USA > Vermont > Windsor County > Norwich > A history of Norwich, Vermont > Part 11
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It must not be inferred, however, that the opposition to the De- mocracy was idle or indifferent in those years. Nearly every election was contested with desperate energy. Often the result was almost a drawn battle, decided by a narrow margin of less than a dozen votes. In twelve out of twenty consecutive years, the successful candidate for town representative was chosen on a slender majority of from six to sixteen votes in an aggregate of 300 to 350 ballots cast. In 1842 Doctor Ira Davis, Democrat, was elected by eleven majority and in the following year re-elected by the same number, on the third ballot. In 1845 and 1846 Doctor Converse, Whig, was successful, in the former year after six ballotings, and in the latter year by the fifth balloting, by six majority. In 1847 William Loveland, Whig, had eight majority on the seventh ballot, and in 1848 there was no choice after twelve ballotings. In 1851 Samuel Goddard, Whig, received eight majority on the fourth ballot, and in 1852 Lewis S. Partridge, Democrat, thirteen majority on the second ballot, and Mr. Partridge was re-elected the next year by seven majority in a total poll of 343 votes.
Meanwhile a new political organization based upon opposition to the extension of slavery was rapidly coming into notice. The anti-slavery sentiment early took firm root in Norwich. Beginning with the birth of the "Liberty Party" in 1840, when one vote was cast by Deacon Sylvester Morris for James G. Birney (who received but 319 in the State and some seven thousand in the whole country), the party gained
I20
HISTORY OF NORWICH
in numbers from year to year, and drew to itself some of the best ma- terial of both the old parties. As early as the year 1845 its voters easily held the balance of power between Whigs and Democrats-an advan- tage they were not slow to use to advance their party interests. They polled thirty-nine votes that year for William R. Slafter, for governor, and three years later gave Morrill J. Walker ninety-five votes for town representative. Their support was courted by both the old par- ties, chiefly by putting in nomination men who sympathized with their distinctive opinions. By their help Doctor Shubael Converse, a Whig of anti-slavery proclivities, was sent to the legislature in 1845 and 1846. But in 1849-50 the State witnessed a general coalition of Free Soilers and Democrats, and Horatio Needham, Free Democrat, received a ma- jority of eighty-three in Norwich over Carlos Cooledge, Whig, who was made governor by the legislature, for want of an election by the pop- ular vote.
The question of slavery extension had now become the absorbing question of the hour, in which all the old political differences were speedily sunk and forgotten. A general break-up of existing parties was at hand and a recombination of their elements into new forms. Before 1856 the Whig party had disappeared forever in Vermont, and in the presidential election of that year Norwich gave its suffrage in a proportion of more than two to one to the candidates of the young and vigorous Republican organization of the country. Such was the answer of the town and State to the imperious demand of the American Slavocracy, that slavery be made national and freedom sectional, through inhuman Fugitive Slave Laws, repeal of the time-honored Missouri Compromise, and Border-Ruffianism in Kansas. With the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, this new party took the helm of administration and a new chapter was opened in the political history of the country, the record of whose pages is not yet complete. . This record, familiar to the memory of living men and pregnant with events of mighty import to the American people and to the human race, it will be the task of the future historian to trace.
