USA > Connecticut > The story of the Diocese of Connecticut : a new branch of the vine (Espiscopal Church) > Part 6
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parish, which built a church in Roxbury for Churchmen in the southern and western parts of Woodbury. The founders met in a home for twelve years, and services were read mostly by Jehiel Hawley, a militia captain who later founded a parish in Arlington, Vermont. The Church struck deep roots in Woodbury, and for some years was served by Richard Mansfield, who rode over from Derby.
About the same time, a parish sprang up at Plymouth Hol- low in Northbury (Plymouth and Thomaston). The Congregation- alists wrangled violently about the location of a new meeting house and about Whitefield's preaching, and some even seceded to the Episcopal Church. Only eleven families erected a tiny building and listened to sermons by Theophilus Morris, a traveling missionary.
With the lessening danger of French and Indian raids, people swarmed into the hill region. In the 1740's it was divided into most of the present towns, and in 1751 Litchfield County was organized. By that time missionaries from Fairfield, New Haven and Hartford Counties had gathered congregations throughout the region, except the extreme northern towns. Beach and Johnson founded a parish at New Milford in the 1740's, and Gibbs rode over the hills from Simsbury. Punderson traveled eighty miles from North Groton to invade Puritan Litchfield, the county seat, a stra- tegic place for a mission to scattered Churchmen. Gibbs went from there to visit oppressed brethren in Cornwall, and tireless Dibblee occasionally rode seventy miles to visit remote Sharon, to which many settlers had gone from Norwalk and Stamford. He was glad to hear them join in the service, even when they had only one Prayer Book.
The people called so insistently for ministers that in 1754 the Society made the county an itinerant mission under Solomon Palmer, the former Congregational minister in Cornwall. He took charge of New Milford, Litchfield and Sharon, and soon annexed Roxbury, Cornwall, Judea (Washington) and Kent. Incessant work eventually exhausted him, and the Society appointed Thomas Davies as a second general missionary. Davies' recommendation that the mission be divided was cordially supported by Doctor Johnson, but the Society's finances would not permit it.
Palmer, literally worn out, died in Litchfield in 1771, after a tedious and painful illness. This unassuming priest was one of
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the Church's truly great missionaries, and scarcely ever failed to visit every part of his enormous parish, although he suffered ago- nies from incurable nephritis. He baptized hundreds of children and adults, and saw the Church increase twofold and his communi- cants even more, while many honored their profession by truly Christian living.
Davies also died in harness, in 1765, after performing in- credible feats of pastoral work, with occasional aid from Richard Mansfield of Derby and Richard Clarke, a lay-reader who later be- came a missionary at New Milford, Sharon, and other places. At Davies' request, the Society finally established a mission for New Milford, Woodbury, Kent, New Fairfield, Roxbury, and New Pres- ton. Under Clarke this mission flourished, with some help from Richard Mosley of Litchfield, and soon had hundreds of families. His burden was somewhat relieved when John Rutgers Marshall took charge of the churches in Woodbury, which could support him without the Society's help.
The northern towns filled up slowly because of their remote ruggedness, and because most of the land-hungry people in older towns had been satisfied. Settlement was hindered also by a brutal winter in 1740-41, by epidemic sickness, and by heavy losses of crops and cattle. The Church penetrated slowly; missionaries were too much needed elsewhere. Palmer requested a division to give him Canaan, Norfolk, Goshen, Torrington, New Hartford, Harwin- ton, Litchfield, and Cornwall. Davies agreed, to lighten his own burden and promote religion in the new settlements.
In spite of enormous difficulties, missionaries pressed into the hill towns from all sides. Dibblee visited Salisbury and Corn- wall in the 1760's, and in the following decade Bela Hubbard of New Haven invaded Goshen. Richard Mosley was transferred from Brooklyn to Litchfield, and visited Sharon, Goshen, and other places for a short time before Sir William Johnson, the Indian agent, enticed him to preach to the Mohawks at Johnstown, New York.
NEW HAVEN COUNTY
While the Church fanned out from Stratford through Fair- field and Litchfield Counties, Christ Church in West Haven be- came the parent of a wide-spreading family of parishes in New
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Haven, Middlesex and Hartford. The first impulse came from the travels of Jonathan Arnold of Haddam, Theophilus Morris of Dub- lin University in Ireland, and James Lyons, another Irishman. It was a back-breaking mission, described by Morris as a "diocese," with the worst roads he had ever beheld. Lyons struggled to plant the Church in New Haven against the invincible opposition of the Yale faculty. Hostility and mean sneers at his Irish brogue so dis- couraged him that he sought greener pastures in Brookhaven, Long Island.
