USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Mount Carmel > The old Mount Carmel parish, origins & outgrowths > Part 13
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On the western side of the Green Mountains was another field to which many came from this New Haven neighbor- hood, helping in the settlement of Rutland, Wallingford, Vermont, and Mount Holly. This movement came soon after the Revolutionary War. A number of those engaged in it were grandchildren of Samuel Dickerman, who was one of the foremost in starting the Mount Carmel Parish. He died in 1760, before his hopes were realized. His children were all young at that time and none of them was married. But as they grew up, most of them had large families, some sixty-seven grandchildren, for whom there was hardly room
* Beardsley, History of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut, pp. 271, 292.
The Schoolhouse This Schoolhouse stood on the brow of the hill across the way from the Meeting-house
Ives Dam Whence came the power that drove the Ives factories
Litchfield, Berkshire, and Vermont. 143
enough or a sufficiently promising outlook about the old nest. The oldest son, Isaac, had six sons and a daughter. Four of his sons, Simeon, Amasa, Lyman, and Isaac went to Mount Holly, where they were prosperous and all had large fami- lies. Susanna Dickerman, a daughter of Samuel, married Wait Chatterton, 2d, and went to Rutland with him as early as 1785. There, he became a man of prominence and a dea- con of the church. A granddaughter, Mary Munson, mar- ried Henry Mead in 1788 and also made her home in Rut- land. Ruth Dickerman, a sister of Samuel, married Eliakim Hall of Wallingford; four of their grandsons, Abner, Moseley, Isaac, and Day Hall, settled in Wallingford, Ver- mont, and gave the place its name; and their granddaughter, Mary Hall, married Philip Edgerton and lived in Rutland. Ruel Todd of Mount Carmel was another settler at Mount Holly; so also were Benjamin and Titus Bradley. Isaac Munson of New Haven, too, was among those who went to the new Wallingford. These settlers had large families, which became distributed in the country around and were a considerable element in the population of Vermont.
The naming of Wallingford, Vermont, illustrates a prac- tice quite common among pioneers, that of calling their new community after some old town from which they came. Thus, in Vermont, we find these names of Connecticut towns: New Haven, Hartford, Middletown, Norwich, Wa- terbury, Windsor, Fairfield, Fair Haven, Woodstock, Guil- ford, Stamford, Salisbury, Colchester, Sharon, Canaan, Bris- tol, Woodbury, Cornwall, Roxbury, Coventry, Essex, Middlebury, Weathersfield, Bethel, Hartland, Wolcott, Groton, Berlin, Brookfield, Chester, Derby, Weston, Read- ing, Plymouth, and Orange. These names show in a general way how large was the flow of Connecticut people to this new region and how they flocked thither from all parts of the old commonwealth. A somewhat similar inflow came also from eastern Massachusetts and the older portions of New Hampshire.
A good many of the Mount Carmel adventurers, how- ever, went to other fields. One of Samuel Dickerman's
144 The Old Mount Carmel Parish.
daughters married Captain Phineas Castle and went to Wa- terbury, whence their numerous children scattered else- where. Daniel Rexford and his three sons, Daniel, William, and Joel, removed to Barkhamsted, as did Captain Jona- than Alling also. Noah Atwater became the pastor of the church in Westfield, Massachusetts, where he continued twenty years, till the end of his life. Especially interesting is the story of Samuel Dickerman Munson, a grandson of Joel Munson and also of Samuel Dickerman. About 1790, he went to Truro on Cape Cod, where he married Elizabeth Lombard. Thence he removed to New Sharon, Maine, where he had four children, the youngest of whom, also named Samuel, was educated at Bowdoin and Andover, and then went out with Henry Lyman under the American Board to be a missionary in Java. The two young men had only entered fairly on their work when they were killed by savage natives. Munson left a little son who was brought back to Maine and grew up to be a captain in the Union Army in the Civil War.
XV. The Susquehanna Frontier.
T HE spread of families from the old colonial com- munities into the wilder parts of New England which followed the French and Indian Wars was a preparation for the wider dispersion to Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio, which came soon after and grew to large proportions at the close of the Revolutionary War. With the fashion of pioneering once established, it came to be looked upon as a less formidable undertaking to pull up and set out for a new country. Those who had moved once were some- times quite ready to move again when an attractive project was proposed; and their sons and daughters were especially inclined to repeat the rather romantic experiences of their parents in going to the frontier. In the staid old commu- nities, too, the stories told of pioneer life had an influence. Occasional visits of the pioneers to their early homes kept the people there informed of how they fared and what they were doing; and we can be sure that the actual attractions of the frontier lost nothing in the accounts that were given. Young men and women, eagerly listening to such glowing stories, fell under their charm and were easily drawn to join in schemes for new settlements as they unfolded from time to time.