VOTES FOR PRESIDENT-1828 to 1900
1828
John Quincy Adams, Nat. Republican 172
Andrew Jackson, Democrat 35
12I
NORWICH PRESIDENTIAL VOTES
1832
William Wirt, Anti-Mason 42
Henry Clay, Nat. Republican 73
Andrew Jackson, Democrat 1836
43
Martin VanBuren, Democrat 137
William H. Harrison, Whig 1840
93
William H. Harrison, Whig 221
Martin Van Buren, Democrat
160
James G. Birney, Liberty
1
1844
Henry Clay, Whig
164
James K. Polk, Democrat
163
James G. Birney, Liberty
12
1848
Lewis Cass, Democrat
125
Zachary Taylor, Whig
112
Charles Francis Adams, Free Soil
96
1852
Franklin Pierce, Democrat 129
Winfield Scott, Whig 119
John P. Hale, Free Soil
65
1856
John C. Fremont, Republican
222
James Buchanan, Democrat 109
1860
Abraham Lincoln, Republican 210
John C. Breckenridge, Democrat
92
Stephen A. Douglass, Democrat 1864
7
Abraham Lincoln, Republican 216
George B. McClellan, Democrat 1868
150
Ulysses S. Grant, Republican 228
Horatio Seymour, Democrat 109
I22
HISTORY OF NORWICH
1872
Ulysses S. Grant, Republican
191
Horace Greeley, Democrat
30
Charles O'Connor, Democrat
32
1876
Rutherford B. Hayes, Republican 194
Samuel J. Tilden, Democrat 157
1880
James A. Garfield, Republican 235
Winfield S. Hancock, Democrat
116
Neal Dow, Prohibition
1
1884
James G. Blaine, Republican
183
Grover Cleveland, Democrat
116
John P. St. John, Prohibition
15
1892
Benjamin Harrison, Republican
154
Grover Cleveland, Democrat
75
1896
William McKinley, Republican
194
William J. Bryan, Democrat 1900
40
William McKinley, Republican
162
William J. Bryan, Democrat
60
CHAPTER XV
POSTMASTERS AND POSTAL SERVICE
It was fifteen years after the admission of Vermont into the Federal Union, and forty years after the settlement of the town, before Nor- wich had a postoffice. The first postoffice was established at Norwich Plain, July 1, 1805, and Jacob Burton was appointed postmaster. Postmaster Burton kept the office in his harness shop on the main street of the village, nearly opposite the present residence of Mrs. Wm. E. Lewis. Probably the duties of the office were not so great as to inter- fere much with the prosecution of his trade. It is doubtful if Mr. Burton had more than two mails per week to distribute, and these were much smaller in bulk than either of the three daily mails now received at the village office. It is certain that less mail matter was then handled here in the course of a year than now in a week, although the territory accommodated at the office and the population of the town itself were each considerably greater than at present. It is safe to say, moreover, that the people now living in Norwich receive more let- ters and miscellaneous mail matter every year than did all the 150,000 inhabitants of Vermont in the year 1805. The postoffice is essentially a modern institution, whose importance and value increases year by year with cheaper postage and the general diffusion of cheap printed matter among the people.
At the time of the admission of Vermont into the Union, in 1791, there were only five postoffices in the State (at Brattleboro, Windsor, and Newbury on the Connecticut river, and at Bennington and Rut- land, on the west side of the mountains), to accommodate a popula- tion of 85,000. In these towns, then the chief centers of population and business, postoffices had been established several years before by State authority, and the number of offices in the State was not ma-
124
HISTORY OF NORWICH
terially increased for some time after the postal service was turned over to the Federal government. Meager as such mail facilities were, they were probably more liberal than were generally enjoyed by the people of the United States at that day. Indeed, the number of post- offices in the whole country was but seventy-five in 1790, and the five appropriated to Vermont, ludicrously inadequate as it seems to-day, with almost 500 postoffices within our borders, was more than three times what the State would have been entitled to, if distributed to the country strictly on the basis of population. From an early period it is probable that Norwich people had received more or less of their mail at Hanover, where a postoffice had been opened as early as 1793.
Previous to 1792, the mails in Vermont, as well as through the country, had been carried chiefly by post riders on horseback. During that year a new weekly mail stage was put on from Springfield, Mass., to Hanover, N. H., via Brattleboro, Charlestown, and Windsor. About 1807 a tri-weekly mail stage was run up the Connecticut river from Boston to Hanover, affording a mail every other day from the older parts of the country ; and a few years later this line (now via Concord, N. H.) was extended from Hanover to Montpelier on the new turn- pike through Norwich, Strafford, and Chelsea. This was the perma- nent mail route for many years. The mail stage left Hanover for Montpelier before light in the morning, stopping at all offices on the line for a change of mails. Col. Wm. E. Lewis, who acted as assistant in the postoffice at Norwich for a short time about 1830, thought that the mail pouches carried over this important mail route at that time were about equal in size to those which now bring the Norwich mail twice each day from the railroad station.
