USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Mount Carmel > The old Mount Carmel parish, origins & outgrowths > Part 14
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19
* History of Little Nine Partners, pp. 3-8.
1 Weygant, The Sacketts of America, pp. 55-56.
155
Cabins in the New York Woods.
white family nearer than Poughkeepsie, Woodbury, and New Milford, or within a radius of fifteen miles.
Joseph Sackett seems to have held some sort of title to lands on account of the Wassaic patent, for in his will, re- corded in Poughkeepsie, he bequeathed all of his property in Dutchess County to his son Samuel, who afterward set- tled near Huns Lake and had a large family.
Another Joseph Sackett, who was born in 1712, was the only child of Lieutenant Joseph and Sarah (Denison) Sack- ett of New Haven. He married, after 1742, Abigail (Rowe) Ives, widow of Stephen Ives, and went out to Nine Partners, which was in the vicinity of Wassaic; and both were living there in 1796, when they gave a conveyance to land in Ham- den, the deed being witnessed by Samuel and Betsey Sackett. Probably this Joseph was distantly related to the earlier Dutchess County Sacketts, but certainly not in the way set forth in the Sackett Genealogy .*
These beginnings of pioneering in Dutchess County were followed by the movement of other settlers from New Ha- ven. Among these were Asa Alling and his bride, who went out soon after their marriage in 1749. At nearly the same time, and we can imagine in the same company, Caleb At- water of Cedar Hill, with his wife and large family of chil- dren, also removed to Dutchess County .; There is reason to think that many others besides these, at about that period, were attracted to this promising frontier from the neighbor- hood of New Haven. The historian of Little Nine Partners speaks of the early settlers of North East as coming princi- pally from New England; # and in lists of men living there in 1755, at the opening of the Revolution, one reads such New Haven names as Allen, Atwater, Austin, Bishop, Mans- field, Peck, Row, Talmadge, Thompson, and Trowbridge, and such other colonial names as Bulkley, Hawley, Holmes, Mead, Reynols, Rice, Townsend, Woodward, and White, which indicate their family relationships. The going of Dr.
* Note of D. L. Jacobus.
+ Atwater Genealogy, p. 118.
¿ History of Little Nine Partners, p. 38.
-
156
The Old Mount Carmel Parish.
Austin Munson to Claverack may have had some connection with this general movement. Another removal from Mount Carmel, in 1755, of John Munson to Hebron, New York, some fifty miles above Troy, connects itself more naturally with the drift to Berkshire and Vermont .*
After the Revolutionary War, the country beyond the Hudson came into the market and was open for settlement as it never had been before. The lands of those who had taken up arms against the Colonial Cause were confiscated and vast tracts came into the ownership of the state, from which pioneers could buy holdings, and, quite in contrast with those who settled in Wyoming, could get secure titles. Moreover, there was no longer much reason to be afraid of Indians. The power of the Indians was broken, and the few who still haunted the woods were as likely to be useful as to do any harm. Richard Smith in his Journal tells how useful he found them and describes how the Indians with his party made a house for them in a time of storm:
Our Indians in half an hour erected a house capable of shelter- . ing us from the wet, for it rained most of the day and night suc- ceeding. They place four crotched stakes in the earth, the two front ones being tallest. On these are rested poles which are crossed by other poles and these are covered with wide hemlock bark; a large cheerful fire being soon raised in the front, they completed our kitchen and bed chamber, wherein after broiling salt pork for sup- per we rested, prepared by fatigue, very comfortably.
Probably most of the men who came out into this new country to look for an attractive spot on which to settle be- gan their life on the frontier in an abode something like this, before they had time to fell the trees and build a substantial log cabin.
A place of no little interest in New York history is the vil- lage of Homer in Cortland County; and the interest is the greater for a certain connection that it had in early days with the people of Great Bend in Pennsylvania. Homer is on the Tioghnioga River, which is a tributary of the Susquehanna,
* Munson Record, p. 573.
157
Cabins in the New York Woods.
and by going down this stream to Chenango Forks, thence down the Chenango to its mouth, and thence up the Susque- hanna, one could more easily get to Great Bend than to some nearer settlements.
