USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Mount Carmel > The old Mount Carmel parish, origins & outgrowths > Part 16
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* Ohio and Western Reserve, p. 141.
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Up the Mohawk and Beyond.
ganization of the county he was made one of the Judges, and the Legislature appointed him a Judge of the Court of Com- mon Pleas; which position he long held and filled with marked ability, impartiality and dignity."*
Jacob Atwater had a daughter Mary, who married Daven- port Williams and went out to New Hartford, apparently about the time that Dan Bradley was there. In that case, Amzi and Jotham would probably have made them visits in going to and from their surveying tours. Amzi certainly visited there in 1830, for he writes of it:
I arrived at New Hartford very early Thursday morning and went to see Uncle and Aunt Williams. I found them and family all well and had a good visit till afternoon. Aunt took a wagon and rode with me to Utica.
He visited there again on his return journey and tells the sad news of the death of a daughter at Lima, where she had left three motherless children, the youngest a babe.t
Among the foremost citizens of the Mount Carmel Parish in its beginnings were Judge Simeon Bristol and Captain Stephen Goodyear. Judge Bristol's son, George Augustus, married Mary DeForest Hawley, a daughter of the Rever- end Stephen and Mary (Bellamy) Hawley of Bethany, and lived in Southington. They had a son, Simeon Bristol, who married Captain Goodyear's daughter Lucy and removed to western New York, early in the last century, and made their home, it would seem, not far from Rochester, probably at Perrington or Pittsford in Monroe County .¿ Their daughter became the wife of Asahel Finch, Jr., and lived in Mil- waukee, Wisconsin, after 1839.
To these annals of movement out from the narrow valley lying north of New Haven to the larger opportunities be- yond the Hudson, it is only fair to add the tribute of an his- torian who writes of this newer region of the State of New York as "the land of his birth and the study of a lifetime."
* Atwater Genealogy, pp. 226-243.
t Ibid., p. 179.
# Goodyear Genealogy, pp. 80-82.
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The Old Mount Carmel Parish.
Francis Whiting Halsey in The Old New York Frontier, page 338, says:
Many of the pioneers from New England had served in the Revolution. Some had gone up the Mohawk with Benedict Arnold to Fort Schuyler in 1777; others were at Cherry Valley with Colo- nel Alden; others went down the Susquehanna with General Clin- ton, and thence to the fertile lands of the Genesee. Most notable of all the impressions they had carried home were impressions of the fertility of this New York soil and the sparsity of the population. This was strikingly true of the Genesee country, where the ears of corn they had plucked from extensive fields cultivated by Indians awakened astonishment. Accordingly the history of the re-peopling of this frontier is mainly a history of the migration poured into it from Massachusetts and Connecticut, by a people whom Professor Lounsbury has eulogized as "born levellers of the forest, the great- est wielders of the axe the world has ever known." They brought not only skill with the axe, but certain arts and refinements in do- mestic life before unknown to the frontier, and with those arts a spirit of enterprise and invention, with an initiatory energy which carried their own fortunes far; and which, more perhaps than all other human forces, have made the central and western parts of New York State what they now are.
XVIII. Personal Recollections.
A LLUSIONS in previous chapters to landmarks about Mount Carmel are founded on the author's remem- brance of them as they were in the middle of the nineteenth century. It may reasonably be assumed that they were then very much as they were in the latter part of the eighteenth century, for after the principal roads had been laid out, homesteads built, and farms put under cultivation, the outward features of the country tended to become more or less permanent. But in the subsequent period changes have been much greater and more rapid. The community itself has been essentially changed, from a society composed al- most wholly of farmers to an aggregation of people having various occupations and diverse interests. As a matter of course, the outward aspects of life have also become very different. On this account, it may add to the value of this his- tory to write out some of these personal recollections in more detail.