It may be remembered that one of the first settlers of the town of Goshen was Timothy Tuttle, Jr., who went there from Cheshire in 1738. He had eleven children, and among them a son Ichabod, who was with the troops enlisted for Ticonderoga in 1775. Returning from that expedition, Icha- bod removed with his family to Wyoming, Pennsylvania, where they settled down with others to make their home. So it happened that they were caught in the massacre of 1778. Tuttle was killed, one of the one hundred and fifty-nine who shared the same fate; but his wife and three little chil-
146 The Old Mount Carmel Parish.
dren, getting away with their lives, made their way back to Connecticut .*
In the years that followed, a number of Cheshire people went to Wyoming, or, as it began to be called, Susquehanna County. Among them were seven brothers, sons of Ephraim and Susanna (Hotchkiss) Smith, whose names were Roswell, Ephraim, Titus, Raymond, Anson, Silvester, and Lyman; } also Rufus Lines, Asa Cornwell, and Asa Bradley, recorded as baptized in Cheshire between 1774 and 1779; and besides these, Benjamin and Obed Doolittle, Enoch and Theophilus Merriman,¿ Ezra, Enos, and Friend Tuttle, all from the neighborhood of Cheshire, and most of them connected with Mount Carmel families. Rufus Lines and Titus Smith were on the ground in September, 1797, having come from Great Bend over a new road, which they, with other men from Connecticut, had cut through the forest to Lawsville. They returned to Connecticut for the winter. In the following February, Titus Smith and his older brother Ephraim went out with a sled and oxen, loaded with provisions and tools. Using the sled for a frame, they rigged up a shelter of boughs which served them for some time, until they could prepare something better to live in. In 1800, Friend Tuttle came, and with him David Tuttle, who was afterward joined by his father, Enos Tuttle; also Theophilus Merriman, whose wife Sarah was a sister of Rufus Lines. Obed Doo- little was there in 1802, or 1803, when he superintended the building of a saw mill. By 1805, Ralph Lines, Asa Cornwell, and Roswell and Raymond Smith had joined the settlers. The wife of Enos Tuttle was Candace Hotchkiss, a sister of Susanna (Hotchkiss) Smith, the mother of the seven Smith brothers; which illustrates the close family relationships among the settlers. The first marriage in the settlement was on May 21, 1804, when Friend Tuttle married Eunice Lines, a daughter of Rufus and Tamar Lines.§
* The Tuttle Family, p. 521.
+ Ibid., p. 532.
İ Merriman Genealogy, p. 165.
§ Blackman, History of the Susquehanna Company, pp. 263-270.
·
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The Susquehanna Frontier.
Another of these pioneers was Ezra Tuttle. His father, Zophar, had removed with his family, in 1775, to Wethers- field, Vermont, having his older brother Benoni with him. Wethersfield is just across the Connecticut River from Clare- mont, New Hampshire, whose settlers were largely from the Mount Carmel neighborhood. In 1801, Ezra Tuttle, who then had a family of six children, started with Gideon Lyman, also of Wethersfield, for a new settlement in Sus- quehanna County, where now is the town of Springville. They drove, all the way from Vermont, some three hundred miles, a team of two horses, another with one horse, and two cows. The oldest of the children, a son, Abiathar, was then about thirteen, and was no doubt an effective help on the journey, as well as in clearing the ground for their new house, which was the first built in Springville. He proved himself an energetic character throughout his life, which was ex- tended to a great age. Zophar Tuttle is said to have died early; and his widow, Hannah (Doolittle) Tuttle, married Jonah Blakeslee and had three other sons, Benjamin, Zo- phar, and Aaron, who went out to the settlement about 1801, and lived near their half-brother, Ezra Tuttle .*
Benjamin Doolittle, in 1799, bought 600 acres of land in Willingsborough, and was living there in 1801. His mother was Esther Tuttle, a daughter of Nathaniel Tuttle of Mount Carmel. He was unmarried when he came, but in due time found a wife in Fanny Ward, a daughter of Ichabod Ward, who was later on the ground; arriving from Litch- field County in 1807. The place was afterward known as New Milford. Their children were Nelson, Albert, George, Harry, Benjamin, and Lydia. The family eventually re- moved to Ohio.t
The first settlers from Connecticut crossed the Hudson to Catskill, or, according to Richard Smith's Journal, further south, near Marlborough, and followed trails thence to the head of Delaware River near Harpersfield, on to Wattles' Ferry at the north end of Unadilla village, and from there
* Blackman, pp. 408-410.
