Colonial days & ways as gathered from family papers

Front matter

O L O N I AL DAYS ^ WAYS

Y Y H E LBN

DATE DUE

Contents

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I THE ALPHABET OF COLONIAL STUDY ix Sources of Information. Superiority of Letters ^ and Diaries over other Records. Pilgrim, Puri-

tan, and Cavalier; Dutchman, Huguenot, and Palatine. Rapidity of Colonial Growth.

Chapter I The Alphabet Of Colonial Study

CHAPTER I.

THE ALPHABET OF COLONIAL STUDY.

Sources of Information.

Superiority of Letters and

Diaries ov er other Records.

Pilgrim, Puritan, and

Cavalier; Dutchman,

Huguenot, and Palatine.

Rapidity of Colonial

|ITH the gathering of relics to make suitable exhibits at the centennial celebration of our national ihdependence, there came a general awakening of interest in all things pertaining to the history of our Revolutionary War and of the few years preceding it. Beginning with an interest only in this special period, the slow fire spread backward until now there are few persons — at least, of English, Dutch, Huguenot, or even of the late-coming Palatine descent — who are not increasingly interested in all that pertains to the earliest colonists. Especially is this true — probably because reliable information concerning it is so difficult of access — in whatever pertains to the home life, the employments, the enjoyments, the hardships, and the habits of our ancestors in those far-away days when the comforts and conveniences which they possessed were, as compared with our own, proportionately as those of the Indians when compared with those of the English in 1620. So far, it must be confessed that, while the amount of information painfully gathered from town records, wills, inventories, letters, traditions, and relics is not inconsiderable, we are not as greatly the gainers by it all as we should be. We have the alphabet, but we do not yet know how to make words, still less how to construct the sentences, which shall tell us the true story of the most interesting beginning which any people has ever had.

Our national life has not been one of growth from savagery up, through many wars, through centuries of depression and oppression, of slow disintegrations and slower constructions, but is the result of deliberate purpose on the part of the majority of the first colonists, of no matter what creed or nationality, to occupy this wide, wild, new land, free to the first comer, and bring to it all the best of the institutions of the Old World, while leaving behind all that was worn out, all that had served its day.

For this reason, if for no other, the smallest traces of our national beginnings should be sought for; but not as one gathers pebbles on the seashore, to bring them home, turn them over, and throw them away. Every old reco'rd, every homely detail, every scrap of old furniture, every bit of home handicraft, above all, every familiar old letter or diary or expense-book, should be treasured ; not always each for its own sake, but because each thing, however valueless by itself, is a letter in our alphabet, and, when read in connection with something else, may help in the formation of a word hitherto unknown to us.

In fA-ming pictures of home life in the colonies, dates, places, and social classes must all be most carefully considered. Slow-moving as those preelectric days now seem to us, there yet was a constant and, when rationally considered, a rapid progression, from the moment of the first landing at Jamestown onward.

The life conditions which prevailed in the New England colonies from 1620 to 1640 were by no means the same as those which prevailed in the same colonies during the next two decades, and in the other colonies they were at no time quite the same as in New England. The settlers of Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland were not of the same creeds, either political or religious, as those which prevailed in New England. They had more money, not having been obliged to make their flitting under such adverse circumstances,, and climate had also its influence.

The Dutch held very similar religious and political views to those of the New England colonists, but their commercial instincts were stronger, their aggressiveness was less vehement, and their love of home comforts and knowledge of how to obtain them were much greater, for during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Holland was at the head of the commerce and manufactures of the world.* Besides this, many of the immigrant Hollanders were either wealthy themselves, or were the wellprovided offshoots from wealthy families who were disposed to enlarge their estates by commerce in the new lands.

The first three sets of colonists had passed through their pioneer stages, and gathered around themselves a fair degree of all the accompaniments of civilization before the advent of the fourth distinct and considerable body of settlers. These were the refugee Huguenots. In religion the Huguenots were as Calvinistic in their creed as were the Puritans and the Dutch, and were fully as earnest and steadfast in their belief, while the persecutions which the Puritans had suffered in England could no more be compared with those which had been endured for nearly two centuries by the Huguenots than the privations of one of our late Spanish captives could be compared with the sufferings of the colonists harried by the Indians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Whether they had been rich or poor in France, there were very few of the Huguenot refugees who were not in the depths of poverty when they reached here. But they were gentle (in both senses of the word), they were trained in many arts, and they had the keen perceptions, the courtesy, and the easy adaptability of their race. Home life among them was different from that of any of the other colonists, partly because they had the advantage of coming to a land which had already been occupied for more than threescore years by laborious, progressive, and intelligent settlers, and partly because they came from a land which was in some things more advanced than either Holland or England. Politically the Huguenots had little sympathy with either English or Dutch. Their race was strongly monarchical by instinct; the rights of the individual man had never assumed their proper proportions in the eyes of Frenchmen.