The main street, now known as Whitney Avenue, would hardly be recognized as the Farmington Turnpike of 1850. There was then a toll-gate about a hundred rods north of the meeting-house; and from that point down to Center- ville, a stretch of two or three miles, the number of dwell- ings could not have been more than fifteen or twenty, while now the count will run into hundreds. The farmhouses, too, had a distinctive style. Many of them were like the Sherman house, which stands just south of the meeting-house, of two stories, with the front door in the middle facing the street, and with a large room on either side above and below, and with smaller rooms in the rear. Another style that was quite common was similar to this, except that it was of one story; or, as it was often called, a story and a half, because there were upstairs windows on the gable ends of the house. A few smaller houses were independent of any style.
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The old farmhouse was ordinarily one of a group of buildings, each with a purpose of its own. A few rods away from the house was the barn, having on each side a pair of broad doors reaching from the ground to the eaves, with a floor of heavy planking between the two pairs of doors. On one side of the floor was a bay for a haymow and opposite a row of stalls for cattle, above which was more open space for the storage of hay or harvests of grain in the sheaf. At- tached to the barn on the outside were additions of one sort and another, sheds, covered pens, an open yard usually sur- rounded by a high fence, within which might often be seen a stack of coarse hay or cornstalks. Where the farm was large, two or three of these barns were found with a motley lot of other buildings-a horse barn and carriage house, a granary and corncrib, a pigpen and chicken house, a smoke house for curing hams and smoked beef, a shop with carpen- ter's bench and tools of many kinds for use in all sorts of farm industries. Connected with the house at the rear was a spacious woodhouse and a wood yard, in which were piled the supplies of fuel, some in the form of green cordwood right out of the forest, others in different stages of prepara- tion for the final process of storing it under cover. On some of the farms, there was a cider mill to which came the apples from many orchards in the neighborhood around, not merely to provide the popular beverage, but also to become a constituent of the huge quantities of apple sauce that was one of the food staples of nearly every house; and a good deal more besides to be ripened into vinegar and sent off to market.
It was one of the proclivities of a thrifty farmer to have some building project on hand. He kept a stock of lumber seasoning and ready for demands as they might arise. He liked to have things under a good dry roof, not only his family, but his cattle; his tools also, carts, wagons, sleds, ploughs, harrows, shovels, and hoes. It would have dis- tressed him to see the treatment that many farmers in the west and south give to their costly machinery today, leaving
The Author's Old Home See note on page 198
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The Blue Hills, from a Field back of the Author's Old Home
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Personal Recollections.
their mowers and harvesters out in all weathers the whole year round.
So long as farming was the chief occupation and the lands throughout the town were under cultivation, the people were widely scattered and most of their homes were somewhat apart from other homes. Each home with its several build- ings was the salient feature of the farm on which it stood. All the belongings of the farm centered in it as the head- quarters from which the directions for whatever was under- taken were given, and to which the products of every sort were brought. To live on a farm then meant living there quite distinctly. The owner and his family did the work; and to the work indoors and outdoors there was very little let-up from one season to another. To pay for this, the farm gave the family their support and whatever else they could make out of it. But the support was the main thing. A farmer bought very little; he raised what was required. He made little use of money and ordinarily had very little that he could use. Even in marketing his products, he took most of their value in other things that were wanted on his farm or by his family.
Unlike most other people, the farmer was largely inde- pendent of markets. His house was stocked from garret to cellar with the things which were necessary for food and clothing, while the wood yard held an abundant supply of fuel. His herds and poultry furnished the meat for his table; much of the pork and beef having been salted down in barrels, or cured by smoking, so that it was ready at hand when wanted. The dairy gave cheese, butter, cream, and milk at all times. The garden provided fresh vegetables, ber- ries, and grapes in their season; and in the autumn a surplus of cabbages, beets, carrots, and onions was stored in the cel- lar for winter use; while cartloads of potatoes, turnips, and apples kept them company in the several bins designed for them. The harvests of wheat and rye made the supply of flour. Buckwheat was in demand for buckwheat cakes, and cornmeal was a staple for hasty pudding and johnnycake. Oatmeal had not then become an article of diet in these
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parts; nor was anything known of canning farm products. Apples, pears, and berries were dried to keep them from spoiling. Rich preserves and jellies were made of quinces, currants, and other fruits, to be put away as special deli- cacies. Mincemeat was compounded with the diligence and pains of an apothecary, and held in reserve for the inevitable mince pies. Sausages were prepared with almost equal care and their linked chains hung over a pole suspended near the ceiling overhead in the pantry or some other convenient place. Lard was tried in quantities and poured into stone jars, where it could be found ready at any time for "shortening" and other requirements of cooking. Tallow was moulded into candles or made into "dips" to furnish all the light to be had on winter nights, except for what shone from the fire on the hearth. All waste grease was saved to be combined with lye, obtained by leaching the ashes from the hearth, and turned into the family supply of soap.