+ Ibid., pp. 147, 152; The Tuttle Family, pp. 217, 257, 640.
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down the Susquehanna to Great Bend .* The Indian school at Oghwaga, in the neighborhood of Unadilla, had long been a center of missionary effort and the route to this point was therefore familiar to travellers from New England; } consequently, when the settlers began to look to the new country for eligible lands, it was quite natural for them to go over the same paths. In their coming we can be sure that they brought along with them a great many things to which the natives were not accustomed. They sometimes came with pack horses, to be sure, but more often they had ox teams, with heavily loaded sleds to be drawn over the snow in win- ter or with strongly built carts, equally well laden, in other seasons of the year. On these loads was to be seen almost everything belonging to a Connecticut farmhouse and the village life of those times: household goods and kitchen utensils, feather beds, blankets and chests of linen; spinning wheels, churns, and baskets; ploughs, not the Dutch sort with two wheels which needed three horses to pull them, but a smaller affair that could be used with a single horse, or a yoke of oxen; axes, spades, hoes, and carpenter's tools; the equipment for a blacksmith's shop; and the lasts, awls, leather, wax, and thread to set up a shoemaker at his trade. In those trains of new settlers, not only the men, women, and children themselves, but all their belongings, went over the Hudson and plunged into the wilderness beyond. The settlers took with them the wherewithal for reproducing on virgin soil the old life to which they were habituated, with its patient industry, careful thrift, inventive shrewdness, and dogged persistence.
The History of Susquehanna County gives some vivid reminiscences of J. B. Buck, who belonged to a Connecticut family that figured prominently in the Wyoming settle- ments, from which are taken the following excerpts:#
When my father came to Red Rock, it was all wild. There for five years he had to pound the grain in a mortar to make flour
* Halsey, ed., Four Great Rivers, p. 8.
+ Halsey, The Old New York Frontier, pp. 27-29.
į Blackman, pp. 57-59.
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The Susquehanna Frontier.
and bread. There I was born, when but few whites were there, but hundreds of Indians often passed up and down. There were no roads, nothing but a path in the woods.
Here was found great abundance of wild animals of different kinds, and birds also. When out late at evening we were often fol- lowed by panthers, but never molested. At one time the wolves drove a deer upon the ice on the Susquehanna, not far from our house, and caught it. After devouring it they had a frolic. We had a horn made of a sea-shell. We ran out with the horn and after watching them at their play sounded the horn. They stopped and ran up the river for dear life. There were fifteen.
I well remember the first wagon brought here. It was drawn by four oxen. Father bought the fore wheels and uncle the hind ones. The tires were in six pieces for each wheel, spiked on.
Fire was obtained either by flashing powder or with the flint and steel. It was always expected that fire would be kept on every hearth. If by neglect the fire went out it was common for families to send half a mile to a neighbor's for fire.
The first house and the one in which I was born was built in an exceedingly primitive style. One huge log nearly made one side of the house. The floor was made of strips split, or halves of logs flat- tened; the roof was covered with "shakes" four feet long; the beams overhead extended beyond the body of the house some five or six feet, making a stoop or piazza from the roof of which in autumn used to hang the seed corn for the ensuing year. The house was situ- ated near a fine spring of water. . . . We had no stoves, no carpets; we needed none. We had an immense fireplace and the forest all around us. The day found us busy; the night gathered us around the broad stone hearth, glowing with a well piled fire, where we re- counted the hopes, adventures and news of the day.
For years we had no other evening light than that from the blaz- ing hearth-fire, pine-knots, or a candle. The only way we had for lighting a candle was by means of a sliver from the wood-pile, or by taking a live coal from the fire and blowing it with the breath until it glowed, and then placing the wick of the candle against it.