The missionary patriarch of New Haven County was per- sistent Ebenezer Punderson. He requested a settled pastorate, and in 1752 the Society established a mission for him in New Haven. Delighted to return to his native town, he gave most of the tim- ber for Trinity Church. Defying age and persecution, he visited Guilford, Branford, Northford and West Haven, everywhere gath- ering new communicants. In 1762, when entering the thirtieth year of his mission, he had founded eleven churches under extreme dif- ficulties and trials, and had officiated on every Sunday but one. After nine years in New Haven, he had six parishes in the county. In spite of potent and subtle opposition, he converted many young collegians, including four who became missionaries - Thomas Davies of Litchfield, Samuel Andrews of Wallingford, John Beards- ley of Groton, and Bela Hubbard in Guilford. By 1764 there were over four hundred Episcopalians among the six thousand people of New Haven and West Haven. His successor, Bela Hubbard, by 1772 had run up the figure to over seven hundred.
Hubbard planted the Church firmly from New Haven to Saybrook, building upon foundations laid much earlier by Lyons, Johnson, Punderson and Matthew Graves at Guilford, North Guil- ford, Branford, Northford and North Branford. For years the loyal Churchmen depended mostly upon lay-readers, while Samuel An- drews of Wallingford helped occasionally, and Samuel Peters rode over from Hebron to visit a promising congregation in Killing- worth. Johnson earnestly recommended a mission in his native Guilford, but about 1765 the Society decided not to begin any new ones in New England. The Church thereby suffered a dishearten- ing setback, and Hubbard was compelled to spread his ministry from West Haven to the Connecticut River, with a little help from Mosley and Leaming.
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Another chain of parishes stretched northward from the pioneer church in West Haven. In the late 1730's Morris discerned the prospect of a mission in the lower Naugatuck and Housatonic valleys, and began to visit Derby. Lyons, his successor, settled there and extended the mission to Oxford. A few years later the Society appointed Richard Mansfield (a former lay-reader) as mis- sionary to both places, and to Waterbury and Westbury (Water- town ). In 1748 the youthful priest began a happy ministry of seventy-two years, until his death at the age of ninety-seven. At first his parish embraced northwestern New Haven County and southern Litchfield, and frequently he was seen on horseback thirty or forty miles from home, at Bristol, Litchfield, Woodbury and Northbury (Plymouth). His mission gradually shrank to Oxford and Derby, as new churches sprang up.
One of the parishes, covering the upper Naugatuck Valley, grew from the early visits of Morris to Waterbury, and of Gibbs to New Cambridge (Bristol). Mansfield served for some years, but growth was so rapid that in 1758-59 a new parish was erected for Waterbury, Northbury, Westbury and New Cambridge under James Scovil, a young Yale graduate and "sober scholar." His task required many sick calls and much travel to distant and pastorless places, with enough work for two men, and he soon hinted that the mission should be divided. Relief came in the early 1770's, when Northbury and New Cambridge volunteered to support their own rector, James Nichols.
Another offshoot from West Haven originated in a secession from the established church at Wallingford, in 1729, and was fos- tered by the quarterly visits of Morris in the 1740's. About that time Punderson gathered a congregation in Middletown, which he tended with help from Samuel Seabury of New London, William Gibbs of Simsbury, and Doctor Johnson. In the summer James Wetmore used to come up from Rye and was happy to see a parish growing in his native place. For some years Wallingford and Mid- dletown shared the ministry of Ichabod Camp, a young lay-reader, who later was their missionary until Governor Dobbs and financial necessity coaxed him to North Carolina.
Wallingford's notorious and bitter controversy about revival- ism so greatly strengthened the Church by conversions that the Society created another mission under Samuel Andrews, who had
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charge also of North Haven, Meriden and Cheshire. Undaunted by his arrival in the dead of winter, he started hopefully and won the people's affection. He became one of the most popular mission- aries, making many converts and performing a remarkable number of baptisms. He was invited to preach and lecture in far-away places, even outside Connecticut. His visits to the sick and his cate- chism classes were innumerable. He rarely failed to preach on Sun- day or at any other convenient time, and his mission became one of the largest and most devout in New England.
