for the minister, in which, an invalid, his life was drawing to its close. Undaunted by the magnitude of the undertaking, the town promised to build a new house for Mr.
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Read. It was to be thirty-eight feet long, nineteen feet wide; to have two chimneys from the ground and, apparently, a chamber chimney. The town agreed to "dig and stone a cellar, clapboard the house and shingle it, and make one end of it fit to live in." As a present gift, independent of the town's action, the proprietors gave him ten acres of upland, and this land seems to have been laid out to him, or to his heirs, long afterward. Yet more was there in the heart of this generous people to do for him. After he had been ordained two years, the house and the house lot of two acres, at the south-west corner of West Main and Willow streets, with a one hundred and fifty pound propriety, was to be his own. Negotiations went on. From time to time, another persuasive voice was added to the committee, to entreat Mr. Read to dwell here; but, at last, as winter was drawing near, Mr. Read evi- dently drew away, for the old record bears wit- ness to the fact in these words: "Deacon Thomas Judd was chosen a committee to endeavor by him- self, and the best counsel he can take, to get one to help him in the work of the ministry, and to bring a man amongst us, upon probation, in order to set- tlement, if he can." John Hopkins was, later, chosen, with Deacon Judd, " for getting a committee."
As we may not enter into the secret of the power that Mr. Read had over this church, let us listen a moment to a few words of his own. Mr. Thomas Prince has placed them on record for us as follows:
In conversation with the late honorable and learned lawyer, John Read, Esq., as I happened to speak of living with the Rev. Mr. Torrey, of Weymouth, he immediately said: "Mr. Torrey ! That was the most wonderful man in prayer I ever heard. When I was senior sophister at college, in 1696, there
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being a day of prayer, kept by the association at Newtown, upon some extraordinary occasion, in the house of public wor- ship, I and several others went from college to attend the exer- cise; where were two prayers made by two ministers, beside a sermon by a third, in the forenoon, and the like in the after- noon; and then, Mr. Torrey stood up and prayed nearly two hours; but all his prayer so entirely new and various, without tautologies, so exceeding pertinent, so regular, so natural, so free, lively, and affecting, that towards the end of his prayer, hinting at still new and agreeable scenes of thought, we could not help wishing him to enlarge upon them. But the time obliged him to close, to our regret; and we could gladly have heard him an hour longer. His prayer so wonderfully enlivened and moved the congregation, that we seemed not to be sensible of the time's elapsing, till he had finished."
If we may judge of the influence of Mr. Read over the people of Waterbury by Mr. Read's account of the effect upon him of Mr. Torrey's prayer, we can form some estimate of the keenness of their disap- pointment. But the work on the minister's house went on and the forty-seven good men voted a tax on themselves of half a penny on the pound "in current silver money or its equivalent, to buy glass and nails for the minister's house." Truly, there were giants in those days, in the pulpit and in the pews.
Meanwhile, the minister for this church and peo- ple had been made ready and was drawing near. He came, in the person of a young man of twenty- three years, late in the autumn of 1699. Dr. Henry Bronson, in his " History of Waterbury," has drawn for us a sharp and vivid outline of the then condi- tion of affairs. He says that Waterbury was not a very inviting field of labor; the town was yet suf- fering from the effects of the great flood; a gloom had settled over the prospects of the people; they
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were upon the borders of civilization and in the midst of an Indian war. All this was true, but, in the ever new and stirring events of the period, when every rustle of the forest trees brought with it life and expectation of important tidings from distant towns, there was no time for despondency, and little time for aught else than imperative action. The building of the great common fence guarding the grain fields-an undertaking, the magnitude of which, when the men and means are estimated, equals and even surpasses the construc- tion of any of our modern public works for which we take credit and glory to ourselves-these men carried on as a matter of life and death to them- selves and families, without a thought of credit or glory; and this great work was yet incomplete when the new minister came.