Our food was mainly meat from the forest, bread, vegetables, short-cakes, johnny-cakes and buckwheat pancakes. We used to eat our venison cooked in various ways. A venison steak is epicurean and reckoned among the best of backwoods dishes. Our bread was baked in a flat, shallow cast-iron kettle, set upon coals, with coals heaped upon the cover. Our biscuits were baked in a tin oven, shaped like
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a letter V, so arranged as to heat both the top and bottom of the biscuits. Our short-cakes were baked in a long-handled frying-pan, heated at the bottom with coals and by the glowing fire at the top.
If the fireplace was well supplied with necessaries, it had an iron crane, from which cooking utensils could be suspended at a greater or less height above the fire. The crane wanting, its place was supplied by some other device for suspending the pots, generally trammels, an exceedingly clumsy arrangement by which a vessel used in cooking must be suspended from a pole, crossing the chimney high enough above the fire not to burn.
Did the good housewife desire to get breakfast, she first filled the tea-kettle and hung it over the fire, or set it on fresh coals, drawn from the wood fire, on the hearth to boil. She then put her meat to frying in a spider, having legs about three inches long, by setting it on fresh coals. Her potatoes, if boiled, were put in a pot and hung over the fire. If she desired pancakes they were baked on a round griddle suspended over the fire; when the griddle was hot enough she swung out the crane and put on the batter; one side baked, the crane was swung out, the cakes turned, and swung in again; when done it was again swung out, the cakes removed and another batch spread on.
Wolves were exceedingly troublesome to the early settlers. They would enter the fold at night and kill sheep and lambs, and, sucking the blood and eating a portion of the flesh, would leave the flock ruined for the farmer's coming. In those days each family made its own cloth for all the various purposes. The clothing of the father, the mother, the sons and the daughters was the handiwork of the busy mother. The flesh was also a reliance for food. Hence the loss of the sheep was a dire calamity. The sheep for many years had to be yarded close by the house. The ducks, geese and chickens also had to be protected at night.
This tells how folks lived in those times, not in one settle- ment only, but first on the farms throughout New England, whence usages were carried abroad wherever the people went. They made a great deal of raising cattle at their old homes and they did the same after crossing the Hudson. They looked out for pasture land and meadows for growing hay, as they had done always, and they ploughed their ground with oxen or a plough drawn by one horse, just as when they lived in Connecticut. They had been used to
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The Susquehanna Frontier.
catching shad in the Quinnipiac and other streams that flowed into Long Island Sound, and they found they could " catch them just as well in the Delaware and the Susque- hanna. They picked huckleberries after haying in Connecti- cut and they kept up the practice in Pennsylvania. So also in their religious habits: the old usage of family prayers was carried over into the log cabin in the woods; the toils of the week were brought to a pause on Saturday night and prepa- ration was made for a quiet Lord's Day and the services of worship.
Connecticut people went to the Susquehanna country in large numbers because their colonial charter, as they sup- posed, assured them a right in the land. They set out from all parts of the state, but more especially from the western counties. Several brothers by the name of Buck figured prominently among the earlier pioneers, one in 1774, and others in the years that immediately followed. Of these Daniel Buck was in the militia of New Milford, Connecti- cut, in 1758; went to Vermont in 1762; then to a place near Albany; and finally, in 1786, came to the Great Bend settle- ment. He was twice married and had seventeen children, of whom sixteen lived to have families of their own, some in Pennsylvania and others in New York. These, with his brothers' families, were a considerable contribution to the population. Another family from New Milford was that of Oliver Trowbridge, who removed in 1796. The people com- ing from this neighborhood no doubt gave its name to the Pennsylvania town of New Milford. Jonathan Dimon came to Willingsborough from Fairfield County in 1791. Isaac Hale, a native of Waterbury, who had spent a number of years with his grandfather at Wells on the western border of Vermont, made a visit to the settlement in the fall of 1787; then went back to Wells and married Elizabeth Lewis, whose brother Nathaniel also had a young wife and was equally keen for a new home on the Susquehanna. Lewis had a yoke of steers and a cart; both couples loaded on their belongings and made the journey together, arriving in due
