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Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907, by Daniel Davenport

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Title: The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907
Address Delivered by Daniel Davenport, of Bridgeport, Conn.

Author: Daniel Davenport

Release Date: December 29, 2008 [EBook #27651]

Language: English

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THE TWO HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY

OF THE SETTLEMENT OF THE TOWN OF

NEW MILFORD, CONN.

June 17th, 1907.

[Illustration]

ADDRESS
DELIVERED BY
DANIEL DAVENPORT,
Of Bridgeport, Conn.

Press of
The Buckingham, Brewer & Platt Co.
Bridgeport, Conn.

ADDRESS

DELIVERED AT NEW MILFORD, CONN., JUNE 17TH, 1907,
BY DANIEL DAVENPORT OF BRIDGEPORT, CONN.,
ON THE TWO HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY
OF THE SETTLEMENT OF THE TOWN.

The settlement of New Milford began in 1707, exactly a century after
that of Jamestown, Va. At that time, although Milford and Stratford at
the mouth of the Housatonic had been settled almost seventy years, and
the river afforded a convenient highway into the interior, for much of
the distance, this place, only thirty miles from the north shore of Long
Island Sound, was still beyond the extreme northwestern frontier of New
England, and indeed of English North America.

The inhabitants of Connecticut then numbered about fifteen thousand,
settled in thirty towns, mostly along the shore of Long Island Sound,
and upon the banks of the Connecticut and Thames Rivers. During the
thirty years next before, a few families from Norwalk had settled at
Danbury, from Stratford at Woodbury, from Milford at Derby, and from
Farmington at Waterbury. With these exceptions, hardly more than pin
points upon the map, and a few settlements about Albany, N. Y., the
whole of western and northwestern Connecticut and of western
Massachusetts and northern New York was a savage wilderness, covered
with dense forests, and affording almost perfect concealment for the
operations of savage warfare.

Though the northwestern portion of Connecticut was then a most
formidable and inhospitable wilderness, strenuous efforts were already
being put forth by the Colony to encourage its settlement. For, strange
as it seems to us now, at that time, owing to imperfect modes of
cultivation and the difficulty of subduing the wilderness, the settled
portions of the Commonwealth had begun to feel overpopulated.
Twenty-five years before, the Secretary of the Colony had reported to
the Home Government, that "in this mountainous, rocky and swampy
province" most of the arable land was taken up, and the remainder was
hardly worth tillage.

This need of more land, and the protection from invasion which the
settlement of this section would afford the communities near the coast,
and the innate love of adventure and desire to subdue the wilderness
which have characterized the American people from the beginning, were
the impelling causes which led to the planting of New Milford.

So pressing did this movement become that, though what is now Litchfield
County was then as remote and inaccessible to the rest of the Colony, as
were Indiana and Illinois to our fathers in the middle of the last
century, within forty-five years after the first settler had built his
log cabin and lighted his fire here, twelve towns had been settled and
the county organized with a population of more than ten thousand.

In order that we may appreciate, somewhat, the broader political
conditions under which the first settlers took up their abode here,
which largely engrossed their thoughts and vitally affected them and
their children for two generations, it is necessary, before taking up
the narrative of their actual settlement here, to advert briefly to the
state of affairs at that time in England, and on the continent of
Europe, and in the English, French and Spanish Colonies of North
America.

By 1707, it had become apparent to the people of Connecticut that, soon
or late, they must fight for the very existence of their chartered
privileges and natural rights, not alone the British Crown, but the
English people. The disposition of the people of England to reap where
they had not sown had become very clear. In April, 1701, Connecticut was
named in the bill then introduced in Parliament to abrogate all American
charters. She resisted with all her might through her agent, but it
passed the second reading, and would have become a law but for the
breaking out of the French War. Its principle was supported by the
mercantile interests and the great men of England. Then for the first
time the people of Connecticut fully realized that their foes were to
be, not the exiled house of Stuart, but the English people themselves,
and that though they changed their dynasties they did not change their
own nature.