John Southmayd was born in Middletown, Conn., August 23d, 1676. He was the son of William Southmayd, mariner, and Esther Hamlin, his wife; the grandson of William Southmayd; the great- grandson of Sir William Southmayd, of the county of Kent, England, and, on his mother's side, the great-great-grandson of Elder William Goodwin, of Hartford; for which descent let his descendants with us, to-day, be duly thankful. The only item regarding his father that has come to the notice of the writer, is recorded in the diary of Major John Talcott, and is the not altogether discreditable fact that William Southmayd, mariner, permitted a negro boy belonging to him to escape out of his barque at Middletown.
The negotiations for the settlement of Mr. South- mayd over this church were carried on for more
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than five years before they culminated in his ordi- nation. In October, 1703, "Sergeant Isaac Bron- son, Thomas Judd, Jr., and Edmund Scott were appointed to prepare what was needful for the entertaining the elders and messengers, for the ordaining Mr. Southmayd," and yet Mr. Southmayd himself in a letter written to Mr. Prince in 1729 has given the date of his ordination as May 30th, 1705. During this interval, important events had occurred in his life. That he lived in Waterbury, and was the acting pastor of the people, is strongly indi- cated, if not proved, by the records; and is satisfac- torily proven when he himself, in 1738, states that he has been with the church about thirty- eight years. Therefore, we may conclude that he came to the house (begun for Mr. Read), with his bride, in the year of their marriage, 1700. They undoubtedly lived, for a time, in the end of the house the town had finished. In 1702 his father died, at Middletown, leaving an estate of more than a thousand pounds, out of which, Dr. Bronson tells us, Mr. Southmayd brought to Waterbury "fifty pounds in gold and silver "; and yet, despite his coin of the realm, this town increased his salary, and the proprietors from year to year bestowed gifts upon him, independent of all his land divisions that fell to him by allotment, from his one hundred and fifty pound propriety. The town gave him the lot of two acres, extending from West Main street to Grand, on one corner of which the residence of Mr. Robert K. Brown now stands, together with the house that had been begun for Mr. Read on that lot; it purchased the two-acre house lot next adjoining that, on the east, and added it to the gift.
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In that house on the corner, two daughters were born to Mr. Southmayd before his ordination, and one of the two, Susannah, who became the wife of Thomas Bronson, Esq., was born just before the order was given, in 1704, to fortify Mr. South- mayd's house. Doubtless the fort about Timothy Stanley's house was too crowded by the alarmed inhabitants to be comfortable for Mr. Southmayd's family.
We may not linger over this period. Mr. South- mayd became pastor, preacher, leader, and the responsible conductor of many of the interests of the community. If it became necessary to make an appeal to the General Assembly, the people applied to Mr. Southmayd to put it in good form and give it all the advantage that might accrue from his pen. He was appointed, in 1710, on the committee to draw up, in writing, "the circumstances of the town in that time of war, and present it at the Gen- eral Court." If any one could do this feelingly, surely Mr. Southmayd could, for, just over the way from his house, near where Mr. C. M. Mitchell now lives, were the distressed wife and children of Jona- than Scott, who had been carried off, with his two sons, by the Indians. Again, in 1711, he was requested to write to the committee of safety, "expressing the fears of the common enemy."
Meanwhile, the little meeting house, that seems not to have been made ready for the first seating of the people until 1702, was continually undergoing changes. First, the young men were permitted to build a small seat, or gallery, to sit in, and then, Mr. Southmayd to enlarge the seat at the west end of the pulpit, and then the town agreed to put up
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a beam for a gallery at the west end, and finally to build the gallery; and then the doors and win- dows had to be repaired. In 1719, the repairs that had been eleven years in process were completed, and the second seating took place. At first, the vote was, that the persons formerly seated in the pews should sit there, without any disturbance. This vote was subsequently overruled, and it was decided that the seating should be by list of estate and by age, reckoning one year in age to four pound of estate. But two years pass by, and then, in 1721, the town voted to apply to the General Court to get a tax on all the land laid out within the town bounds, the money to be disposed of to the building of a meeting house. I do not know the result of the above appeal to the Court, but it was probably not granted, for in the year following more repairs were made; a part of the stairs into the gallery was taken up, and seats were placed where the stairs had been. We might never have known that the first meeting house had east and west doors, had they remained as they were at the beginning; but they were closed on this occasion, to give place for more seats. The outside of the meeting house was mended and the pulpit was raised.
