USA > Connecticut > Litchfield County > Litchfield > The history of the town of Litchfield, Connecticut, 1720-1920 > Part 2
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The highest point in the township is the summit of Mount Tom, with an actual elevation of 1,291 feet; the figure 1,325, given in the Government's topographical map of 1889, is therefore not at all exact.
The original area of the township, which included the present town of Morris, and also a large tract of land set off to the Town of Torrington in 1866, was 71.9 square miles. The present area is 48.6 square miles.
The largest natural sheet of water in Connecticut, Bantam Lake, lies in part in the township. Before the separation of Morris, 1859, it lay entirely in the town limits. The Lake varies about seven feet in surface elevation between low water and flood, namely between 892.5 and 899.7 feet above sea level. At a surface elevation of 893.5 feet, the students of Camp Columbia have determined its area to be 916 acres, its maximum length 23/8 miles and its maximum width 7/8 miles, the length of the shore line 91/3 miles, the average depth 16.1 feet, and the capacity 4,800,000,000 gallons.
The name, Litchfield, is supposed without reasonable doubt to be derived from Lichfield, the Cathedral city of Staffordshire, England; but no tradition is preserved as to why the name was given. Much ink has been spent, to little purpose, to explain why the letter T has been added in the name of our town. Usually its insertion is laid to an inaccurate clerk at Hartford; but it is not at all necessary to suppose such an explanation. We shall see, in our quotations from the early records, how variable all spelling
2
THE HISTORY OF LITCHFIELD
was until after 1750, and this was the case in England as much or nearly as much as in New England. In the English records of the early Seventeenth Century, Lichfield is spelled Litchfield very fre- quently; and there is still a small village of Litchfield in the north- ern part of the county of Hampshire. In Windsor, where so many of our first settlers came from, we find resident about 1700 a certain John Wichfield, whose name was also often spelled Witch- field and gradually took this form exclusively. On the whole it appears that a simple philological cause would explain the change as plausibly as any other. Be that as it may, all the other later towns of the same name in the United States have adopted our spelling, as well as several families of the name.
The Indian name of the region was Bantam, a name whose deri- vation will be discussed elsewhere. The first explorers called the region by several different names. Sometimes it was the New Plantation, sometimes it was the Western Lands, sometimes the Western Wilderness, and sometimes the Greenwoods. The last name, derived from the great tracts of both pitch-pine and white- pine which were native, is particularly pleasing and we must regret its disappearance locally. The country around New Hart- ford is still spoken of infrequently by this name, and a trace of the old Greenwoods Turnpike from Hartford to Canaan, through Nor- folk, is still preserved in the designation of one of the Norfolk streets.
The geologic history of Litchfield is extremely interesting, as is that of every region where some of its varied pages can still be read by those qualified to do so. We are, however, concerned so urgently with the story of the last two-hundred years, that the hundreds of millions of years preceding must be dismissed in the remainder of this brief introductory chapter. The details given are summarized from an admirable account of this geologic history specially pre- pared by Frederick K. Morris, of the Department of Geology of Columbia University.
The oldest type of rocks around Litchfield may be that called the Becket Gneiss, which covers a large area to the north, notably in Torrington, Winchester, Norfolk and Colebrook, and to the south- west, west of Mount Tom, into Warren and New Milford. These rocks tell of an old sea into which, in the modern way, rivers poured their muddy waters. This sea covered all the parts where this Gneiss is now found, and doubtless stretched on elsewhere, so that all of our town would have been fine sailing. For untold years mud was deposited by the rivers, and limestone was forming too; but whether the limy matter was made by live organisms or was simply a chemical precipitate cannot be determined. The muds and limes cemented into rock, in level-lying, orderly strata, layer hardening upon layer.
Then began a very slow thrusting and folding and lifting of the earth's crust, which with succeeding ages modified the shore line of
3
THE HISTORY OF LITCHFIELD
our sea and built up mountains possibly as high as the Rockies now are. No trace of these mountains survives in the shapes of our Litchfield Hills, which shapes are of infinitely more recent origin, as we shall see. The importance to us of these older, vastly greater mountains lies in the fact that their formation, thrusting great masses of rock away from the center of the world, released the pressure which heretofore had kept more or less rigid the deep, hot interior of the earth. This rich material from within, the molten sources of our present granites, together with the eager gases and vapors we associate with volcanoes, came pushing towards the surface ever more insistantly and searchingly as the pressure was more and more relieved. They filled the natural crevices between the upthrust rocks, until perhaps some great mass of this upthrust, stratified rock was completely surrounded by the molten matter from below. With nothing to support it, the mass would sink engulfed into the underlying liquid depths, and, for aught now known, the liquids and gases may have reached the surface and built noble volcanoes.