MIDDLESEX AND HARTFORD COUNTIES
After Andrews settled in Wallingford, Middletown felt neglected, and in 1762 made a historic decision by calling Abraham Jarvis, the future second Bishop of Connecticut. The parish was so poor that even the Congregationalists said that the Society ought to support it, and Jeremiah Leaming gave all the lime for the church. For years Middletown was a lone Episcopalian outpost in the Connecticut valley, where Congregationalism reigned supreme.
The nearest parish to the north was St. Andrew's, in Sims- bury (now in North Bloomfield). It was organized about 1740, when Johnson, Punderson, Morris and Seabury, the elder, rode long distances to visit the English miners who toiled in the dark, damp copper mine at Newgate. In spite of continual oppression for taxes, the poor people built a church and bought the glebe which the parish still possesses. Converts came when the Congregational parish was split by a violent quarrel about revivalism, and could not agree on calling a minister. Encouraged by James Lyons, the parish begged for a missionary and pledged a salary to their reader, William Gibbs, a Harvardian who braved the long voyage to England for ordination.
Tragedy stalked poor Gibbs, who was exhausted by inces- sant travel, and worried into insanity by frequent conflicts with the established church about the exaction of taxes from his flock. He became unfit for routine duties and was barely able to sign bills of exchange for his salary, which the Society compassionately paid until he died.
The forlorn church was kept alive and even grew because of sheer loyalty and the occasional visits of distant missionaries. In 1762 Samuel Peters of Hebron opened a new church, St. Ann's at
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Salmon Brook in Granby. He also encouraged a young lay-reader, Roger Viets, a Yale alumnus and the uncle of the future Bishop Alexander Viets Griswold of the Eastern Diocese. The people urged him to secure ordination, and the Society erected a new mis- sion for the Farmington Valley. For twenty years he ranged over a vast territory, from Hartford, Windsor and Suffield to Litchfield County, and northward to Hartland and Berkshire County, Massa- chusetts. In spite of his personal hardships and the persecution of his flock, the mission prospered and in 1774 had about nine hundred people in Simsbury alone.
Except for Bristol and Simsbury, the rest of the present Hartford Country seemed fast closed to the Church. Doctor John- son failed to open the door at Wethersfield, and even the persistent Samuel Peters merely got one foot in at Hartford. In 1761 Davies visited Hartford, by invitation, to preach to a handful of Church- men and a "very large Concourse" of Dissenters, who apparently had lost their bitter dislike of the Prayer Book. Later, Peters visited monthly, and Leaming came from Norwalk in the heat of August and preached in the State House to about three hundred. In a flash of enthusiasm the parishioners laid the stone foundation of a church. Winslow even thought of moving from Stratford to Hart- ford to be nearer his Boston friends, and the clergy proposed a joint mission with Middletown.
They made the mistake of underestimating the power of Deacon "Sam" Talcott of the First Church. Through his influence the parish lost a law suit to retain possession of the lot, and Talcott carted off the stone. Viets was furious and laid part of the blame upon the indifference of Abraham Beach, who attended Congre- gational meetings after returning from his ordination in England. The Connecticut clergy in convention scathingly condemned the "wicked design" of the powerful Talcott family "so to demolish the Church there that it might never rise."3 They agreed to visit Hart- ford in turn, and suggested its inclusion in the Hebron mission, but no church rose until long after the Revolution.
THE EASTERN COUNTIES
Hartford would have been almost forsaken without the ministry of Peters. And his church in Hebron existed only because of the incessant labor of the original missionaries in New London
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and Groton, Samuel Seabury, the elder, and Ebenezer Punderson. They carried the Prayer Book to many towns where it had seldom or never been heard. Punderson was left alone in 1742, when Sea- bury went to Hempstead on Long Island. Punderson took literally his orders to serve all the places he could reach, and became a familiar figure on the roads from the Sound to central Massachu- setts, and from the Connecticut River to Narragansett Bay.