The machinery of that day was very simple, but somehow it was made the means of doing a large part of the work of more complicated inventions. The farmer mowed his mead- ows with a scythe swung to and fro hour after hour by his own strong arms. Wheat, rye, oats, and buckwheat were har- vested in a similar way with a cradle, or sometimes with a sickle. Then the grain was threshed out on the barn floor with a flail that pounded the sheaves till nothing was left in them but straw. After that, when the straw, with the thickest of the chaff, had been raked off, all that remained was win- nowed in the wind till the grain was clean of refuse. A big wicker fan was sometimes swung back and forth to help in this process. The way of shelling corn off the cob was to take a spade and put it face down with the blade on the side of a half-bushel measure; then to sit on it, looking toward the measure, with one foot on each side; and, taking the ear be- tween one's two hands, to draw the row of kernels along the edge till they were all dropped in the measure below. Old- fashioned corn had eight rows on a cob, so that this manner of getting off the kernels was easier than it would have been with such ears as we have now. Simple fanning mills and
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Personal Recollections.
corn shellers were coming into use about 1850; but they were new then, with only one or two in a neighborhood, and were circulated about from one farm to another, as occasion required.
The skill of the women in the house was quite as masterly. Baskets of wool came to them from the barn after the men had sheared it from the sheep. After washing it clean, they turned it into neat rolls with a pair of cards; next they spun it out into yarn on the whirring spinning wheel that was a part of the kitchen furniture; and finally they knit it into warm stockings. Or, it might be, they spun the wool into a finer thread to be woven into blankets or cloth out of which garments were cut and made. In like manner, quantities of flax came to them in the rough to be prepared for use. For this, they took the hatchel, a piece of board set thick with pointed spikes some four or five inches long, and whipped the flax across it again and again, till the fibers became clean of the coarse stuff in which they had been grown, and straightened into soft tufts, which passed thence to the little spinning wheel, where they were drawn into thread, finer or coarser as might be desired, and then went on to the final process of being woven to provide linen for all the uses of the household. All bits of cloth, new or old, were scrupu- lously saved; and what might otherwise have been waste was cut into strips, the ends of which were sewn together, and was then wound into balls to be woven into rag carpets, about the only carpet known in the farmhouse. To be handy with the needle was one of the first accomplishments, and little girls were early set to work at making samplers, to be kept and hung on the wall, often as much a source of pride to them as the diploma of a college is to girls today. Knitting, too, was a universal accomplishment for women, and it was practiced on all occasions. This was a sure safeguard against idleness when other work was done.
Such a life may seem to have been very isolated. It was less so than many might think. The people from the houses in any particular neighborhood were brought together in various ways. In the absence of books, newspapers, and fre-
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The Old Mount Carmel Parish.
quent mails, there was a desire to see one's neighbors as often as one could. People had no means of knowing much about what was going on in the world abroad, but they could learn what was going on in the homes right about them, and they were as eager for this as though the horizon had been wider. Their neighborly chat might be called "gossip," but it was just as human and vitally essential to a normal social life as the circulation of information in any other manner. So they were in and out of one another's homes at all hours of the day, often on errands of some importance, but at other times for simple relaxation and pleasure after a task was done.