The last of the great immigrations was that of the Palatines. In modern times there never has been such wholesale abandonment of home and fatherland as that by these unfortunate members of a home-loving race, driven by scores of thousands forth from the land of their birth by unendurable misery. Their home had been the battleground of Europe. Great kings and petty princes. Catholics and Protestants, had alike fought over it, burned its villages, destroyed its crops, leveled its strongholds, and harried its people until they had no hope remaining. In sheer desperation they begged from the compassion of England a passage to and a home in the wilds of the new land. Theirs is a history as yet inadequately written, but it is worthy of the pen of a really good historian, and when one shall arise from among their descendants theirs will prove to be a worthy and in some respects an unexampled record.

In studying the lives of the early colonists these different origins should always be considered.

The one colony must not be judged by another. The Puritan, — a political as well as a religious exile, — persecuted for his political views even more than his religious tenets, came here to found an empire where all his views should have room and liberty to expand. He was keen-witted, and, — for his day, be it ever understood, — in spite of his rigid notions of morality, and of all modern assertions to the contrary, he was no narrower in his strictness than was the roistering Cavalier in his laxity of morals. The harshness of the Puritan toward those who disagreed with him was tenderness and mercy compared to the "justice " meted out to either religious or political dissidents in old England, or, for that matter, in any other country in Europe, with the possible exception of Holland, at that period. Neither man nor nation should be judged by other than the standards of his time.

The conditions of the Puritan's life were hard, but full of mental, moral, and physical health. Whether gentle or simple, he despised no handicraft, neglected no means of cultivation, shirked no duty (nor did he permit any other to do so, if he could help it), and he fought his way upward, unhasting, unresting.

The settlers of the fertile Southlands were also principally of English blood, yet they differed widely from those of the sterile North. They were courageous, of course. A minority came under compulsion, but the majority came of their own free will, and cowards did not cross the ocean in those days, when the sea and the wilderness had real terrors for even the boldest. The love of liberty was in their blood, and both the traditions of their past and the comparatively genial conditions by which they were surrounded gave them easy and comfortable views. If the Englishman of the North were strenuous, energetic, a warm friend and a stern foe, he of the South was strong, generous, and joyous. If each were disposed to loo\ a little askance at the other when the world went well with both, when trouble threatened either the fraternal blood flowed warm and true. We are all proud of them both — stern Puritan, gay Cavalier.

The Dutchman was milder than the Puritan, but every way as stiff-necked, and was an inborn republican as well as an educated Calvinist. Slower in his perceptions, narrower in his conceptions, and more prejudiced than even the Puritan, his faults were not so glaring because less aggressive, and the strength of his friendships and family affections hid them from the view of those who lived nearest him. As a mariner and as a trader, as well as in the arts which tend to make life easier and more comfortable, he had few equals, and our country owes much of its subsequent prosperity to the Dutchman's commercial and industrial instincts. We are ever grateful to him.

The Huguenot was devout, unambitious, affectionate of heart, artistic, cultivated, adaptable. He brought to us the arts, accomplishments, and graces of the highest civilization then known, together with a sweet cheerfulness all his own. Not a colony or a class but was ameliorated by his influence, and, consciously or unconsciously, we all love him.

The Palatine came to our shores desperate with misery. Although Protestant, his faith was not Calvinistic, neither did it fill so large a place in his thoughts. To the older colonists he seemed to be material, almost sordid, in his aims; but they understood neither his language nor his desperation. Perhaps they did not sufficiently try to do so. So he was left to himself, and so difficult was he of assimilation that even to-day those of his descendants who live a little off from the highways of commerce may still be found speaking but very imperfect English, if any, and living in self-centered communities, with little heed of the outside world, shut off from its influence. Industrious, frugal, unprogressive, living for himself alone, we still do not comprehend him.

Now, it is certain, from the nature of things, that the home lives of all these different bands of colonists must have differed widely. None had luxuries and few had comforts, as we now understand these terms, but each had some possessions, some ways, some deficiencies, and some attainments which belonged to none of the others; hence it is that a knowledge of the home life and personal characteristics prevalent in one colony does not imply a knowledge of those of another.