The chief work of the dissolved vapors from within, in the Litchfield region, was not however volcanic. The most volatile substances, water, fluorine, boron, and the rest, were concentrating in the upper chambers of the molten realms below, with an outward pressure quite beyond our conception. Reaching at last the old sedimentary bottom of our ancient sea, now upthrust into moun- tains, they soaked into the rock as into a sponge, between its beds and its mica flakes, in large and small streaks, until the bedded rock and the molten visitors were blended so inextricably, that to-day one's hand, in many places, may cover a dozen alternations of rock type; while elsewhere long streaks of large-crystaled, glitter- ing rock may be found cutting through the native rock for hundreds or thousands of feet. Such streaks are called Pegmatites, and bring many of the rarer minerals from great depths to within our reach long after their formation.
The so-called Becket Gneiss, then, is a compound of the old sediment first described and of the various igneous or molten infil- trations and saturations to which it was subjected. Rare traces of the original sediment are still found. According to the Con- necticut State Geological Survey's Report, 1906, the oldest clear sediment consists of what is called the "Poughquag Quartzite and Schist", which is mapped by Prof. Rice and Dr. Loughlan as sur- rounding Bantam Lake, except on the West and North-west. There are exposures of it also on the road toward Mount Tom.
Litchfield itself lies upon the next rock to be described. This is the Hartland Schist, which was originally undoubtedly a sediment, partly limestone, partly sandstone, but mostly clay shale. It, too, has undergone profound burial, great heating, and complex injection by igneous fluids. It is more markedly modified than the Poughquag Schist. It is a light colored mica-schist, silvery smooth when fine-grained, crystalline and glittering when the mica
4
THE HISTORY OF LITCHFIELD
flakes are large. It is full of garnets, none of which are of gem- quality, but many are decidedly handsome. Blue and white blade- like crystals of Kyanite, three inches long, and brown, double-ended crystals of Staurolite, an inch long, are common.
Among the oldest invaders in these original sediments are the dark igneous rocks that once were black masses of basalt or trap. These quite possibly date from an igneous invasion even older than the one described for the Becket Gneiss, an invasion characterized by dark molten rocks instead of by light ones. These black rocks were changed by the squeezing of the earth's crust during the moun- tain making into the sheeted, streaked, dark, pepper-and-salt rocks now called Amphibolite Gneiss or Schist. Mount Tom and Little Mount Tom are made of it, and there is a patch of it west of the road from Litchfield to East Morris.
North of Mount Prospect lies another great belt of yet another schist, the Berkshire Schist, probably younger than the Becket Gneiss. The problem of the relative ages of the schists is indeed a profoundly difficult one, still far from satisfactory settlement. All the tentative tables that have been published, such as those of the Connecticut State Geological Survey, are liable to revision at any time. All we can say with certainty is that it all happened very long ago, and that the present complex folding and thrusting of these oldest rocks are evidence that the mountains they tell of formed, at one time or at different times, a great area of many ranges. Beyond the old sea which preceded these mountains we are powerless to look.
Now followed a third great series of events, the shifting of shallower seas over the land, the patient downwear of the first great mountains, the later sinkings and re-elevations of the land. The changes came so gradually that perhaps the world from century to century seemed not much less stable then than it does to us to-day. The changes, too, involved so vast an area than no one region con- tains more than a fraction of its record. The rocky mass of Mount Prospect is possibly a witness of this period. It is a dome of molten rock, of a different and, it would appear, a much later type than its neighbors. The hill contains many varieties of igneous rocks, some light, some dark in color, among which are found the half melted fragments of those earlier rocks already described, which the uprising liquid masses broke off and engulfed. Here are the oldest limestones, too, but wholly changed by the hot juices that have attacked them. Here, finally, are the ores which caused so much excitement about 1860; these were among the last ingredients to crystalize and were brought last of all to their present resting places by the molten energies from within. All this may have happened at about the time that the Appalachians were being folded and uplifted, the time also when the leisurely dinosaurs were about to start on their upward evolution.