In 1707, the principal kingdoms of Europe and their colonies were ablaze
with war. Anne was Queen of England. In that very year she attached her
signature to that long projected and most important constitutional
arrangement, the Act of Union between England and Scotland, which made
them one kingdom, the crown of which, by the Act of Settlement passed a
few years before, had been forever vested in the person and heirs of
Sophia, the electress of Hanover, the present reigning dynasty. Anne's
accession to the throne in 1702 had been followed by the
acknowledgement, by Louis XIV, of the son of James II, the deposed and
fugitive king of England and the determined foe of the rights of the
Colonists, as the rightful king, although in the Treaty of Ryswick, in
1697, he had solemnly stipulated to the contrary. This act of perfidy
roused the English to fury. The primary cause of the war, then raging,
was the acceptance by Louis of the crown of Spain for his grandson
Philip despite a previous formal renunciation. But the immediate
occasion was his espousal of the cause of the son of James II as
pretender to the British throne, which enabled the English Government to
form a great European alliance to wrest Spain from Philip and prevent
Louis from becoming the absolute master of Europe.

The year before, 1706, had witnessed the humbling of the pride and
ambition of Louis by the defeat of his armies, at Ramillies by the Duke
of Marlborough, in Piedmont by Prince Eugene, and in Spain by Lord
Galway. Charles XII of Sweden had advanced to Dresden in Saxony, an
English and Portuguese army had occupied Madrid, and an attack of the
combined fleets of Spain and France upon Charlestown, S. C., then
claimed by Spain as a part of Florida, had been repulsed by the vigor
and martial skill of the Colonial authorities.

At that time, the valley of the St. Lawrence was occupied by about fifty
thousand French settlers, imbued with bitter hostility towards the
settlers in New England and New York. Already the vast design of LaSalle
to acquire for the King of France the whole interior of the Continent
seemed to have been accomplished. While as yet the English were
struggling to secure a foothold upon the Atlantic seaboard, the French
had explored the Mississippi and its tributaries to its mouth, and the
whole vast region drained by them, between the Alleghanies and the
Rockies, had been taken possession of by the French under the name of
Louisiana, and a chain of military and trading posts from New Orleans to
the St. Lawrence, admirably chosen for the purpose, had been established
to hold it, and another chain was already planned to extend southward
along the west side of the Alleghanies, to forever keep out the English.
The French had been for fifty years hounding on the numerous tribes of
Canada and northern New England to attack and exterminate the settlers
of New England. The conquest of Canada by the English was therefore an
object of the greatest political importance, and necessary for the peace
and safety of the colonies, and their future growth, and it continued to
engross the efforts and exhaust the means of the colonists, until their
purpose was finally accomplished in 1763.

The people who settled here were entirely familiar with the hardships,
dangers and horrors of Indian warfare to which they were liable in
taking up their abode on this frontier. The horrible incidents which
attended the massacre of the inhabitants of Schenectady, in 1690,
seventeen years before, during the previous war, and of the inhabitants
of Deerfield, Mass., and other places in 1704, during the war still
raging, were household words throughout Connecticut, and had left an
abiding imprint in the minds of the people on the border. Though the
Indians, right about them here, seem to have been few in number and
comparatively harmless, they knew from their own and their fathers'
experience, that their position was one of extreme danger, and that at
all times their scanty and hardwon possessions and their lives were
liable to instant destruction, from unheralded irruptions by the more
distant Indian tribes of the North and Northwest, urged on by their
French instigators and allies. For the experience of the last seventy
years, from the time of the Pequot War, and during the subsequent
troubles with the tribes in southwestern Connecticut, and on Long
Island, and during King Philip's War, had fully taught them the craft,
treachery and pitiless cruelty of the savages, as well as their capacity
for extensive combination among widely separated tribes.

When Major DeRouville, in 1704, with his band of civilized and
uncivilized savages, committed the atrocities at Deerfield, Mass., the
suspicion of the Colonists that the French had instigated the former
Indian outrages became a certainty, for in this instance they openly
shared in them. Their object was, as I have said, to drive the English
Colonists from North America, and substitute in their place their own
colonial system. For this purpose they fitted out hundreds of parties of
savages to proceed to other portions of the English settlements, shoot
down the settlers when at work at their crops, seize their wives and
children, load them with packs of plunder from their own homes, and
drive them before them into the wilderness. When no longer able to
stagger under their burdens, they were murdered, and their scalps torn
off, and exhibited to their masters, and for such trophies bounties were
paid. The French government in Paris paid bounties for the scalps of
women and children, as Connecticut did for those of wolves, and it not
only fitted out other savage expeditions, but sent its own soldiers to
assist in the murderous work. Detailed reports of each case were
regularly made to the government at Paris by its agents in Canada which
can now be read. This is true of every French and Indian war until 1763,
and the fact was as well known to the settlers here in 1707, as it is to
the historical investigator of to-day.