Even the details of domestic life differed somewhat in all the colonies, and a thing sometimes forgotten is that the house furnishings and personal habits, as well as the degrees of mental culture, differ with every advancing decade. Improved conditions came with a rapidity that was unexampled until that time. Because the first New England immigrants were obliged to live in mosschinked and mud-plastered log huts, it does not follow that they long continued to live in them. In fact, it was but a few years before very substantial and comfortable dwellings were erected by the better class in all the colonies. The " Old Stone House" of Guilford, Connecticut, erected in 1639, is still an exceedingly comfortable and even handsome residence, though it has been damaged by some ill-judged alterations for which there was no excuse, because they have in no way added to the convenience or comfort of the inmates.

Two or three years later than the building of the Guilford house, there was erected in Hartford, Connecticut, a two-story house of squared timbers, covered with overlapping shingles on the sides, for the Rev. Thomas Hooker. Of this house a cut is given in Barbour's " Historical Collections of Connecticut," which shows it to have been not only a substantial, but, though a simple, yet a noticeable mansion for that period in the old England as lO well as in the New. The house erected for Mr. William Whiting about the same time is said to have been still better. The house furnishings of Mr. Hooker and Mr. Whiting, as inventoried after their deaths, would not seem very plentiful or luxurious to-day, but, read in connection with the similar inventories of the same date belonging to the yeoman or petty gentry classes in England, do not show many marked differences. Even when compared with the inventories of the larger landed proprietors in England, there is not much to choose in the way of comforts, though undoubtedly there is in that of articles of luxury and display. In these there is as much difference between the possessions of Mr. Hooker and Mr. William Whiting of Hartford and those of an English gentleman of high social grade, as there is between an English nobleman's belongings and those of a Frenchman of similar rank, or those of a Hollander of the rich merchant class at the same period. To the French nobleman or the untitled but wealthy Dutchman, the interior of the English nobleman's castle must have seemed to the full as barren of beauty and of comfort as the homes of the Hartford settlers would have seemed to all of them.

A few years later than the deaths of Mr. Hooker and Mr. Whiting, the recorded inventories grow longer and fuller. Stools gradually disappear from them and chairs are increasingly in evidence. Forks are not named until well on to the opening of the seventeenth century, and then they are of silver, and are first mentioned in the will of a citizen of Boston in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, at about which time they seem to have come into use among the upper classes in England, having been introduced there from France and Holland.

It may be taken for granted that the wealthiest settlers of New England in 1630 were a little better off in comforts than the poorest of 1650, and so on. The advance was continuous. So much industry, intelligence, energy, and invention were applied to the work that the progress was marvelous.

The same process was going on in all the colonies. The Dutchman, when he became an English subject, did not change his character or his ways, but his growth was steady, if, perhaps, a trifle slower than that of his English neighbor. It must be remembered that he started from a higher plane of comfort (Holland being much in advance of England in this regard), so that by the middle of the eighteenth century both stood upon about the same level in these things. In the meanwhile, both had been greatly helped by the incoming of the artistic, polished, and thrifty French element. The latter brought but few articles of luxury or even of utility, for, like the persecuted Armenians who lately sought our shores, the dangers and difficulties of their escape made such importations impossible; but they brought the manufacturing and decorative skill to supply all deficiencies, and also the power and the will to impart their ^kill, and a few of them, like the Jays of Bedford, had been able to send some of their wealth to this country in advance of their own emigration. Very little of all that was left behind was ever regained. As sources of knowledge concerning household possessions of the colonists, wills and the inventories accompanying them have been too much relied upon — not because they are not accurate, for this, of course, they are, but because they do not cover ground enough. As a rule, the larger the estate the less likely was there to be an inventory of household possessions, their appraisement ahd division among heirs being usually made by agreement. In several distinct lines of colonial families which I have traced back through seven and eight generations to the years beginning with 1630, I have discovered comparatively few wills, and, after about 1650, these were seldom accompanied by inventories of household possessions. Even when an estate had been administered upon, in ordinary cases the more purely* personal property had apparently been divided by lot or private agreement, without public appraisal. Especially is this found to be the case in families numbering lawyers among its members. In such families, when wills were made, some person was nearly always named as residuary legatee, in order, probably, to prevent the necessity for giving detailed information of such purely private matters to a curious local public.

From the extent and variety of my researches in this line, I have come to have little doubt that this aversion to recorded inventories of household possessions was stronger in proportion to the wealth of the deceased. Hence it is unfair to suppose that the inventories which remain give accurate ideas of the kinds and qualities of the household furnishings of all the classes in a colony.

