Proprietors' records of the town of Waterbury Conn., 1677-1761 ...

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Proprietors' Records the Town of Wacerbiiry Connecticut iiiiiiiiii tl'ill ll M I I 'it

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Preface

In this its first printed book the Mattatuck Historical Society publishes certain ancient documents relating to the early history of the town of Waterbury, — originally known as Mattatuck. A brief reference to the early history will explain the origin of the documents and their relation to one another and thus place them in their proper historical setting.

In October, 1673, a petition signed by twenty -six inhabitants of Farmington was presented to the General Court at Hartford, asking permission to "make a small plantation" at "a place called by the Indians Matitacoocke." The General Court, having been advised by men whom they had sent to "view those lands" that the place was a suitable one at which to begin a new settlement, granted the petition and appointed a committee of five persons "to regulate and order the settling of a plantation at Matitack."

This committee, known afterwards as the "Committee for Mattatuck," or the ' ' Grand Committee,' ' had for its task as Doctor Henry Bronson describes it in his "History of Waterbury," "to make rules for the planters and prescribe the conditions of settlement," to act "as the temporary guardians and the fathers of the plantation, with all the power usually exercised by town authorities ... in fact to found a town and organize it." In pursuance of this task the committee drew up certain "Articles of Association and Agreevi Preface

ment," constituting a basis of membership, that is of proprietorship, in the new settlement. The thirtynine persons who signed these articles, — thirty-one of them on the 6th of June, 1674, — constituted the organization known as the "Proprietors of Mattatuck," and afterward "of Waterbury."

The original manuscript of the "Articles of Association and Agreement" was doubtless retained by the General Court, but a duplicate of it, in the handwriting of Major John Talcott, the chairman of the committee, is still extant. Having survived the vicissitudes of more than two centuries, it was carefully framed between sheets of glass, and is in possession of the Mattatuck Historical Society.

These Articles constitute, no doubt, the earliest remains of the doings of the Committee for Mattatuck, but are not included in this volume. They are given in Bronson's History, as taken from the copy in the handwriting of John Stanley found in Waterbury Land Records, Volume II. A comparison of this v/ith the photographs of the duplicate, reproduced in one of Miss Sarah J. Prichard's chapters of "The Town and City of Waterbury," will show many inaccuracies in the copy, and the omission of one name.

The other surviving records of the doings of the committee — excepting the letter of April 5, 1682, which appears in the Appendix — constitute Part First of this volume.

At a meeting of the Proprietors in 171 1 — a quarter of a century after the Grand Committee had ceased to act — Mr. John Southmayd and Deacon Thomas Judd were instructed to "view some writings of the Grand Committee," with the understanding that such as were "of value" were "to be recorded, the remainder to be

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obliterated," and eleven years later action was again taken with regard to these same or other similar "writings," namely, "that those papers that Deacon John Stanley shall present, setting forth the acts of the Grand Committee relating to the settling of the town, shall be recorded," unless recorded already, "and those that are not deemed needful shall be returned to Deacon Stanley."

What "writings" were "obliterated" we have no means of knowing, but the records which remain to us are evidently incomplete. We have the minutes of less than a dozen meetings between 1677 and 1682, containing such orders and regulations of the Committee in relation to the settlement at Mattatuck as their office of supervision involved, and in some instances confirming the previous action of the planters. We have also several letters of instruction and three lay-outs of land.

The Grand Committee was the centre and source of authority, but as the plantation became well established they sought to relieve themselves of their burden of responsibihty. At a meeting held in February, 1680-81, they decided that "for the future the inhabitants of the place being orderly called and convented" shall have liberty to choose their civil officers "without any further order from the committee." In 1685, a majority of their number having died, the General Court authorized the two survivors to "continue their powers as Committee for Mattatuck, but we have here no record of their action later than 1683, except a grant of land in June, 1687, and a letter in September of the same year,"

Their task may be considered as having ended when the incorporation of the town took place. An act of incorporation was applied for — "a patent for the con-

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Preface firmation of their lands unto the present proprietors" — in May, 1685, and was granted by the General Court a year later.