There came to this spot in the Tioghnioga valley in 1791 a company of three persons from North Haven, Joseph Beebe and his wife Rhoda, with her younger brother, Amos Todd, a member of the numerous Todd family which scat- tered abroad from the North Haven neighborhood .* After starting in and making a lodge to shelter them from the rain and cold, it became necessary for the men to go out after supplies and the wherewithal to carry on their work, as was always the case in pioneering, and Mrs. Beebe was left alone for some six weeks during the winter, taking care of herself and looking after the premises as best she could till her hus- band and brother returned. We have no way of finding out where the two men went on this errand, but within the two years following one of them, Amos Todd, came into very intimate relations with the family of Ozias Strong, so that in April, 1794, he was married to Lurana Strong and took her with him to the new home he had made in the Tioghnioga valley. Life there proved so attractive that about a year later Mr. Strong himself moved thither with his family and be- came a member of the new community; and, after having sojourned in Coventry, Lee, and Great Bend, he found there an abode in which to pass the remainder of his days. Nor was this all. Mrs. Todd was the youngest of six sisters; and, besides these, she had six brothers. All the sisters married and eventually came there with their families to live, though the home of one of them was at Hartford, a few miles away from Homer. Three or four of the brothers also brought their families to Homer. The families were most of them large, making a group of over sixty cousins. Several of these families afterward went to Ohio and settled at Lyme, Hu- ron County, about 1814. The mother of Mrs. Beebe and her
* The Tuttle Family, p. 702; Centennial of the Congregational Church of Homer.
+ History of Susquehanna County, PP. 53-55.
158
The Old Mount Carmel Parish.
brother, Amos Todd, Mrs. Penina (Peck) Todd, came on from North Haven to live with them, having previously married David Hotchkiss of Broome County .*
The settlement which was thus started in the clearing of the Beebes and the Todds grew with great rapidity. The val- ley that was so attractive to the Strongs was equally attractive to others coming from different parts of New England. Among these were Joshua Atwater, with his wife, Betsey Goodyear, and their family of eight children, who came from the Cedar Hill district of Hamden, close by East Rock. In all, there were eight sons and two daughters in this family, who grew up and most of them had large families of their own. The eldest son, Ezra, lived in Homer, and his youngest daughter, Jane Isabel Atwater, married Dr. Moses C. White and became a missionary of the Methodist Episco- pal Church to Foo Chow, China. Another son, Eli Atwater, lived in Sempronius, Cayuga County, New York.t Amos lived in Westfield, New York, but finally went to Beards- town, Illinois; Asa G. Atwater lived in Arcade, New York; Thomas, in Chautauqua County; Joseph remained in Ho- mer, where he was a teacher and county superintendent of schools. Dr. Andrew D. White, a native of Homer, says in his Autobiography:
Hither came toward the close of the eighteenth century a body of sturdy New Englanders and among them my grandfathers and grandmothers. Those on my father's side, Asa White and Clara Keep from Munson, Mass .; those on my mother's side, Andrew Dickson from Middlefield, Mass., and Ruth Hall from Guilford, Conn.}
These pilgrims from the east, as they came together in an orderly community, set up a church of the kind to which they had been accustomed, and a school for the education of their children. Not satisfied with the privileges thus afforded, they soon took a further step in the institution of Cortland Academy, whose superiority drew to itself students, not only
* Strong Genealogy, p. 459.
+ Atwater Genealogy, pp. 146, 149.
¿ Autobiography of Andrew D. White.
I59
Cabins in the New York Woods.
from neighboring towns in New York, but from the com- munities of northern Pennsylvania. Homer thus became a distinctly educational center and had a wide influence .*
In the same year that Beebe and Todd broke ground for the first homestead in the Tioghnioga valley, 1791, Dan Bradley went from Mount Carmel to Whitestown in the Mohawk valley, to be followed somewhat later by his cousin, Joel Bradley; his brother, Jabez Bradley, 2d; his cousin, William Bradley; his sister and her husband, Colonel Samuel Bellamy; Eli Bradley and his sons, Heman and Miles, from the southern part of the Mount Carmel Parish; and a number with other names, Goodyear, Atwater, Todd, Sperry, and Doolittle, who distributed themselves over the central and western portions of the state.