When he settled in New Haven, his place was taken, if not quite filled, by the zealous evangelist Matthew Graves, a priestly schoolmaster from Chester, England. His sympathy with White- field made him popular in the "New Light" eastern towns, and Congregationalists flocked to hear his frequent services in their homes. He would preach to anybody, and in spite of suffering from epilepsy, accomplished a staggering amount of hard work. His journeys covered eastern Connecticut, southern Rhode Island, east- ern Long Island, and other islands off the coast. He thought noth- ing of lengthy trips at his own expense, and penetrated where no Episcopal minister had ever gone before. Sometimes he stayed for several days or a week, to preach, baptize, win converts, and found a parish. Just before the Revolution, in one year he rode over six hundred miles and preached more than thirty sermons outside his regular mission. He won the confidence of the Mohegan and Nar- ragansett Indian tribes, promoted education among them, and tried to protect them from unscrupulous land speculators.
Graves planted the Church between New London and Mid- dletown and along the eastern bank of the Connecticut River. About 1766 he penetrated East Haddam, Middle Haddam and Moodus. The Congregational minister wrathfully wrote to him that he had no right to visit there without his leave, and Graves replied that no threats would scare him away from his duty. Although the established churches "raged furiously," he continually visited Mill- ington, Moodus, East Haddam, Colchester, and Chatham (Port- land and Easthampton), preaching from house to house, instruct- ing converts, and administering Communion. He left a church building in Chatham, hundreds of converts, and the seeds of later parishes in East Haddam and Middle Haddam. During all his travels he received only one barrel of flour for expenses!
His only rival as a missionary to the eastern towns was Pun- derson, who was absent from his church in North Groton for weeks
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at a time. There was scarcely a village east of the Connecticut River that did not recognize him as a frequent visitor. He rode hundreds of miles a year over miserable roads and trails through New London, Windham, Tolland, Middlesex and New Haven Counties. The Society, however, declined to lighten his burden by setting up the new mission he requested for Stonington and southern Rhode Island.
After Punderson went to New Haven, his flock in North Groton waited long for his successor, John Beardsley. The latter soon encountered problems of decline in the parish, caused by many removals to the trading center on Poquetanuck Cove near Norwich. With the Society's permission, they tore down the old church, used the timber to build one at the cove (its present site), and sold the old glebe to buy another.
The change revealed a marked shift of population toward the prosperous and growing mercantile town of Norwich. It was a rock-ribbed Congregational citadel, but Punderson moved up his siege engines, breached the walls, and built a church inside. After twenty years of services by readers and nearby missionaries, Christ Church welcomed the establishment of a mission and the pastor John Tyler, a graduate of Yale and King's College, who had studied under Doctor Johnson. The parish was a tiny minority among twelve hundred other families, and struggled against pover- ty, social hostility, "New Lights," and Baptist influences. Only intense loyalty and Tyler's ingratiating personality kept it alive, and after nearly thirty years there were still only twenty-five or thirty communicants.
St. Peter's in Hebron, another offshoot of New London and Groton, hurdled even greater obstacles. Probably no colonial parish played in such continual bad luck, after its first surge of growth under the ministries of Samuel Seabury, the elder, and Ebenezer Punderson. The few devoted families bought a glebe and built a church, in spite of great opposition caused by frantic "New Light" excitement. Then they waited for more than a decade, while vainly paying the expenses of three candidates for Holy Orders. One was lost at sea, one died of small-pox a few days after his return from England, and another died in prison during one of the wars with France. The little parish depended mostly upon the visits of Pun- derson and Graves. The latter used to stay as long as two weeks,
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but did not enjoy cordial relations with some contentious people, who questioned his authority and collided with his strict piety.
Finally, the people tried fortune successfully by sending to England Samuel Peters, a native son of Hebron and a graduate of Yale, who had inherited a large estate from his father. He caught the small-pox in England, and was attended by the personal phy- sician of Archbishop Secker. The archbishop once related that Peters was too awed to speak at their first interview. The young ordinand survived, and returned to minister until the Revolution- ary patriots proved to be fiercer than the small-pox. He had to be of stern stuff to endure his many travels to visit pastorless congre- gations on both sides of the Connecticut River, at Taunton in Mas- sachusetts, and in the frontier settlements of Vermont and New Hampshire. In one year he rode at least two thousand miles and gave nearly one hundred weekday lectures, for practically no reward except a present from the pleased and grateful Society.