In the beginning of 1707, reports of an expedition by the French and
Indians against some part of New England gave alarm to the Colony, and
on the 6th of February of that year a council of war was convened at
Hartford, consisting of the Governor, most of the Council, and many of
the chief military officers of the colony. Suspicions were entertained
that the attack would fall upon western Connecticut, and that the
Indians in this vicinity intended to join the French and Indians. The
Council of War determined that the then western frontier towns, Danbury,
Woodbury, Waterbury and Simsbury, should be fortified with the utmost
expedition. They were directed to keep scouts of faithful men to range
the forests to discover the designs of the enemy, and give intelligence
should they make their appearance near the frontier. At the October
session in 1708, it was enacted that garrisons should be kept at those
towns, and so it continued until after the close of the war in 1713.

It was in the midst of alarms and dangers such as these that the
settlement of this town was begun. One of the first houses constructed
here had palisades about it to serve as a fort, which lasted many years,
and in 1717 soldiers were stationed here for the protection of the
inhabitants, and this was repeated several times afterwards. Every man
was a soldier. He was a soldier when he sat at his meals, a soldier when
he stood in his door, a soldier when he went to the cornfield, a soldier
by day and by night.

At the time the first settlers arrived here there was a tract of cleared
land on the west side of the river called the Indian Field. It extended
from where the river runs in an easterly direction south to the mouth of
the little brook which runs along Fort Hill. It was not included in the
original purchase from the Indians, having been reserved by them in
their deed. It was, however, purchased from them in 1705, by John
Mitchell, and was conveyed by him to the inhabitants of the town in
1714. This was of the greatest advantage to the first settlers. It
furnished them a space of cleared ground, where each planter could at
once plant his corn and other crops, without the delay of felling the
trees.

It is thought also that the ground where we now stand, and Aspetuck Hill
had been in a large measure cleared of trees by the Indians by burning,
as was also Grassy Hill, two miles east of here. There appears also to
have been some meadow land partially cleared at the mouth of the
Aspetuck River.

At that time the country about here presented no such appearance as it
does now. The river then flowed with a fuller tide. With the exceptions
I have noted, a continuous forest overspread the whole landscape. No
thickets, however, choked up the ways through it, for the underbrush was
swept away every year by fires built by the Indians for that purpose.
Winding footways led here and there which the Indians and wild beasts
followed. The roots of the smaller grasses were destroyed by this annual
burning over. A coarse long grass grew along the low banks of the river
and wherever the ground was not thickly shaded by trees. After the
occupation of the country by the white settlers this annual burning was
prohibited. In lieu thereof, the General Court early in its history
enacted that every inhabitant, with a few exceptions, should devote a
certain time yearly, in the several plantations, to the cutting of brush
and small trees in the more open forests for the purpose of allowing
grass to grow in such places, as during the summer the cattle ranged
through the forests near the plantations subsisting on what grew there.
It is said that in the early settlement of this town, all meadow land
was secured by clearing marshy or swampy ground and allowing it to grow
up with grass from the roots and seeds already in the soil. It was one
of the early difficulties in the Colony to secure grass, from want of
grass seed.

The forests about here abounded with bears, wolves, foxes and
catamounts, deer and moose, wild turkeys, pigeons, quail and partridges,
and the waters with wild geese, ducks, herons and cranes. The river
itself was alive with fish and every spring great quantities of shad and
lamprey eels ascended it. Strawberries, blackberries and huckleberries
were extremely abundant in their season.

The winters were usually of great severity. In 1637 the snow lay on the
ground three feet deep all over New England from the third of November
until the 23rd of March and on the 23rd of April it snowed for several
hours in Boston, the flakes being as large as shillings. The springs
were very backward, the summers extremely hot and often dry.