A postoffice was opened at Union Village January 1, 1830. This office, while within the limits of the town of Thetford, most con- veniently supplies their mail to the inhabitants of the north part of Norwich. Morrill J. Walker was the first postmaster-an office which he held continuously for twenty-six years. Shortly after the building of the Connecticut and Passumpsic Rivers Railroad through Norwich, in 1848, another postoffice was established near the mouth of the Pom- panoosuc, receiving its name from the river Pompanoosuc or Ompom- panoosuc, an Indian word meaning "the place of very white stones," Here Benj. Preston was the first postmaster.
125
FORMER POSTMASTERS AND LOCATIONS OF POSTOFFICES
The following are the names of the postmasters at the several post- offices in town, and the term of office of each :
Joseph Burton appointed July 1, 1805; George Riley appointed Nov. 9, 1814; Cyrus Partridge appointed Jan. 1, 1818; Jason Allen appointed Apr. 17, 1820; Cyrus Partridge appointed Nov. 22, 1821; Roswell Shurtleff served 1834-1836; John Wright served 1837-1839; Baxter B. Newton served 1839-1841; Ira Davis served 1841-1849; Harvey Burton served 1849-1853; John Wright served 1853-1855; Lewis S. Partridge served 1855-1857; Edward M. Lewis served 1857- 1861; Franklin L. Olds served 1861-1885; Lewis S. Partridge served 1885-1886 ; J. T. Morrison served 1886-1889; Edward W. Olds served 1889-1894; L. K. Merrill served 1894-1897 ; F. W. Hawley served 1897. 1902; Edward W. Olds served 1902-present time.
It is not known where George Riley kept the office. Jason Allen kept office either in the house now occupied by Miss Sarah Tracey or just across the street where the late Dr. S. H. Currier resided. At different times Allen lived in both these houses. Cyrus Partridge (both terms), Roswell Shurtleff, John Wright (1st term), and Baxter B. Newton had the office where Henry Lary resides.
At first, Ira Davis kept the office in the south room of the brick building destroyed by fire December 29, 1889, just south of "Union Hotel," and part of the time in the small south annex to James Cur- rier's house. During Harvey Burton's term the office was kept in a small building that stood between the present residences of William Bicknell and Edward W. Olds. The building was subsequently moved across the street and placed close to the north end of F. L. and E. W. Olds' store, where it yielded to the flames August 4, 1875. John Wright (2d term) kept the office in the north room of the brick build- ing (owned by himself) where Ira Davis previously kept the office. Lewis Partridge (1st term) and Edward M. Lewis kept the office in a small building that stood on the west side of the street, just north of Charles E. Ensworth's premises, and quite close to the street. The building was placed there by E. W. Mattoon and used by him for a tailor's shop. The building is now the home of Abel Hebard, just north of the village. While Franklin L. Olds was postmaster, the office was kept in F. L. and E. W. Olds' store (where Hawley's store is). Lewis S. Partridge (2d term) had the office in a building just north of Olds' store. During the terms of Morrison and Hawley, the
126
HISTORY OF NORWICH
office was kept in what is now Hawley's store. Edward W. Olds (1st term) kept the office in the north end of the brick building already mentioned, and later in his dwelling house. At present the office is in his store next south of the hotel. While L. K. Merrill was postmaster he kept the office in his store (now Merrill & Smith's store).