Perhaps it is due to too great a reliance upon such sources of information that many persons are in the habit of thinking that our ancestors possessed only the plainest, most uncouth, and most comfortless of furnishings. This was quite true of even the wealthy among the first comers, but it speedily ceased to be true even of those who were not wealthy. The first immigrants among the Puritans had not a floor carpet among their possessions ; but the number used in England in the first half of the seventeenth century was small, and they were considered quite in the light of effeminate luxuries. By 1660, or a little later, the always ugly and hard-to-be-swept, but all-enduring (and much-inflicting) rag carpet came into use, while those of the better class were usually provided with several of the excellent and easily swept but equally ugly yarn carpets, which could be and were made in those private families who were rich enough to provide the material, own the looms, and pay for

H

the weaving. A few fine carpets were imported from the Netherlands, but only by the wealthiest colonists. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the yarn carpets were made and sold by village weavers, and had thus become comparatively plentiful. I find no evidence that rag carpets were used in the better sort of houses, except in rear passages and inferior rooms. Not long ago it was desired to restore one of the living-rooms in the most venerated house in North America to its condition in the years between 1776 and 1800, and preparations were made by one of our patriotic societies to cover its floor with a rag carpet. This seems an error in judgment. As Washington imported most of the finer clothes for himself and his immediate family, as well as their rich bed-hangings, their handsomest articles of furniture, and the best of wines for his family consumption, it is hardly likely that he did not follow the fashion of other gentlemen of his social rank, and import carpets for his best rooms, while using those of woven yam for all inferior purposes.

At one time there was a general impression that all the immigrant families of good standing had brought over with them many rich articles of furniture, much silver plate, and even many articles of porcelain. Later on it had to be acknowledged that nothing but the most essential of household furnishings could have been permitted on vessels which were already entirely overcrowded with passengers and the animals which were essential to life and agriculture in the new land, while " Mayflower tea-pots " became a laughing-stock when it was remembered that tea did not come into use in Great Britain until many years after the landing of the Pilgrims.

After this there set in a reaction, and now the pendulum has swung almost as far the other way. While it is true that fine furnishings were the exception in the colonies as long as they continued to be such, it is untrue that there were not many families well supplied with all the comforts and luxuries that were usual in families of similar rank in old England. There is now in the possession of a descendant of the original owner, and in perfect preservation, a handsomely inlaid mahogany sideboard of the sort known as Chippendale, which was imported by a Connecticut farmer in 1 737, at a cost, including that of transportation, of thirty-nine pounds fifteen shillings sterling, as witnessed by the time-yellowed receipted bill of the maker, which is still preserved. This cannot have been an isolated instance, yet we are now asked to believe that the stern conditions in the first half-century in the colonies prevailed until after the colonial period had passed by.

The second error is as great as the first. The colonial stage of our existence was one of continual advancement. The colonists were of different races, of different social grades, of differing stages i6 of intellectual growth, of varying degrees of wealth ; hence they cannot be judged by inflexible standards, and colonial life should be carefully studied, almost as scholars study the history of ancient Nineveh and Babylon. From the scanty fragments of a long-neglected past we may gather our alphabet and learn to construct our sentences aright.

CHAPTER II THE CONTENTS OF AN ANCIENT GARRET a

CHAPTER II.

o

^ THE CONTENTS OF AN

Py ANCIENT GARRET, X

o o o Sharon, Connecticut. »

o o

o When and how the Town- «

V ship was Settled. o

V The Old House: how it V ^ was Constructed; who ^ O Lived in it ; the Papers \J ^7 it Contained. ^ .^

^QoO/^HE beautiful village of Sharon, ly- *yj^ f 1^ *yj^ ing picturesquely along one of the 10 broad natural terraces which form \j \7 the western slopes of the southern

O C^^\^ ^ spurs of the Berkshire Hills, was not one of the earliest settlements of Connecticut. A few stragglers, mostly from the banks of the Hudson River, had reared their temporary homes in this vicinity from time to time, but these had for the most part faded away when the township was laid out, in 1 733, and it was not until several years after this that there were enough inhabitants to justify an application to the Assembly for an act of incorporation. Hence it would hardly be expected that papers relating to the very earliest colonial periods should be found here. But the first settlers of Sharon were not fresh immigrants from the Old World; they were all, or nearly all, descended from the pioneer colonists of New England, and naturally brought with them some of the relics and records that their parents and grandparents had accumulated.