Upon the petition of the people in Milford, in May, 1702, the General
Assembly granted them liberty to purchase from the Indians a township at
Wyantonock, the Indian name of this place, and directed them to report
their doings to the Assembly. The next March they made an extensive
purchase of the natives, and a patent for the same was granted by the
Assembly. In October, 1704, the Legislature enacted that the tract so
purchased should be a township by the name of New Milford, and that it
must be settled in five years,--the town plat to be fixed by a committee
appointed by the General Assembly. In October, 1706, the Legislature
annexed the tract to New Haven County. In April, 1706, the first meeting
of the proprietors was held at Milford, and it was voted that the town
plat and home lots should be speedily pitched and laid out by the
committee appointed by the Legislature, according to its own best
judgment, following certain rules laid down by the proprietors. During
that year and according to those rules, the town plat was laid out.

It was originally intended to lay out the settlement on the hill
immediately east of the present village, from this circumstance called
Town Hill to this day. In point of fact, it was laid out on Aspetuck
Hill, and consisted of the town street and sixteen home lots. The street
was twenty rods wide. It began at the south end of the brow of the hill,
or at the lower end of what was then called the "Plain on the Hill" and
extended northward. Eight lots were laid out on each side of this
street, each lot being twenty-one rods wide and sixty deep.

By the rules adopted by the proprietors, these lots were to be taken up
successively in regular order by the settlers as they should arrive.
John Noble took the first lot on the east side of the street at the
lower end, he being the first settler to arrive. John Bostwick took the
lot on the opposite side of the street, he being the next settler on the
ground. This method was followed by others until there were twelve
settlers with their families, numbering seventy souls located on this
street in 1712. Of these twelve families, four were from Northampton and
Westfield, Mass., four were from Stratford, two from Farmington, and
only two from Milford. In 1714, the town street was extended southward
to the south end of the present public green.

The first houses constructed here by the settlers were of the rudest
description. They were built of logs fastened by notching at the
corners. They were usually from fifteen to eighteen feet square, and
about seven feet in height, or high enough for a tall man to enter. At
first they had no floors. The fireplace was erected at one end by making
a back of stones laid in mud and not in mortar, and a hole was left in
the bark or slab roof for the escape of the smoke. A chimney of sticks
plastered with mud, was afterwards erected in this opening. A space, of
width suitable for a door, was cut in one side and this was closed, at
first, by hanging in it a blanket, and afterwards by a door made from
split planks and hung on wooden hinges. This door was fastened by a
wooden latch on the inside, which could be raised from the outside by a
string. When the string was pulled in the door was effectually fastened.
A hole was cut in each side of the house to let in light, and, as glass
was difficult to obtain, greased paper was used to keep out the storms
and cold of Autumn and Winter. Holes were bored at the proper height in
the logs at one corner of the room, and into these ends of poles were
fitted the opposite ends, where they crossed, being supported by a
crotch or a block of the proper height. Across these poles others were
laid, and these were covered by a thick mattress of hemlock boughs, over
which blankets were spread. On such beds as these the first inhabitants
of this town slept and their first children were born. For want of
chairs, rude seats were made with axe and auger by boring holes and
inserting legs in planks split from basswood logs, hewn smooth on one
side. Tables were made in the same way, and after a time, the floor, a
bare space being left about the fireplace instead of a hearthstone.

No sooner had the first settlers taken up their abode here than they
were called upon to defend the title to their lands in the courts of the
Colony. About thirty-seven years before, the General Court had granted
permission to certain Stratford parties to buy land from the Indians and
settle a plantation at this place, and they had bought over twenty-six
thousand acres hereabouts. Apparently, however, no attempt was made
towards a settlement of the same until after the purchase of same tract
from the Indians by the Milford parties in 1702, and the grant for a
patent for the same to them by the General Court in 1703. Soon after the
settlers first broke ground here in 1707, a suit was begun against them
by the Stratford people in the County Court at New Haven in May, 1708,
and it was carried thence to the General Court. It was tried sixteen
times. The first fifteen times, the plaintiffs won on the strength of
their Indian title. The sixteenth, the defendants won on the strength of
their Indian title, the patent from the General Court, and occupation.
This incident is particularly interesting because one of the plaintiffs
and the lawyer in this great case was the famous John Read, one of the
ablest men and most remarkable characters which New England has
produced. Some notice of him will not be inappropriate here, as he was
one of the earliest inhabitants of this place.