For three years the little meeting house must have been, on Sundays, on lecture days and on Fast days, not to mention Thanksgiving days, a veritable human hive, and it is not surprising that the pulpit had to be raised. In 1726, the situation evidently became unbearable and it was decided to build a new meeting house, forty feet wide and fifty feet long. Later, it was decided that the area
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of the new house must contain two thousand square feet, but it might be proportioned by the com- mittee and the workman, and we have no record as to the proportions adopted. The need was impera- tive, and in the building haste was made. There was much culling of material for that house. Mr. Southmayd held I know not what place on the committee, but a little book found in the Kings- bury house tells its own interesting story, written by his hand, of the building of the second meeting house in Waterbury.
On the first day of July, 1729, the town met together for the important work of seating the people in it. Mr. Southmayd was given his choice and chose " the pew at the east end of the pulpit, next to the pulpit." It was evidently a day of great expectations, and the committee began to bestow the honors. Age and estate alone are men- tioned as qualifications. The pew, next in dignity to Mr. Southmayd's was there, facing that one, with the pulpit between. Into it were delegated those whom they delighted to honor, Abraham Andrus, senior, and his wife. Mr. Andrus must have been eighty-two years of age at this date, and, with the exception of his brother-in-law, Benjamin Barns, seems to have been the only signer of the articles for the settling of Mattatuck left alive, unless we count Stephen Upson, senior, who was probably of greater age than either Andrus or Barns, but who signed later. Into the pew with the above went widow Deborah Porter, whose hus- band, Dr. Daniel Porter, had died a few years before. Her house was hard by the meeting house, facing it, with only the highway between. Lieu-
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tenant Hopkins and his wife completed the list. These persons had lived in Waterbury fifty years, and had been familiar with every scene of joy or woe within the town. Into the second pew went Dr. Warner. However much we may desire to fol- low this seating, the door of the record closes upon us, and we are shut out from farther knowledge, thanks to Mr. Southmayd. If there was a skeleton in the church, he has not told of it. New people had come in, doubtless there was dissatisfaction and some friction, but the Rev. John Southmayd's good common sense was equal to the occasion.
It was when the new meeting house was fin- ished that Mr. Southmayd's salary was raised to seventy-five pounds, money. This was one of Water- bury's bright periods. The old town was growing. It would be pleasant to tell of the new inhabitants that came. Two years later, the minister's salary reached its highest point, one hundred pounds, and in the following year came the first of a long series of trials that the old First church had to pass through; and they grew then, just as they are growing to-day, out of the town's increase in wealth and population. The inhabitants who had been welcomed to hospitable meadows and uplands, asked to withdraw their support from the church in the town spot, and establish little centers of their own, here and there, throughout the township. To-day, we can see the bright outcome of all this darkness and trial, better than we can see the sore distress that surely settled in the breast of their dear mother, when she saw her birdlings flying away, laden with much of the harvest that she had toiled to gather. Through all this period the Rev.
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John Southmayd proved himself the very man for this church and people. They who will give the subject careful study, amid the facts left to us, will find that his name is worthy of great honor.
To go back to 1721. That was the year in which, in the great town meeting in December, Mr. Southmayd was by the town chosen town clerk, and by the proprietors, proprietors' clerk-an act of ancient Waterbury the value of which will re- main in full force until time shall have effaced the last word written by him. For thirty-four years he filled the offices, to the increasing satisfaction of both parties. How difficult it must have been to keep the peace at all times between town and proprietors, and make the record satisfactory to both amid conflicting interests, came out on one or two occasions, when the votes had been recorded by another hand.
After " about thirty-eight years" as preacher and pastor of this church, the Rev. John Southmayd sent "to the deacons and townsmen in Waterbury to communicate to the church and inhabitants of said town," words that must have occasioned sorrow. He addressed his people as " Beloved brethren and neighbors," and told them that through great diffi- culty and infirmity of body he had served them for two years; that he had no expectation of relief; that the public work he was engaged in was too much for him; that a sedentary life was destruc- tive to his health, and that he desired to live more privately. He besought his people to obtain another minister and give him relief as speedily as possible. The town acceded to his request, but
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