The next period lies almost wholly outside of the Western High- land. It includes the making of the red sandstones and the red
THE LITCHFIELD HILLS, FROM CHESTNUT HILL
BANTAM LAKE
5
THE HISTORY OF LITCHFIELD
and dark shales of the Connecticut Valley Lowland. It was the time when the dinosaurs were becoming numerous and large. But for Litchfield the importance of the age lies in the occurrence of a renewed and extended volcanic activity, the last outburst of vol- canism known anywhere between New England and the Rocky Mountains. Dark lavas, rich in iron-bearing minerals, were injected into the earth's crust and poured liberally upon its surface from Nova Scotia to Virginia; and some found their way through the crust in our township, a part of this last crop of igneous rocks.
In the following age arose a new series of mountains, of a shape and structure like the present mountains of Utah and Nevada, which must not be confused with those earlier mountains when the schists were made. This renewed splitting and tilting of the earth's crust necessarily left many cracks and zones of crushed stone called faults, into which, as well as into the less frequent earlier cracks, we bore hopefully for artesian water.
Then came two geologic periods, during which the slow attrition of weather and time wore the mountains down again into one great level plain, upon which roamed the last of the dinosaurs. The remarkably even sky-line of our hilltops to-day marks where the level of this plain used to be, for our hilltops are all that is left of the surface of the plain.
During the next age, a slow uplift, with many and long halts, raised the whole plain, enabling the rivers and streams to cut their present deep valleys inch by inch. Our hills, as we know them, are the foundations of the ancient mountains, the remnants of the great plain in which the valleys have been carved by erosion. None of our hills are the direct result of a special upthrust. But they trend north and south exactly as did the mountains of which we see the roots.
There was only one more period in the making of our landscape, the time of the ice-age, that most recent great event in geologic history. A sheet of ice thousands of feet thick moved out over the continent from centers in Canada. The part that crossed Western Connecticut melted upon Long Island. It has been asserted that it was not less than 1,500 feet thick where it passed over New Haven. Such a masterful glacier would freeze into its mass and carry along with it every particle of soil from the land it traversed; it would even attack the bed rock and tear out large and small blocks by simply freezing fast to them and ripping them out of their places as it moved gradually onward. The hills that form Long Island's backbone are the general dumping place of whatever materials, from fine clay to huge boulders, the melting ice still retained at its journey's end.
As the ice melted back from off the country, it deposited sheets and piles of bouldery soil over all the land it had once covered. All the soil of Connecticut, except recent swamps and river bottoms, was laid down by the glacier, or by streams of melting water gush- ing from the ice, or in lakes formed and held in by dams of ice
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THE HISTORY OF LITCHFIELD
across valley outlets. Sometimes the valley outlets were dammed by glacial drift, which remained after the ice had melted; then the lakes were permanent or gradually subsided into swamps. Most conspicuous of the glacial formations are the shoals of boulder clay formed under the ice, much as an overloaded river builds long shoals in its bed. The ice glided over these deposits, smoothing and slicking them, plastering them with fresh material and model- ing them into long, oval, gently rising hills. Such hills we call Drumlins, and they are among Nature's most graceful forms. Their long axis lies in the direction in which the ice moved, just as the river-shoal is elongated parallel to the water current. There are many Drumlins about Litchfield, notably on all sides of Bantam Lake, except on the south. Signs of the glacial action are about us on every hand: the stray boulders, like the famous Medicine Rock on Chestnut Hill; the peat swamps, like the one on the land of the Litchfield Water Company, where great deposits have been dumped; the beds of sand or gravel, deposited by the streams within the ice sheet, or as the deltas of streams rushing out of it; Bantam Lake itself, which, with its tributary ponds, covered a much larger tract than it does now, probably including South Plain, Harris Plain and the Little Plain. These and others testify to us con- stantly of the past history of Litchfield.