He was born at Fairfield, June 29th, 1679, and was a brother-in-law of
Governor Talcott. He graduated at Harvard in 1697, became a minister,
preached in Woodbury as a candidate, and in various towns in Hartford
and Fairfield Counties and preached the first sermon ever delivered in
this place. He studied law, and when in 1708 the General Assembly first
provided for the appointment of attorneys as officers of the Court, he
was one of the first admitted. He held the offices of Colony Queen's
Attorney, 1712-16, Deputy for Norwalk, 1715-17, Commissioner to settle
the boundary with New York 1719, and he was Connecticut's representative
in the Inter-Colonial Commission in regard to Bills of Credit, in 1720.
He removed to Boston in 1722, and became the Attorney General and a
member of the Council of Massachusetts. He was by far the most eminent
lawyer in New England, and was called "the Pride of the Bar, Light of
the Law, and Chief among the Wise, Witty and Eloquent." It was he who
prepared the instructions to Lord Mansfield, the counsel for Connecticut
in the great case of Clark vs. Tousey, in which was discussed the
question whether the Common Law of England had any force in Connecticut
other than as it was adopted by the people of Connecticut. His
exposition of the principles involved was most masterly, and it was the
great authority upon which in a later generation the people of
Connecticut relied to sustain them in their opposition to the measures
of the crown in 1775.

In a centenary sermon delivered at Danbury in January, 1801, the Rev.
Thomas Robbins had this to say of him, "One of the early inhabitants of
Danbury was John Read, a man of great talents and thoroughly skilled in
the knowledge and practice of the law. He possessed naturally many
peculiarities and affected still more. He is known to this day through
the country by many singular anecdotes and characteristics under the
appellation of 'John Read, the Lawyer.'"

In 1712, the town was incorporated, which gave it the power to tax the
inhabitants to support a minister, and the place became thereby an
ecclesiastical society. In March, 1712, the Rev. Daniel Boardman was
called to preach to the settlers. In May, 1715, the settlers petitioned
the General Assembly that they might obtain liberty for the settlement
of the worship and ordinances of God among them, and the Legislature
granted them liberty to embody in church estate as soon as God in his
providence should make way therefor. On November 21st, 1716, Mr.
Boardman was duly ordained as the pastor of the church of Christ in New
Milford, the total number of inhabitants of the town then being one
hundred and twenty-five. The first vote of the town to build a meeting
house was passed in 1716, but work was not commenced upon it until 1719,
and it was not completed until 1731, after infinite struggling. It was
forty feet long, thirty wide and twenty feet in height between joints
and was provided with galleries, pews and a pulpit. Long before
completion, when it was first used for religious purposes, the
congregation was accustomed to sit upon its outer sills, which were able
to accommodate every man, woman and child in the town with a little
squeezing. In 1713, the town voted to build for the minister a dwelling
house forty feet long, twenty-one wide, two stories high, and fourteen
feet between joints. In 1726, thirteen years later, the house was still
unfinished. The first Sabbath day house was not built until 1745.

In 1721, when there were but thirty-five families residing here, a
public school was ordered by the town to be kept for four months the
winter following, one-half of the expense to be borne by the town. The
children were taught reading, spelling after a phonetic fashion,
writing, and the first four rules of arithmetic. In 1725, it was voted
to build a school-house twenty feet long, sixteen feet wide, and seven
feet between the joints.

The first settlers crossed the Housatonic to their lands on the west
side by fording it at a point near the mouth of Rocky River, about a
mile above the settlement, or at Waunnupee Island in times of very low
water. In 1720 the town built a boat for the purpose, which was used
until 1737 when the first bridge ever built across the Housatonic from
its source to its mouth was constructed at what is now the foot of
Bennett Street.

The settlers for many years crushed their grain by hand in mortars or
carried it to mill at Danbury, Woodbury, or Derby, and brought back the
flour and meal. In 1717, John Griswold, under an arrangement with the
town, built a grist and sawmill on Still River, at what is now
Lanesville.

It is said that in 1713, there was but one clothier in the colony. The
most that he could do was to full the cloth which was made in the homes.
A great proportion of it was worn without shearing or pressing. He lived
at Woodbury, and thither the early inhabitants of this town resorted to
have their cloth fulled. People, to a very large extent, wore clothing
made from the skins of animals. They also wore wooden shoes and
moccasins, or went barefoot, although leather boots and shoes were
sometimes used.