AT UNION VILLAGE-(OFFICE ESTABLISHED JANUARY 1, 1830)
Morrill J. Walker served 1830-1856; R. M. Gleason served 1856- 1861; S. M. Gleason served 1861-1864; R. M. Gleason served 1864- 1874; Anson West served 1874-1877 ; J. K. Blaisdell served 1877-1896; H. E. French served 1896-present time.
AT POMPANOOSUC-(OFFICE ESTABLISHED 1849)
Benjamin Preston served 1849-1851; W. W. Reynolds served 1851- 1854; Benjamin Preston served 1854-1857 ; B. G. Reynolds served 1857- 1859; Isaac Pierce served 1859-1862; H. F. Reynolds served 1862- 1868; J. M. Flint served 1868-1876; Hersey E. Kendall served 1876- 1902; Cora L. Kendall served 1902-present time.
The office at West Norwich ("Beaver Meadow," of old) was estab- lished April 18, 1890, with Chauncey Smith, the present incumbent, as postmaster.
At Lewiston the office was established December 26, 1898, with George F. Kibling, postmaster, which position he has held continuously to date (1905).
The salary of the postmaster at the Norwich office, in 1823, was $125.55. Only ten offices in the State paid a higher salary at that time.
From the information at hand, it appears that the first post route through Norwich was established in 1796, by virtue of an act of the legislature (then in session at Windsor) authorizing the laying out of a post road from the Massachusetts line to Newbury. Hon. Paul Brigham of Norwich, Lewis R. Morris of Springfield, and Oliver Gal- lup of Hartland were a committee to lay the route through Windsor county.
In the Vermont register for 1797 appears a list of several post routes already established in the State, designated by numbers. "No. 6" extended from Windsor to St. Johnsbury. The names of the sev- eral towns along the route are given, with the distances between them
127
POST ROUTES
and the names of the post riders. From Hartford to Norwich the dis- tance given is two miles (probably from Hartford postoffice to Nor- wich south line), and Bunton as post rider ; from Norwich to Thetford, eleven miles, and Childs, post rider.
We regret that we are not able to give a more complete account of the early post routes through the town and of the post riders, and also to tell something of the stage drivers and their coaches, the arrival and departure of which was such an event in our little community.
CHAPTER XVI
GROWTH AND DECLINE OF POPULATION
The population of Norwich has been steadily declining for more than seventy years, having reached its maximum in 1830, when it num- bered 2,316 souls. By the census of 1900 it was 1,303, a loss of over one thousand since 1830. The end of the present decade will doubt- less show a further shrinkage in the number of inhabitants. The following table records the population of Norwich by successive enu- merations :
1771 (New York census, forty families)
206
1779* (120 families, estimated)
600
1791 (U. S. census)
1,158
1850 (U. S. census)
1,978
1800
66
1,486
1860
1,759
1810
1,812
1870
1,639
1820
1,985
1880
1,471
1830
2,316
1890
1,304
1840
2,218
1900
66
1,303
Where this decline in population is to end it would be useless to speculate. It is a phenomenon that arrests the attention of the most casual observer all through the country districts of New England. It is, perhaps, nowhere more noticeable than in some of the purely agri- cultural towns of Windham and Windsor counties. In illustration of this constant tendency to depopulation of the farming towns, we have compiled from the several censuses (1790-1880) the following table, showing the growth and decline of population in ten representative towns in this section of the state :-
*Taken by a political committee.