We must turn now to the story of the last two-hundred years, but let us not forget as we go about the roads and fields of our township that we can read, in the whale backs of our drumlin hills, in the level sky-line which was once the level plain, in the uplifted edges of bedded rock which are the roots of once mighty mountains, in the shining schists that were once sea-bottom clays and have been as it were through water and fire, and everywhere in the sheets and streaks and greater masses of molten volcanic crystalline rock, an infinitely greater story wherein the only measures of time are the thicknesses of deposited strata, the periods of mountain build- ing, the forever unknowable periods of the patient wearing down again of the mountains by the rivers and waves and weather, periods in which the pulse of years beats too rapidly to be counted and into which our whole two centuries will ultimately merge as an undistinguished instant.
CHAPTER II.
THE SETTLEMENT OF LITCHFIELD.
The following statement of the conditions prevailing before 1715 in the region in Connecticut, in which Litchfield is situated, is from Kilbourne, pp. 17-18: "In 1630, about ten years after the landing of the pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, the whole of the territory of the present State of Connecticut was conveyed by the Plymouth Com- pany to Robert, Earl of Warwick. On the 19th of March, 1631, the Earl executed the grant since known as the Old Patent of Connecti- cut, wherein he transferred the same tract to Viscount Say and Seal, Lord Brooke, John Hampden, John Pym, Sir Richard Saltonstall, and others. In the summer of 1635, the towns of Hartford, Wethers- field and Windsor, on the Connecticut River, first began to be settled by emigrants from the vicinity of Boston. Still a year later, the Rev. Thomas Hooker and his congregation made their celebrated journey through the wilderness, from Cambridge, Mass., to Hartford, where they took up their permanent residence. In 1637, the Pequot War was begun and terminated, resulting in the expulsion and almost total annihilation of the most formidable tribe of Indians in the colony.
"The first Constitution adopted by the people of Connecticut bears date, January 15, 1638-9. This continued to form the basis of our colonial government until the arrival of the Charter of Charles II., in 1662, when it was nominally superceded. Alternate troubles with the Dutch and Indians kept the settlers, for many years, in a perpetual state of discipline and alarm. But while the political commotions in the old world sometimes agitated the other American colonies, the people of Connecticut had from the first felt that their civil rights were guaranteed to them beyond the reach of any contingency. The Royal Charter was but a confirmation of privileges which they had long enjoyed. No king-appointed Gov- ernor or Council annoyed them by their presence or oppressed them by their acts; but the voters were left to choose their own rulers and enact their own laws. Indeed, the influence of the crown was
for a long period scarcely felt in the colony. On the accession of James II., however, in 1685, the whole aspect of affairs was changed. It was soon rumored that His Majesty had determined to revoke all the charters granted by his predecessors. The arrival of Sir Edmund Andros at Boston, in December 1686, bearing a commission as Gov- ernor of New England, was an event not calculated to allay the apprehensions of the people of Connecticut. His reputation was
8
THE HISTORY OF LITCHFIELD
that of a selfish, grasping despot, bent upon enriching himself and immediate friends. at the expense of the colonists. At this time, the entire region now known as the County of Litchfield, except a solitary settlement at Woodbury, on its southern frontier, was an unexplored wilderness denominated the Western Lands. To save these lands from the control and disposal of Andros, the Legisla- ture granted them to the towns of Hartford and Windsor, at least so much of them as lay east of the Housatonic River. When the usurpations of Andros were over and the Charter had found its way back from the hollow of the oak to the Secretary's office, the Colonial Assembly attempted to resume its title to these lands; but the towns referred to steadfastly resisted all such claims. The quarrel was long kept up, but no acts of hostility were committed until efforts were made to dispose of the tract. Collisions then became frequent. Explorers, agents and surveyors, of one party, were summarily arrested and expelled from the disputed territory by the contestants."
In May 1725 a mob broke open the Jail in Hartford and liberated the prisoners therein. Kilbourne and others have usually assumed that this occurred in connection with the arrests in the Western Lands; Frederick J. Kingsbury, in an address before the Litchfield Historical Society, 1909, attributed the riot to other causes, adding, however, that "while the Litchfield disturbance was not the imme- diate cause of the jail delivery, the feeling engendered by it had doubtless infused a spirit of disregard for colonial legislation which made the jail delivery more easy than it might otherwise have been."