The implements which they used in subduing the wilderness, their axes,
saws, plows, hoes and scythes were of the rudest description. Their
horses, cattle, sheep and swine we should now regard as of very inferior
quality. The same was true of the few vegetables they cultivated, and of
their fruits, especially their apples. Turnips, squashes and beans were
the principal vegetables. Potatoes were not as yet cultivated in New
England, onions were not generally, and tomatoes were looked upon as
poisonous. Some of them owned negro slaves but worked the harder
themselves to make them work.

They had little or no currency, taxes and debts being paid in produce.
What they ate, what they wore, what they coaxed from the reluctant soil
of these hillsides, cost them infinite labor. As was to be expected, a
stingy avarice was their besetting sin, which manifested itself in all
the relations of life. They were without newspapers, none being
published in the Colony until 1755. They had few books, the first
printing press in the Colony not having been set up in New London until
1709. They suffered greatly from malaria and other forms of sickness, as
did all the early settlers in the State. Medical treatment was poor and
difficult to obtain. The women went to the limit in childbearing, and
the burden of rearing their large families was awful. The art of cooking
was little understood. They had no stoves or table forks. The food was
served in a very unsavory fashion, and was very indigestible. The people
therefore had frightful dreams, and dyspepsia was very prevalent. No
carpet was seen here for a hundred years after the settlement.
Communication with the outer world was slow, difficult and rare. On
several occasions, owing to the failure of their crops and the
difficulty in getting relief from distant places little better off, they
nearly starved to death.

Truly the task which they had undertaken to subdue this wilderness, to
plant here the civil, religious and educational institutions of
Connecticut, and to prepare this beautiful heritage for their children
and children's children, was no holiday pastime, no gainful speculation,
no romantic adventure. It was grim, persistent, weary toil and danger,
continued through many years, with the wolf at the door and the savage
in the neighboring thicket.

Beside the physical evils with which they were beset, they had spiritual
troubles also. They fully believed in witchcraft as did all their
contemporaries, in a personal devil who was busily plotting the ruin of
their souls, in an everlasting hell of literal fire and brimstone, and
in a Divine election, by which most of them had been irrevocably doomed
from before the creation of the world to eternal perdition, from which
nothing which they could do, or were willing to do, could help to rescue
them. The great object of life to them, therefore, was to try to find
out what their future state would be. Said one of their preachers, "It
is tough work and a wonderful hard matter to be saved. 'Tis a thousand
to one, if ever thou be one of that small number whom God hath picked
out to escape this wrath to come." That we may get a touch of reality
from those far off days, let me quote you a few lines from the saintly
Thomas Hooker, the founder of Connecticut, and long the model for her
preachers. "Suppose any soul here present were to behold the damned in
hell, and if the Lord should give thee a peephole into hell, that thou
didst see the horror of those damned souls, and thy heart begins to
shake in consideration thereof; then propound this to thy own heart,
what pains the damned in hell do endure for sin, and thy heart will
shake and quake at it. The least sin that thou didst ever commit, though
thou makest a light matter of it, is a greater evil than the pains of
the damned in hell, setting aside their sins. All the torments in hell
are not so great an evil as the least sin is; men begin to shrink at
this, and loathe to go down to hell and be in endless torment."

The only test they were taught to apply to ascertain whether they were
predestined to suffer or escape this fearful doom, was in their ability
and willingness to conform their wills to the will of God as revealed in
the Bible. Accordingly as they had succeeded in this, they had a
reasonable assurance as to their fate, although no wile of the devil was
more frequent than to falsely persuade men that their prospects were
favorable. To study the scriptures day and night to ascertain the will
of God, and to struggle without ceasing to conform their wills to his as
therein revealed, was therefore the great object of existence for them,
not that they could thereby alter in the least their future state, but
that they might, if possible, find out what it was likely to be.

Should this recital of their beliefs provoke a smile, our amusement will
soon be checked by the thought of the little progress which has been
made in the last two hundred years, towards solving the same problem.
The origin of evil, the ineradicable tendency of the human heart to sin
and do evil, the mournful spectacle of ruin and desolation in the moral
world, and the future life are the same inscrutable mysteries to us as
to them. If we have constructed or adopted a more comfortable theology,
it is probably because we are less logical than they. It is perhaps
because we have forgotten or refused to look at some things at which
they did not blink.