The people were acquainted with everybody for miles all around. Every well-to-do farm had a horse; some of them had two or three; the bridle and saddle were ready in the stable to be thrown on at any hour; and close by in the shed was some wheeled vehicle, or a sleigh for winter time, to be brought out whenever needed. The young people, especially, considered it very bad for a horse to be idle for long at a time, and had him out on the road whenever it was conven- ient. They drove to market. They went to see friends who lived at a distance. Occasionally, they took a longer journey for business or pleasure to another part of the state, or per- haps to Massachusetts or Vermont. On Sunday, their work ceased, and then was the great chance for seeing one another. This of itself was reason enough for the presence of the great throngs at the meeting-house. They met for worship, but the expectation of seeing their neighbors in large num- bers added no little zest to the occasion. They were by no means unsociable, nor was the circle of their friendships a narrow one. If they did not see so many people as we do, they yet took a personal interest in everyone they did see. Somehow, account for it as we may, the young men and maidens of that old time found it easier to form those con- genial intimacies that ripen into a life-long companionship than do those who enjoy the social advantages most highly esteemed in our modern cities. Perhaps, after all, the hap- piest social conditions have their abiding place where life is unartificial and rests within the sphere of nature's harmonies.
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Personal Recollections.
My childhood was passed among people who, for the most part, had been born in Mount Carmel and always lived there, as their fathers also had done before them. Some of them were aged and in their retrospect took in the stirring events of the Revolution and the early years of the Ameri- can Republic. My grandmother, who shared the old home- stead with my father and his family, was born in 1764, the very year in which the Mount Carmel church was organized, and she lived to the spring of 1853, when I was in my tenth year. Her room, in which my aunt Chloe lived with her, was in itself a memorial of other days. The fireplace, with andirons, shovel, and tongs, and burning sticks of hickory or maple, was the cheerful center about which all loved to sit and listen to the gentle voice that told of a girlhood under King George of England. On a nail by the fireplace hung the well-thumbed almanac, and under it a small pair of yel- low bellows, adorned with a green vine that incircled a me- dallion on which was the portrait of Lafayette, the friend of Washington, about whom no child ever tired of hearing. Her animation rose to the highest pitch when telling about the British soldiers under General Tryon, who fought their way into New Haven over the west bridge, then broke into the stores, rolled the barrels out into the streets, gathered what valuables could be found, and got away before the men from the farms arrived in sufficient numbers to stop them. In one corner of the room was grandma's big feather bed and in another corner the tall cherry clock, on whose face was the picture of a robin and whose measured ticks had a dignity quite in contrast with those of the hustling little new clock in the kitchen. Between the two front windows stood a small dressing-table and over this hung an ancient looking- glass with a wonderful gilded spread eagle at the top. At one of the windows, our aunt often sat with her knitting, while her keen eyes watched the passing teams coming down from above the Steps on their way to market; and it was her quiet claim that she knew every horse on the road, as far as Chesh- ire and Southington, and could tell who was behind before the driver could be clearly made out.
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The Old Mount Carmel Parish.
Our garret was full of relics of times gone by; imple- ments of industry, spinning wheels, swifts, hatchels, a win- nowing fan; old papers in large quantities, which might be of great value now if they had been longer kept back from the paper mill. Especially interesting was a file of almanacs that had been carefully strung together by their hanging loops from year to year, as a new one took the place of the old. Smoked to a brown, dog-eared by constant handling, and covered with flyspecks, they held volumes of history; in them were marked the dates of children's births and other events of importance. What a pity that these too should have vanished at the clearing out of the "old rubbish"!
The impression that came to me from all this and from what I saw of those people of a former period was that our life at that time was very much the same as that which they had known from their childhood in these very scenes. Changes were coming, and coming fast. One of these was from open fires on the hearth to air-tight stoves. I remember the bricking-up of a fireplace in order to gain the conven- ience and greater warmth of the stove. No one saw then the deadly peril of foul air which this involved for the family, and which may have been a cause of the shortening of not a few promising lives in this very community. The old ways predominated, however, and the usages of colonial New England were the habit of the hour.