However this may be, a compromise was presently arrived at between the colony on the one hand and the towns of Hartford and Windsor on the other, by which title to the territory of the Western Lands was divided between the claimants of both parties. The township of Litchfield was included in the share assigned to the towns of Hartford and Windsor. Meanwhile, the towns were not waiting the consent of the colony, but, as we have seen, were pro- ceeding with explorations and settlements on their own responsi- bility, and were endeavoring to substantiate their claims by pur- chases of the Indian rights to different parts of the Western Lands.
"As early as the year 1657", (Woodruff, p. 7), "I find certain Indians of the Tunxis or Farmington tribe conveyed to William Lewis and Samuel Steele of Farmington, certain privileges, as appears by the following copy of their deed:
"This witnesseth that we Kepaquamp and Querrimus and Mataneage have sould to William Leawis and Samuel Steele of ffarmington A p sell or a tract of land called Matetucke, that js to say the hill from whence John Standley and John Andrews brought the black lead, and all the land within eight mylle of that hill on every side; to dig; and carry away what they will and to build in jt for ye use of them that labour there; and not otherwise to improve
THE HISTORY OF LITCHFIELD
9
ye land. In witness whereof wee have hereunto set our hands, and thos Jndians above mentioned must free the purchasers from all claymes by any other Indyans.
Witnes ; John Steel.
february ye 8th 1657.
William Lewis, Samuel Steele.
The mark febru ye 8th
of Kepaquamp. 1657.
The mark febru ye Sth
of Querrimus. 1657.
The mark of february ye 8
Mataneage. 1657."
This title was confirmed fifty seven years later, August 11, 1714, by a quit-claim deed to the same parties and their heirs by the Indians of these same tribes then living. The deed is given in full in Woodruff's History, pp. 9-11. It is extremely quaint, but not sufficiently important to the story of Litchfield to reprint here entire. It begins :
"To all christian people to whom these presents shall come, Pethuzso and Taxcronuck with Awowas and ye rest of us ye sub- scribers, Indians belonging to Tunxses or otherwise ffarmington jn theyer majesties Colony of Connecticut jn New England send greet- ing", and continues to reconvey the Hill whence the black lead came. Just where this hill known as Mattatuck was has caused a good deal of discussion. Woodruff most plausibly supposed it to be in the southern part of Harwinton, embracing that town and also some portion of Plymouth (then Mattatuck or Waterbury) and Litchfield, possibly what we now know as Northfield and Fluteville. Certain it is that on the 11th of June 1718, the Farmington claimants relinquished whatever rights they held under these two deeds to Hartford and Windsor, and in lieu thereof received one-sixth of the whole township of Litchfield in fee.
Meanwhile Hartford and Windsor had been busy getting a title
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THE HISTORY OF LITCHFIELD
of their own to the township. The affairs of the Western Lands, (Kilbourne, p. 19), were "transacted by committees. In 1715, these towns took the initiatory steps towards exploring that portion of the wilderness now embraced within our corporation limits, and purchasing whatever rights the natives possessed to the soil. It would be interesting to know who was the first individual of the Anglo-Saxon race that ever visited the localities so cherished by us all. The earliest record evidence is contained in an entry in the first Book of Records in our Town Clerk's office, which is as follows:
"The Town of Hartford, Dr.
To John Marsh,
May 1715, For 5 days, man and horse, with expenses, in viewing the Land at the New Plantation, £ 200
The Town of Hartford, Dr.
Jan. 22, 1715-6, To 6 days journey to Woodbury, to treat with the Indians about the Western Lands, by Thomas Seymour,
£ 140
To expenses in the journey, 1 14 9
£ 2 18 9
The Town of Hartford, Dr.
To Thomas Seymour, Committee,
May 1716, By 2 quarts of Rum,
£026 4 9
Expenses at Waterbury,
1
7
Paid Thomas Miner towards the Indian purchase,
7 10
0
Expenses at Woodbury,
2 11
0
Expenses for a Pilot and protection,
1 10 0
Fastening horse-shoes at Waterbury,
2
0
Expenses at Waterbury,
1
8
Expenses to Col. Whiting, for writing 40 deeds, 1 10 0
66 to Capt. Cooke for acknowledging 18 deeds, 18 0
to Ensign Seymour,
1 0 0
66 at Arnold's, 1 0 7
by sending to Windsor, 1 0
August 4, 1718 .- Sold 11 lots for
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