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time at Great Bend .* Ozias Strong was a native of Coventry, and his wife, Susannah West, of the adjoining town of Tol- land; they were in Lenox and Lee, Massachusetts, from 1757 to 1787, when they removed with their family to Great Bend. A number of the settlers were from Norwich- Joseph Chapman, a sea captain, and his son Joseph; Andrew Tracy and his wife and three children, with his wife's sister, Betsey Leffingwell; also Charles Miner, who, fifty years after, gave an account of his journey with several others in midwinter, in a sleigh, from Norwich to Hopbottom, cover- ing sixteen days, from February 12 to February 28, 1779.1
It must not be supposed, however, that the settlers who sought this Susquehanna country were all Connecticut peo- ple. Thomas Parke and his brother Henry came, in 1796, from Charlestown, Rhode Island. They were sons of Benja- min Parke, who was killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill, and had been brought up by their grandfather, who gave them a good education. John Baker, who came in 1789, was a native of Hatfield, Massachusetts. But, most important of all, was a company from Attleboro, Massachusetts, who got together in the fall of 1789 "to seek ampler room in some new region and on cheaper soil." There were nine of them, all but one under thirty years of age: Hosea Tiffany, Caleb Richardson, Ezekiel Titus, Robert Follet, John Carpenter, Moses Thacher, Daniel Carpenter, Samuel Thacher, and Josiah Carpenter. In the following April, they set out for Albany where they made inquiries about the lands of the Mohawk valley; looked with some favor on the neighborhood of Cherry Valley; and then accepted the invitation of a real estate agent named William Cooper to go down the Susque- hanna and see some lands a hundred miles south of there, which he had in his charge. They arrived at Great Bend on May 16. On their way from Massachusetts, they had seen snow a foot and a half deep, but in Pennsylvania the trees were in full leaf. They were charmed with the country. Go- ing out into the wilderness to the south, they spent some
* Blackman, pp. 53-103.
t Ibid., pp. 114-117.
I53
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The Susquehanna Frontier.
days in looking over the field, and then bought for £1,198 a tract four miles long and one mile broad, which became known as the "Nine Partner's Purchase." The party then re- turned to Attleboro to attend to affairs at home. In the fall of the year, nearly all went out again, having several others with them and taking an ox team, tools, clothing, and pro- visions. They worked on the ground till late in the season and then returned home, to come out again in the following spring in time for planting. They spent the summer there, returning once more in the autumn to Attleboro. In Febru- ary of the next year, they started out, taking their wives and children, and were a month on the journey, which was by ox team as usual, and arrived early in March. This was the be- ginning of the Harford settlement, which grew from year to year by fresh accessions from the old Massachusetts neighborhood .* Among these was the family of John Tyler, the grandfather of Professor William S. Tyler of Amherst College, who went out in the fall of 1794, as narrated in Professor Tyler's Life.
The pioneers under the claims of the Connecticut charter, beginning their adventures in 1757, had a long struggle full of hardship and suffering only to meet with bitter disap- pointment in the end. Those who followed them, after 1782, and obtained their titles under Pennsylvania laws, could hold their property unmolested and live at peace with their neighbors. Their experience, therefore, was happier in all ways and their settlements enjoyed that stability which is essential to real prosperity.
* Blackman, op. cit., pp. 174-179.
XVI. Cabins in the New York Woods.
T HE territory lying east of the Hudson and adjacent to Connecticut, with the chances it offered for pio- neering, was not likely to be wholly overlooked by Connecticut people. The enterprise that early crossed the Sound to plant a settlement on Long Island, and sent a colony to found Newark in New Jersey, could not well be blind to opportunities on that western frontier. The open- ings for speculation there were the more inviting, perhaps, because the boundary was not sharply defined until 1734, and some thought that the New York lands extended over to the Housatonic River. Hence, to the east of the great es- tates along the Hudson, there were tracts that could be re- garded as "unappropriated," and these became a field for exploitation .*
One of the earliest pioneers in this region, if not the very earliest, was Captain Richard Sackett. This man is supposed by the historian of the Sackett family to have been a son of Jonathan Sackett of New Haven; but no evidence is found to establish this opinion. In 1699, he was the owner of a malt-house and brewery in New York City, and was married in that year to Margery L. Sleade, which identifies him fully with that community. Three years later, in 1703, with sev- eral associates, he petitioned the government for permission to purchase of the Indians a certain tract of unappropriated lands in Dutchess County. The permission was given, the purchase made, and a patent to what was called "Wassaic," covering 7,500 acres, was granted. Among the patentees ap- pears the name of Joseph Sackett, whose kinship to Richard is not clear.t In 1711, Captain Richard Sackett took his family from New York City and went up to Wassaic to make his home. At that time, it is said, there was not another
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