Peters and his flock struggled through many troubles. Hard times during the French and Indian Wars reduced his salary and hindered completion of the church, while oppression by the es- tablished religion bore down heavily. There was a brighter side in the friendliness of some Congregationalists, who helped to finish the church. They even flouted the threats of their minister, to at- tend service in the church at Christmas, and invited Peters to read prayers and preach in the meeting-house on election day. But he was an ardent royalist, and the good will dissolved in the troubles before the Revolution. He was mobbed and threatened, and forced to flee to England to begin many unhappy years of exile.
While clouds gathered about him, the Church was strug- gling for life in Windham County, which Punderson and other missionaries found to be stony soil. "New Lights" and Baptists had reaped the harvest of discontent with the established church, and most people were invincibly prejudiced against the Prayer Book. One who loved it was Colonel Godfrey Malbone, a resident of Newport in Rhode Island, a graduate of Oxford University, and a polished scholar, who owned a large estate in Pomfret. Irritated by agitation in Newport against British taxation, he moved to Pomfret to live in peace as a country gentleman.
He soon discovered that "tranquility was not to be pur- chased at so cheap a rate." The nearest Episcopal church was in
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Norwich, and he had to pay for Congregational worship which he firmly declined to attend. The climax came when his estate was assessed for a large part of the expense for a new meeting-house, which he claimed was unnecessary. At that point the colonel did what is now called "blowing one's top," and decided to build his own church. Although he doubted that ten people in town (out- side his family) had ever seen the Prayer Book, his bold stand aroused a surprising number of sympathizers who read it and were "delighted." Religious dissensions in Canterbury and Plainfield made more converts, and almost before he knew it Malbone was reading services to thirty or forty families.
One of his friends gave land and subscriptions came from parishioners and from Malbone's wealthy friends in large towns from Philadelphia to Boston. The colonel drew the plans for a sim- ple and stately church, which is now treasured as one of New Eng- land's finest colonial buildings. The congregation appealed to the Society to establish a mission, promising a salary, a rectory and a glebe. Malbone asked his friend and college classmate, the Bishop of Bangor, to press them for a missionary. While they waited for a parson, the new converts were instructed in the liturgy by John Tyler of Norwich and Jeremiah Leaming of Norwalk.
Out of regard for Malbone and sympathy for the people, the Society ignored its rule not to send a missionary before a par- ish had a glebe and a rectory, and appointed Richard Mosley. He came in 1771, determined not to stay, until he saw what sacrifices the people had made. Then he tactfully decided to let the beauty of the liturgy recommend itself, and to teach doctrine by lectur- ing. The resulting steady stream of converts scared the established religion into vain threats against Mosley and the colonel, and pet- ty persecution of the parishioners by confiscating their goods and selling them at auction to pay the ministerial tax.
Mosley's worries were over in 1772, when he went to Litch- field, gracefully yielding the pulpit to Daniel Fogg, a friend called by Malbone from North Carolina. The new parson was a graduate of Harvard, and became one of the priests who assembled at the Glebe House in Woodbury in 1783 to elect a bishop. He was a man of culture and literary ability, and his letters and diary afford an entertaining chronicle of oldtime parish life during his long ministry in Pomfret until his death in 1815.
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It was a lonely ministry, for he was the only Episcopal clergyman in the county, many miles from any other church. His lot was made harder by the trials of the Revolution and the result- ing depression of the Church. Year after year he tended his small flock, preaching twice every Sunday most of the time. In a region where the Church's doctrine and liturgy were almost unknown, he emphasized instruction and scattered religious literature far and wide.
By 1775 the Church in Connecticut presented a marked contrast to its condition in 1740. Then there were only four settled missionaries, two traveling missionaries, and two schoolmasters. In 1742 there were seven priests and fourteen churches built or in course of construction. Johnson then wrote that when he came to Stratford there were not one hundred adult Churchmen in the colony, but in 1742 there were "considerably more than two thou- sand, and at least five or six thousand, young and old."
By 1775 the Society was paying seventeen resident mission- aries and a schoolmaster, and three other priests were supported by the parishes at Middletown, Woodbury, Northbury, and New Cambridge. In the years 1745-1781 the Bishops of London licensed twenty priests who served or intended to serve in Connecticut. Between Pigot's arrival at Stratford in 1721 and the cessation of its work in 1784, the Society poured out nearly £27,000 in salaries.
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