Then, too, the Lord was abroad in those days. Their thoughts were deeply
tinged by the semi-pagan views with which the authors of both the Old
and New Testaments were imbued. When the thunder crashed, it was the
voice of an angry God that spoke. When the lightning flashed, it was the
gleam of His angry eye. Benjamin Franklin was then but a year old, and
electricity had not become the packhorse of the world. The smiles and
frowns of nature in all her varying moods through all the days and
seasons, which we ascribe to the operations of law, were to them the
visible tokens of the wrath or favor of the Almighty. On December 11th,
1719, for the first time in the history of the Colony, the northern
lights were seen here. They shone with the greatest brilliancy. The
consternation they caused was fearful. The people had never heard of
such a phenomenon. They considered it the opening scene of the day of
judgment. All amusements were given up, all business was forsaken, and
sleep itself was interrupted for days. Again, on the 29th of October,
1727, a mighty earthquake occurred, which shook with tremendous violence
the whole Atlantic seaboard. The people here believed that the Lord was
about to swallow them up in His fierce anger. The women throughout New
England immediately discontinued the wearing of hoop skirts then
recently come into fashion, believing that the earthquake was the sign
of the Lord's displeasure at the sinful innovation.

Hardly had the first settlers here begun to build permanent homes for
the living, when they were called upon to provide resting places for the
dead. The first person to be buried in yonder burying ground was a
child, a girl, Mary, the daughter of Benjamin Bostwick. The next was
John Noble, the first settler, and the first Town Clerk. He died August
17th, 1714. The town formally laid out the burying ground in 1716.
Within fifty years three hundred had gone to rest there.

There were no religious exercises at the funerals, neither singing,
praying, preaching, or reading of the scriptures. This was by way of
revolt from former superstitious practices. The friends gathered,
condoled with the afflicted ones, sat around a while and then the corpse
was taken to the burying ground. After that the party returned to the
house of the deceased, where much eating and drinking was indulged in,
and if the weather permitted, outdoor games and horse races were in
order. The next Sabbath an appropriate funeral sermon was preached. A
bereaved husband or wife usually soon married again.

The meeting house was never heated, but the people, summoned by drum
beat, attended it every Sabbath, morning and afternoon, even in the
severest weather, although no Sabbath day house was erected here until
1745.

The sacramental bread often froze upon the communion plate, as did the
ink in the minister's study. The people worked their minister very hard,
as was the case in all early New England communities. They went to
church not so much because they had to as because they wanted to.
Church-going was their principal recreation. They demanded long prayers
and two long sermons each Sabbath from their minister, usually on
doctrinal points, which they acutely criticised. Services began at nine
o'clock in the forenoon, and continued until five in the afternoon with
an hour's intermission. Soldiers, fully armed, were always in attendance
throughout the services ready to repel any attack upon the settlement.

It should be added, however, that with all their strictness in Sabbath
keeping and catechising, in family and church discipline, there was
great license in those days in speech and manner, much hard drinking,
and rude merrymaking, due to their rough form of living. They were not
what they wanted to be, nor what a loyal posterity perhaps longs to
believe them. They had red blood in their veins. They were among the
most enterprising men of their generation. They were backwoodsmen, the
vanguard of that wonderful race which in two hundred years pushed
westward the frontier from this place to the Pacific, fighting with man
and beast the whole way, and sowed the land with vigorous sons and
daughters.

The congregational singing in those days must have been an interesting
performance. When the first settlers came to New England from the old
country, they brought with them a few tunes to which they sang all the
psalms and hymns. The proper mode of rendering these was through the
nose. With the lapse of time and the advent of a new generation, these
tunes became jangled together in inextricable confusion. The practice
was for a deacon as leader to read a line of the psalm or hymn, and the
congregation sang at it as best they could, each one using such tune as
he chose, and often sliding from one tune to another in the same line or
improvising as he went on. Finally, in 1721, the Rev. Thomas Walter of
Roxbury, Mass., published a treatise, upon the grounds or rules of music
or an introduction to the art of singing by rote, containing twenty-four
tunes harmonized into three parts. The attempt to supersede the old
Puritan tunes and restrict the liberty of the individual singers met
with the greatest opposition and was long successfully resisted in all
the churches in New England, so tenacious were they of the rights of the
individual singer. It caused great dissension in the church at this
place. Finally, in February, 1740, the church voted to half the time for
the next year, singing the old way one Sabbath and the new way the next,
and in 1741, at a meeting specially called to settle the matter, it was
voted thirty to sixteen to sing thereafter after the new way.