Whitestown had its name from Hugh White of Middle- town, Connecticut, who came to the spot and began to make his home there in the spring of 1784, less than a year after Congress had ratified the treaty of peace with Great Britain. Probably he was the first to undertake settlement in the Mo- hawk region after the War. He, with three others, owned what was known as the Sadaquada Patent. The others were Zephaniah Platt, Ezra L'Hommedieu, and Melancthon Smith. The four agreed to meet on the ground in the sum- mer of 1784 to make a survey and divide the property: White went to the meeting with the purpose of staying, and took along his four grown-up sons, a daughter, and a daughter-in-law. They seem to have made the journey by water, sailing down the Connecticut, through the Sound, and up the Hudson to Albany, where they crossed over to Sche- nectady by carry and took rowboats up the Mohawk to the mouth of Sauquoit Creek. Landing there, they put up a shanty to house them while the survey was going on. The Patent having been bounded and divided, they built a log house and proceeded to clear the land for future cultivation. With the coming on of cold weather, the father went back to Middletown for his wife and the rest of the family; and the following spring all were there for permanency. Whites-
* Bacon, Theodore T. Munger, pp. 21-28.
I60
The Old Mount Carmel Parish.
town, as defined in 1788, had for its eastern boundary a line crossing the Mohawk where Utica now stands and going north and south across the state; all of central and western New York being covered by the town organization .*
This was the settlement to which Dan Bradleyt came in 1791. He established himself in the particular part of it afterward known as New Hartford, which was some four miles south of where the Whites lived. He came there to preach as a licentiate of the New Haven Association, having received his diploma from Yale College in 1798 and having been employed the two following years in a course of the- ology with the Reverend Dr. Jonathan Edwards. Dr. Ed- wards was at that time the chairman of a committee of the Connecticut General Association for looking after "the scat- tered back settlements in the wilderness to the northwest- ward,"# and Bradley went to Whitestown on his recommen- dation. A family tradition says: "That he organized there in June 1791 a religious society," which was preparatory to the organization of the church in Whitestown that was effected on August 27 following, when Dr. Edwards himself was present and guided proceedings. The church was started as Congregational, but like many others of similar origin, it afterward became Presbyterian; it claims to have been the first church of any denomination in the state west of the longitude of Utica. Having had so favorable an introduction to this young man and having enjoyed his services with them long enough to be satisfied that he was the minister they wanted, the people by a unanimous vote, on October 31, invited him to become their pastor. Upon his acceptance, they passed another vote: "That Capt. Oliver Collins, Col. Jedediah Sanger, Mr. Joseph Higby, Capt. John Tillotson, Mr. Elias Hopkins and Mr. Salmon Butler be a committee to wait on Mr. Bradley at his ordination without fees"; a significant thing that so many men of prominence in the place should have been willing to take the long journey to
* Barber and Howe, Historical Collections, New York, pp. 378-379.
+ Yale Biographies, Fourth Series, pp. 628-629.
$ Ecclesiastical History of Connecticut, p. 164.
161
Cabins in the New York Woods.
Connecticut at their own expense. The ordination was at Mount Carmel on January II, 1792, the sermon being by Dr. Edwards, and, in the following February, Mr. Bradley was on the ground as pastor. He had been married in the fall of 1790, and had, not only a wife, but a little daughter about six months old, with whom to enter upon his ministry .*
It is disappointing to record that a pastorate so favorably begun did not prove to be a long one; and that, after only three years, Mr. Bradley turned to other pursuits. The rea- son for this is not clear. After his purpose had been made known, efforts were made to persuade him to withdraw from the step. He probably became convinced that he was not at his best in the routine of a parish. We must believe, too, that he was eager to have a hand in the big doings of that new country with its boundless promise. Anyhow, he was dis- missed in December, 1794, and in the autumn of 1795, re- moved some fifty miles westward, to an inviting region at the northern end of Lake Skaneateles that was being opened, and started in afresh at what is now Marcellus Falls.
He knew farming as it was in his old home north of the Blue Hills; and made up his mind to know it as it ought to be in western New York. He was bent on making a model farm that would stand as an example to all the farmers in the neighborhood around; what the late Dr. Seaman A. Knapp, in his fight with the Texas boll weevil, called a "Demonstration Farm." After clearing the land, breaking the ground, and undertaking tillage as best he could accord- ing to the old ways, he went to work in search of something better. He read and thought and made experiments, talked his schemes over with his neighbors and got the results of their experience to add to his own. He brought the farmers together in a club, which was named the "Onondaga County Agricultural Society," and they made him their first presi- dent. Then, as he came to understand better the things that belonged to good farming and stock raising, he wrote able discussions on various topics and sent them to the agricul- tural journals that were beginning to appear in different
* Centennial, Presbyterian Church, New Hartford, 1891.