Among the things that I remember with an admiration that increases with the passing years are the evidences I saw of the love of beautiful objects. Among these were the great trees standing about our house. A big button-ball stood near the front door, stretching its giant limbs above the roof like a protecting sentinel. Two other similar trees were by the Sherman house. A lordly elm overshadowed the barn-yard on the west side of the street. An enormous pear tree, such as I never have seen anywhere else, stood by the brook under the hill back of the house; a hickory almost as large stood by the brook further south; and out in the middle of the meadow was a "Daddy" apple tree of unusual size. Down the street opposite the old Hezekiah Dickerman place were
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Personal Recollections.
two great maples; and on the hillside off to the west, back of the old house, was a solitary oak of rugged trunk and wide- spreading branches in whose shade the cattle loved to gather at noontime. Smaller trees with trim bodies and shapely tops, mostly maples and elms, bordered the wayside to the north and the south. What was the reason for these trees? Why should these matter-of-fact, hard-working farmers have had them in their fields and all about their buildings? There was no economy in them. Any one of them would have made a lot of firewood. Those trees in the meadow by the brook shaded the grass where it ought to have grown most luxuriantly and reduced it to half a crop of hay. No doubt the trees were there for the same reason for which the farmers of the Connecticut valley above Northampton left their wonderful Hadley elms all about their bottom lands. It was simply because they loved to see them; they liked the looks of those big, sturdy things, the grandest of all the products brought forth by the ground on whose cultivation they subsisted.
The same was true of the patches of old primeval forests that were left as the wandering Indians had known them. A clump of such trees between our house and the river en- circled and concealed a little pond that filled a geologic sink- hole; and beyond the hill along the river's side was a larger tract of several acres. Over the river, too, was "Spruce Bank," whose evergreen mass of hemlocks is to this day a picture of rare attractiveness. Impressiveness of mass and in- finite variety of detail with vague associations of the wilder- ness combined to make this landscape gardening unlike other kinds in interest.
Illustrative of interest in trees is a story my father some- times told his boys. In his own boyhood, he was out with his father on a spring morning, looking over the fences and clearing away any briers and weeds that might have got into them, when they came upon a little hickory, straight and vigorous, which it seemed a pity to cut; so he asked his fa- ther to let it live and give it to him, which was done. Always after that he looked on the tree as his particular property and
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The Old Mount Carmel Parish.
took care that it should be protected from injury. Years passed; the boy grew to manhood; the tree grew there by the old fence till it began to bear, and the nuts proved to be of rare excellence, with a thin shell, a full meat, and choice flavor. Then, every autumn, father gathered these nuts as his personal right, and, as they were the choicest on the whole farm, he found no small pleasure in disposing of them as he thought best, keeping them for the entertainment of friends on special occasions, and giving a few to the chil- dren now and then as a mark of approval. After father's death and the disposal of the farm to strangers, his sons con- tinued to prize these nuts and obtained them from the owner when possible, till finally the old tree fell into decay and a few years ago followed its companions to the wood yard.
Shrubbery and flowers were a conspicuous feature of many old homes. In front of the Bellamy place, as I remember it, were great clumps of lilacs, and long after the house had be- come a swarming hive of Irish tenants these bushes would be loaded every spring with blossoms that the children coming from school might pluck off as they pleased. Syringas and wax balls were common. Honeysuckles and climbing roses were trained on trellises by the sides of doors and windows. The path leading down through the vegetable garden was bordered on either side with peonies, marigolds, larkspurs, lilies, daffodils, tulips, pansies, and other plants; while tall sunflowers and hollyhocks adorned some corner of the yard. The laying out of the garden was often done with no little pains and regard for ornamental effect, the beds outlined with mathematical precision, the cedar bean poles selected for symmetry and set at right angles in careful perpendicu- lars, and the whole assiduously tended to keep down the weeds.
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