İ29
EARLY POPULATION OF TOWNS
1790
1800
1810|
1820|
1830|
1840|
1850|
1860 1870
1880
Barnard
673
1,236
1,648
1,691
1,88I
1,774
1,647
1,487
1,208
1,19I
Strafford
845 1,642
1,805
1,92 I
1,935
1,761
1,540
1,506
1,290
1,18I
Hartland
1,652
1,960
2,352 2,553
2,503 2,34I
2,063
1,748
1,710
1,604
Norwich
1,158
1,486
1,812
1,985 2,316
2,218
1,978
1,759
1,639
1,47I
Pomfret
710
1,106
1,433
1,635
1,867
1,774
1,546
1,376
1,25I 1,139
Reading
747
1,120
1,565
1,603 1,409
1,363
1,171
1,159
1,012
953
Weathersfield
1, 146 1,924 2, 115
2,301
2,213
2,002
1,851
1,765
1,557 1,354
Westminster
1,601
1,942
1,925
1,974
1,737
1,546
1,72I
1,300
1,238
1,377
Dummerston
1,501
1,692 1,704 1,658
1,592
1,263
1,645
1,02I
916
816
Guilford
2,432 2,256 1,872 1,862 1,760 1,525 1,389 1,291 1,277 1,096
16,364
12,182
It appears from these footings that the above named towns in 1880 contained about seventy-five per cent of the number of people they did eighty years earlier (in 1800) and less than sixty per cent of the population the same towns had at the time of greatest population, two or three decades later (1820-1830).
A thoughtful man might find a sort of melancholy interest in a ride through one of these depleted townships and a census of its deserted homesteads and its scores of abandoned farms. He would linger for a moment around the old cellar holes where a few scrubby lilacs and stunted rose bushes still survive and bloom in their season and where perchance an old chimney still stands intact in naked ghastliness, with the hearthstone and doorstone still in place, around which chil- dren played and the annual family gathering at Thanksgiving was assembled half a century ago. Not infrequently some emigrant to the West or elsewhere returns in his old age to Vermont, to revisit the home of his childhood and the scenes of early life as he recalls them fifty years back, to look upon such a picture. Such a person-if he has a touch of sentiment in him-will seek out the oldest inhabitant of the locality, and then the two will quietly sit down together, and sadly
" talk of the old familiar faces, How some they have died and some they have left us ; *
* * all are departed -
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces."
At the first enumeration of the inhabitants of eastern Vermont, as made by the authority of New York in 1771, Norwich was found to be the most populous of all the towns of Windsor County, having forty
130
HISTORY OF NORWICH
families and 206 inhabitants .* Windsor followed with 203, and Hart- ford was third with 190. The aggregate population of the county (ten towns reported) was then but 1,205, mostly confined to the first and second tiers of towns west of the Connecticut river. Twenty years later, in 1791, Hartland led all the towns of the county with 1,652 in- habitants, Woodstock and Windsor coming next with 1,605 and 1,542 respectively. Exceptional causes made the little town of Guilford (now numbering scarcely more than one thousand inhabitants), till after the year 1800, the most populous town in the state. In Norwich, the great falling off in the size of families in recent years is seen in the fact, that in the year 1800, the number of children of school age was 604, out of a total population of 1,486, while in 1880 with a nearly equal population (1,471) it was but 390 .*
In the removal of large numbers of the native-born inhabitants by emigration, we must find the principal cause of the decline of our rural population. Pre-eminently is this true of Norwich. The outflow of people began very early, and now for more than a century there has been one unbroken, living stream of emigration pouring over our bor- ders. Several families that had first located here became, before the close of the Revolutionary War, the pioneer settlers of Royalton, Tun- bridge, and Randolph. Some of the captives taken at the burning of Royalton in 1780, among them Mr. Elias Curtis, had previously been residents in Norwich. The families of Seaver, Hutchinson, Parkhurst, Cushman, and Morgan, whose names often appear on the early records of the towns just mentioned, were either derived from or closely connected with Norwich families of the same name. The original pro- prietors of the town of Randolph mostly belonged in Hanover and Norwich, and their meetings were held here for several years. Abel Curtis was clerk for the Randolph proprietors in 1778. Other Nor- wich proprietors were John Slafter, Elisha Burton, Simeon Curtis, and William Lewis. In the year 1793, Captain Aaron Storrs, also a pro-
*The New York Schedules show the following classification of the townspeople by age and sex at this census : -
Heads of families (males)
401
Females over sixteen
48
Males above sixteen and under sixty
66
Females under sixteen
39
Males under sixteen 53
Total females
87
Total males
119
Over sixteen (both sexes)
114
Unmarried males over sixteen
26
Under sixteen (both sexes)
92
Unmarried females over sixteen 8
İ3İ
MIGRATION FROM NORWICH
prietor, sold his homestead near the west end of the bridge between Norwich and Hanover, to Doctor Joseph Lewis, to lead a colony of settlers to Randolph. Mr. A. A. Storrs, at the time of present writing representative-elect to the legislature from that town, is a grandson of Captain Aaron Storrs .* A little later the towns of Brookfield, Orange, Vershire, and Washington, in Orange County, received important accessions to their infant settlements from Norwich. The town of Washington was chartered to Major Elisha Burton of Norwich and others, by the legislature of Vermont, August 8, 1781- Jacob Burton was the first clerk of that town. Prominent citizens of Norwich were also grantees of Orange and Vershire, both chartered the same year, and interested themselves actively in promoting their settlement.