162
The Old Mount Carmel Parish.
parts of the country-the Genesee Farmer, the New Eng- land Farmer, the Baltimore Farmer, the Plough Boy-and in this way his vigorous thought was made to tell in a wide field. So he grew to be a recognized intellectual leader and won the respect and confidence of the people to such a degree that they made him associate judge of the court of common pleas, and then chief judge of the county .*
Judge Bradley brought up a family of nine children, most of whom married and had children and grandchildren that are widely distributed in many parts of this country and in other lands. One son, the Reverend Dan Beach Bradley, M.D., became the pioneer of the American Missionary As- sociation in Bangkok, Siam, where he started to practice as a physician, translated a part of the Bible, had an alphabet of the Siamese language cast, and printed a Bible for the Siam- ese people. He was not only a distinguished missionary, but the father of missionaries. One daughter became the wife of the Reverend Daniel McGilvary, and with him opened and built up the remarkable mission to the Lãos in Chiengmai, in northern Siam; another daughter married Marion Adol- phus Cheek, M.D., and, with him, became an important as- sistant in the work at Chiengmai; while others of the family bore their part in various fields of endeavor.t One son, Cor- nelius Beach Bradley, has been for many years a professor in the University of California at Berkeley; and another son is the Reverend Dan Freeman Bradley, D.D., the pastor of the Plymouth Congregational Church of Cleveland, Ohio.
One of Dan Bradley's traits was his fondness for his friends, answered in turn by their fondness for him and love of being with him; which partly accounts for the fact that so many went out to the frontier after him.
Dan's cousin, Joel Bradley,¿ was two years younger than
* Yale Biographies, Fourth Series, pp. 628-629.
+ Information regarding the missionary enterprises of Dr. Bradley and his family may be obtained from an exceedingly interesting narrative, published by the Fleming H. Revell Company, entitled, A Half Century among the Siamese and the Laos; An Autobiography, by Daniel McGil- vary, D.D.
Yale Biographies, Fourth Series, pp. 630-631.
163
Cabins in the New York Woods.
he, but their homes were very near, so that they were to- gether a great deal in their boyhood days; then they went to college at the same time, pursued their course as classmates and were both graduated in 1789; after which they took their training for the ministry together under the tutelage of Dr. Jonathan Edwards. So it is not very strange that after Dan had become established at New Hartford, Joel should have come on to be ordained pastor of a newly organized church at Westmoreland, some fifteen miles from that place. On that occasion, July 16, 1793, the Reverend Ammi Rob- bins of Norfolk, Connecticut, preached the sermon, and the Reverend Dan Bradley gave the right hand of fellowship. The first settler in Westmoreland was James Deane, a native of Groton, Connecticut, who was educated in Dartmouth College, and after his graduation in 1773 went out among the Indians as a teacher; serving as an Indian agent and in- terpreter at Fort Stanwix during the Revolutionary War; at the close of which he was granted a tract of land near Rome, which he exchanged for a tract in Westmoreland, whither he removed in 1786. Joel Bradley's pastorate was a happy one and continued till the year 1800, when he was dismissed and became the pastor of a church at Ballston Springs, where he continued his ministry till 1811. On ac- count of ill health, he then resigned and returned to West- moreland to live among his old people; but he soon removed to Clinton, near by, where he taught for a number of years in the academy there, giving his family at the same time the unusual educational privileges of that college town. Finally, with his health so far restored as to allow him to resume the ministry, he became the pastor of the Presbyterian church of Orville in Onondaga County, only a few miles from the home of Dan, which must have added much to the enjoy- ment of his declining days.
The Reverend Joel Bradley had a family of three sons and five daughters, all of whom lived to a good age and married, making their homes in different parts of the coun- try. Several had families. They were people of cultivation and had many attractive qualities, exerting a fine influence in
164
The Old Mount Carmel Parish.