No musical instruments were allowed in the meetinghouse. They had
never seen or heard a church organ. But they knew that their fathers
likened its sound to the bellowing of a bull, the grunting of a pig, and
the barking of a dog, and had resisted its use in religious services
even to the shedding of blood. Nor were flowers allowed in the church.

In those days in New England women were not thought to have minds worth
educating, and they were brought up in extreme illiteracy. Nevertheless,
their natural wit, brightness, and good sense made them very agreeable
companions of the superior sex. And their influence over their husbands,
sons and brothers, was quite as great as that of their more cultivated
daughters of the present day. The refining, educating, stimulating
influence of the women had much to do in withstanding the tendency back
to barbarism, which life in an isolated and new community led to. The
debt which is owed to them is incalculable.

As the descendants of those people assemble here to-day after the lapse
of two hundred years, to commemorate their work and rejoice in all the
strength, beauty and order, now smiling around us in peace and plenty,
which have grown out of what they began, and as we look back upon their
condition, trials and experiences, we are apt to imagine that their lot,
contrasted with our own, was an unhappy one. Nothing could be further
from the truth. They were a brave, hardy, thrifty, frugal, industrious
and most capable people. Man for man and woman for woman, they were
probably superior to those here to-day in faculty, and in the capacity
for healthy enjoyments. Their whole previous lives had inured them to
their experiences. They were the sons and grandsons of the original
pioneers of New England, and they had been born and reared in rude
settlements. They never indulged the delusion that this region was a
land flowing with milk and honey. Before they came they knew that they
were to wrest their living from an uncongenial soil, to struggle with
penury and to conquer only by constant toil and self-denying thrift. The
forest would supply them with the materials for shelter and fuel and to
some extent with food and clothing. All the rest must depend upon their
own exertions. There was a pleasure in facing and overcoming the perils
and difficulties which they encountered, which those, more delicately
reared who now live here can never know. Their individual helplessness
in the face of appalling obstacles to be met, but bound them closer
together in mutual helpfulness. Accordingly we find that their social
faculties were highly developed. It may well be doubted whether the sum
total of human pleasure among the whole five thousand inhabitants of the
town to-day is any greater than it was among the few hundred who settled
it. Probably our own superabundance of good things has actually lessened
our capacity to enjoy, in comparison with theirs. Their simple tastes
and homely joys amid their rude surroundings were probably more
productive of positive pleasure and real happiness, than all the
refinement and culture of our twentieth century civilization.

It would be a pleasing and instructive task to trace the progress of
this old town, from those rude beginnings to its present strength and
wealth. But the limits of the time and subject allotted to me on this
occasion forbid. It is the product of the labors of eight generations,
who now sleep beneath its soil. They never could have foreseen the
present. They never knew or thought of us. Each generation was busy with
its own problems, tasks and experiences. As we look back upon them our
hearts are filled with gratitude for the results of their work. A clean
blooded, land-loving thrifty race, through their activities they escaped
from the poverty of their beginnings and attained unto an almost ideal
abundance of the primal needs of civilization. Their physical condition
became probably as good as that of any other village community in the
world. Their experiences stimulated their intellectual life into full
activity, and they bore their full share in the wonderful work which
Connecticut has done in the world. In all critical times in both State
and Nation, the sons of New Milford, both native and adopted, have been
very active and influential and one of them, Roger Sherman, performed a
work which will last as long as this nation shall continue to be free
and independent or as long as the Constitution of the United States
shall endure.

We know that the past two hundred years are but the beginning of a long
history of this town. We believe that as the years roll by, at the close
of each century of its life, the events of this day will be repeated
here. What will be the lot of those who stand here, one, two, three and
four hundred years hence, to recall the origin and history of this town,
we cannot conceive. Our hope is that it will be as peaceful, as
prosperous, and as contented, as our own.

Whatever it shall be, we expect that their desire to know what can be
known of that long vanished world, in which both present and future have
their roots, will lead them to examine the memorial of what is said and
done here to-day. We are not more sure that the Housatonic will then be
flowing than that they will share with us in affectionate interest in
what has gone before.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the
Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907, by Daniel Davenport

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