About the beginning of the present century, there was a large mi- gration from Norwich into the then newly organized counties of the northern part of the state. Several young men of marked ability at that time left their native town to become prominent and honored citizens of the newer townships of Washington, Orleans, and Essex counties. Sylvanus and Daniel Baldwin, while quite young men, went to Montpelier then just being established as the permanent capi- tal of Vermont. There the former built the first state house, and in 1810 the first cotton factory in this part of the country, while the latter became a leading merchant, and some time later founded the Vermont Mutual Fire Insurance Co .- was for many years its president, and the influential promoter of many other public enterprises, wherein he was ably seconded by Joseph Howes, another Norwich boy who followed the Baldwins to Montpelier in 1808. In 1804 Dan Carpenter, having studied law with Ebenezar Brown, Esq., and been admitted to the Windsor County bar, established himself in the new town of Water- bury, where he at once became a leading citizen and spent a long and useful life, filling many positions of honor and trust in the town and county. His brother, Luther Carpenter, had settled three or four years earlier in the town of Orange, with whose public affairs and interests he was closely identified for nearly fifty years, dying in 1861 at the age of eighty-three, having represented the town in the legislature four-
*About the year 1789, Captain Asa Story and Christopher Huntington emigrated to Randolph from Norwich with their families.
İ 32
HISTORY OF NORWICH
teen years, served as justice of the peace thirty-five years, as member of constitutional conventions, council of censors, and holding other important trusts,-in all, or nearly all, of which he was succeeded by his son, Carlos Carpenter, now a resident of Barre, at the ripe age of eighty. Besides the offices already mentioned, each of the above named gentlemen, with the single exception of Sylvanus Baldwin, held for several years the position of judge of the county court, and each of them, with the same exception, took for himself a wife from the vicinity of the old home, when ready to start out in life for himself. Luther Carpenter married Sarah Waterman of Norwich in 1803; Dan Carpenter married Betsey, daughter of Elisha Partridge, in 1805; young Howes married Patty, daughter of Abel Wilder, in 1808; and Daniel Baldwin married Emily Wheelock, a grand-daughter of the first president of Dartmouth College.
In 1801, William Baxter, son of Elihu Baxter of Norwich, and law student from the office of Honorable Daniel Buck, settled in the town of Brownington, Orleans county. Beginning married life the same year, with Lydia Ashley, a sister of Mrs. Daniel Buck, and with scarcely a dollar in his pocket, he soon became a leading lawyer and one of the wealthiest men in that section of the state. He secured the location of the Orleans County Grammar School at Brownington, and erected for it a new academy building at his own expense in 1824. Mr. Baxter died in 1826, at the age of forty-nine, leaving to his son, Honorable Portus Baxter of Derby, a munificent estate, and the better inheritance of a high reputation for integrity, business capacity, and public spirit, which never suffered in the keeping of the son.
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