the communities where they lived. The eldest son was Dr. Samuel Beach Bradley, a physician, of Greece, New York. Another son was the Reverend Joel E. Bradley, who died at Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, in 1883. A somewhat extended record of the family may be found in the Dickerman Gene- alogy .*
When Dan Bradley brought his family from Connecticut to his parish at Whitestown, he took with him his niece, Mary, the elder daughter of his deceased sister Hannah, who had married Captain Jonathan Alling and lived in Colebrook. She was then a maiden of sixteen and no doubt filled an im- portant place in the new home. Something over a year later, July 14, 1793, she was married to Adonijah Tillotson of Whitestown, the service being performed by the bride's uncle. In the following year, Mr. Bradley went to Mount Carmel on business connected with the settlement of his mother's estate, and on his return he brought back with him Mary's sister, Chloe Alling, who became a member of the household in a similar way, and journeyed with the family when they removed to Onondaga County. Eventually, she became acquainted with Miles Bradley and was married to him on November 6, 1796. These nieces had one brother, Rodolph, younger than they, who also came to the same neighborhood and married a wife named Theodotia; both Rodolph and his wife died early and left two orphan girls who were taken into the home of their Aunt Chloe and gen- erously cared for.f Mr. Bradley's youngest sister, Lue, who was then twenty years of age, went out to pay him a visit, apparently on the same trip with Chloe Alling; she became ill, however, and died in her brother's home.}
The action of Dan Bradley in going from New Hartford to Onondaga County was no doubt influenced somewhat by the course of his older brother Jabez. This brother had lived a number of years in Lee, Massachusetts, where his uncle Jesse was; but in the summer of 1793, the year following
* Pp. 579-584.
¿ C. C. C. Bradley's MSS.
¿ Gravestone at Mount Carmel.
165
Cabins in the New York Woods.
Dan's settlement at Whitestown, he took a journey out to the New York frontier and, arriving at the spot where the village of Northville now stands, in Cayuga County, pro- ceeded to build a house. The historian of Northville says that "he was the first to break the forest at this point," and then adds that "he moved in with his family in February 1794, and the May following his fifth child, Dan, was born, who was said to have been the first male child born in the town of Milton." How much his brother may have had to do with Jabez's removal to this spot we can only imagine, but the naming of the boy Dan is suggestive of intimate relations between the two. It is not unlikely that the mother may have come on to Whitestown with her husband and tarried there with her children while he went on into the wilderness and got the home ready for them .*
In the following May, Jabez's cousin William, a son of Captain Jesse Bradley, appeared on the scene, having come from Lee on foot. He went into the woods to the south of where Jabez was and built himself a sort of camp, covering it with elm bark to keep out the rain, and cleared up the land around, working until fall, when he went back to Lee and taught a school there through the winter. Upon the opening of spring and the closing of school, he returned to his lodge, continuing operations there till the next fall, and then going back again to teach. He repeated this for three or four years till he had things in such shape as to warrant his bringing a wife to the spot; then on January 3, 1798, he was married to Tabitha Hamlin of Lee, and brought her out to share his pioneering. Long after, in her old age, Mrs. Bradley told a friend of her early married life:
We had a hole cut through the logs for a window without sash or glass for a window and a blanket hung up in place of a door. My husband worked hard clearing in the woods. I cooked the dinner, and taking that with my child would go where he was, and seated to- gether by the side of a log we would eat it. I came when this country was all a wilderness and have lived to see it a flower garden; but those were the happiest days of my life.
* Centennial, First Parish Church, Genoa.
.
166
The Old Mount Carmel Parish.
During the summer that followed the coming of Jabez's family and the arrival of William, the two brothers of Jabez's wife, Heman Bradley and Miles, joined them from Mount Carmel, to be followed later on by their parents, Eli and Esther (Goodyear) Bradley. These latter had all lived a number of years at Lee, but had gone back to their old Connecticut home, from which they made this second re- moval. The particular part of the settlement on which these pioneers planted themselves was long known thereafter as "Bradleys' Corner."
In Holland's History of Western Massachusetts, it is stated that Captain Jesse Bradley and Eli Bradley per- formed service in the Revolutionary War. It is known that lands in Cayuga County were, some of them, granted to sol- diers for military service and it seems likely that the right to these wild lands was obtained in this way. We can thus ac- count for the selection of this place for the Bradleys' settle- ment .*
Cayuga County was included in Onondaga County until 1799, and the distance between Marcellus and Genoa was some twenty-five or thirty miles. When Dan came over into Onondaga County to undertake his enterprise in farming, his new home was near enough to that of Jabez to make them not very remote neighbors and to afford a sort of com- panionship in developing the new country. We can be sure that this brought no little encouragement and satisfaction to both of them in the passing of the years; especially as other friends from the east were added to their numbers from time to time and the region became more populous. It is said of the town of Milton, the name of which was afterward changed to Genoa, that, in 1793, the whole number of fami- lies was twelve; and that this was increased, by the next spring, to forty; and, in 1800, the census gave a population of 3,553; which shows how rapid was the multiplication of settlers.}
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.