In Sharon, among several fine houses of late 19 colonial dates, is one in which, during more than a hundred and thirty years, six generations of one family have lived quiet and happy but full and not uninteresting lives.

In the wide and lofty garrets of this house are stored many thousands of letters and other papers such as generations of cultivated and undestructive persons would naturally accumulate around them. Some of these papers are packed in oaken chests which had brought household plenishings "across the water " in the early days of the seventeenth century ; some are in other chests of cherry wood, which were probably made in this country in the first decades of the colonial period ; some are in the hair-covered, brass-nailed, and round-topped trunks of a later day ; some are discovered packed in bandboxes which may once have contained elaborate periwigs, or immense and costly Leghorn bonnets; and again we find papers, valuable or useless, as the case may be, tucked away under the eaves in old baskets of Indian make, or in open pine-wood boxes, and even in barrels.

Some years ago, Mrs. E. P. Terhune (Marion Harland) visited this old house, and in her valuable and altogether charming book concerning " Some Colonial Homesteads and their Stories'' has mentioned the old garret and its papers. She says :

" We climb the stairs to the great garret. A large, round window, like an eye, is set in a gable ; the roof slopes above a vast space, where the townspeople used to congregate for dance and speechmaking and church ' entertainments ' before a public hall was built; . . . and in the middle of the dusky spaciousness, a long, long table over which is cast a white cloth. . . . Family papers ! . . . Hampers, corded boxes, and trunks full of them ! The hopes, the dreads, the loves, the lives of nine generations of one blood and name."' But the last clause is hardly correct. The nine generations who are represented here are of several names and even of differing nationalities; but the blood of them all is mingled in the veins of their descendants, the present owners of the old house.

During all the years that these old papers were accumulating they were carefully dusted once or twice a year, but not always replaced in their various receptacles with the reverential care which they deserved. Indeed, it is known that during the dozen years or so which succeeded 1845, ^^^' vants who had neglected to provide kindlings for the fires were occasionally permitted to use the garret's store of papers for their purpose. Notwithstanding this culpable carelessness, great quantities still remained at the time that my interest in them was first aroused, now a great many years ago. From these papers the larger part of the materials for the following chapters has been culled, though some of the things that are here related are on the authority of family traditions, notes of which I began taking when I was eleven years old, as I heard them narrated by parents, grandparents, and great-uncles and -aunts. These notes I continued to take at intervals for about eighteen years, by the end of which time many of the beloved narrators had gone to rejoin those whom they had held in such faithful and affectionate remembrance. Whenever anything is told on the authority of traditions only, it is thus expressly stated; but most of the information is from the abundant store of written sources.

The house in which the before-mentioned papers had been preserved is a fine specimen of the best period of our colonial architecture. The part which is now a capacious wing, running back from the main structure, was the first to be erected, and was reared on the foundations of a still earlier building. This first portion of the new home was completed about 1 765 and was in itself a spacious dwelling. The cellars and kitchen were in its basement, and a very large dining-hall, with two other good-sized rooms, were on its first floor. These were flanked by piazzas (or rather stoeps) on the north and south sides. The wing's bedrooms were on the second floor, with windows in the long, sloping roof, whose peak was filled by a garret of good dimensions.

In this broad and comfortable dwelling, the owner, Simeon Smith, M.D., lived with his family while the very much larger main house was in the process of construction. And a slow process it was in those laborious days ! Just when the wing was begun we do not know, but as it is of the same well-cut stone as the main house, which was not finished until some time during the Revolutionary War, we may hardly credit it with consuming much less than three years. There were then no steam-drills to assist in cutting the finely fitted stones. Water-power sawmills existed in this region at the time, and such planks as were used in the building were mostly sawed by them ; but all the heavy timbers — and very heavy they are — appear to have been hewn with the carpenter's broadax, while the matchings of the floor-boards were all cut by hand.

The walls of both the wing and the main house were very solidly built of deftly fitted stones, laid with a fine regard for shape and color, and are from sixteen inches to two feet in thickness. The windows are surrounded by ornamental settings of red brick, which are of an unusually large size. The rear wall of the main house was built up against the exterior of the western gable of the wing, and the two walls thus joined are fifty-two inches thick where a large doorway connects the two structures. It is said that the foundations of the main house were begun before the completion of the walls of the wing, and were allowed to stand through the frosts of several successive winters " so that they might be well settled." The whole work was under the direction of a Genoese archi-