To these "proprietors" the Grand Committee, having purchased the Mattatuck lands from the Indians, had "assigned and made over all their right and title" in 1677, "the inhabitants having paid the purchase to our order," as the committee phrased it. In the "Articles of Association and Agreement," already referred to, there is set opposite the name of each subscriber the amount of his subscription, the smallest being limited to fifty pounds and the largest to one hundred, but the relation of these subscriptions to the actual ownership of the territory is nowhere distinctly indicated. "That there was a purchase of the township made by the planters in some form," Miss Prichard remarks in her fifteenth chapter in "The Town and City of Waterbury," " and quite distinct from the purchase from the aboriginal inhabitants is evident, but nothing definite or explanatory concerning it has been left on our records." She suggests that the arrangement was similar to that adopted in Massachusetts Bay, where "the proprietors became holden to the colony, through the committee appointed by it, for all the costs and charges incident to the settlement of the plantation." In each case the planter "secured lands according to his venture in the common stock," but in Massachusetts the original allotment was left to the governor, while in Mattatuck it was left to the Grand Committee.

The names of the men who became by the action of the "Committee for Mattatuck" the proprietors of a territory embracing a hundred and thirty-three square miles are spread upon the pages of Bronson's History,

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and Miss Prichard in her twelfth chapter gives interesting facts concerning them, including personal characteristics.

But the fact that concerns us here is that these Proprietors kept a record of their proceedings which came to be known as the Proprietors' Book, and that a large part of the present volume (Part Second) is occupied with an accurate reproduction, a "verbatim et literatim" copy, of this Proprietors' Book, or at least of what remains of it.

In his History of Waterbury, Doctor Bronson refers to this Proprietors' Book as ''an old, dingy manuscript, of foolscap size, which he had dug out of a mass of forgotten rubbish found in a private family." Describing it as it came into his hands he says: "The sheets are sewed through and through, in the middle, by a cord of unnecessary strength, and the whole is covered by coarse brown paper turned over at the edge, with a broad margin, and made fast with a thread. Many leaves are gone at the beginning and end, and those that are left are rent and broken, and exceedingly brittle when handled. Only fifty -four pages remain."

The late Frederick J. Kingsbury, LL.D., — the first and only president of this Historical Society until the time of his death in 1910, — in a first draft which he had prepared of a preface for this volume, suggested that the "forgotten rubbish" of which Doctor Bronson speaks, "consisted of books and papers, left by his father. Judge Bennett Bronson, who was well known as a student of local history, and who undoubtedly had the manuscript in his possession while pursuing his researches. As Judge Bronson died in 1850, it was a piece of good fortune that this unique document did not completely disappear between that date and 1857,

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when his son discovered it. Doctor Bronson made such use of it as he wished in writing his History of the town, and in 1862 deposited it for safe-keeping with the New Haven Colony Historical Society."

In 1890, while Miss Prichard was at work upon her volume of "The Town and City of Waterbury," through the courtesy of Doctor Bronson, this Proprietors' Book came into her hands, and consisted at that time of twenty-six leaves, one having been lost since 1857.

It was in 1890 also that the discovery was made among the papers of the late John Kingsbury, Esq. (who was the last "Proprietors' Clerk"), by his grandson, Frederick J. Kingsbury, of the Articles of Association and Agreement, the writings of the Grand Committee, the two Indian deeds which (form the illustrations of this volume, an almost complete record of the tax-lists of the town from 1730 to 1783, warnings to depart the town, and hundreds of deeds, agreements, and other valuable and interesting documents. All these papers were turned over to Miss Prichard for her use in writing the early history of Waterbury, and are now the property of the Mattatuck Historical Society.

As the Proprietors' Book stands, it contains the minutes of nearly seventy meetings, only two before 1689, and the last in 1722. A photograph of the manuscript as it came to Miss Prichard, showing the ragged cover and one of the pages, is reproduced in "The Town and City of Waterbury" (Vol. I., p. 216).

It has been submitted to the Emory process and bound in parchment, together with the extant records of the Grand Committee.

Mr. Kingsbury, in his memoranda for a preface,

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refers to the "suggestions of a historic nature" to be found "in the leaves of this old record besides their written contents." He speaks of the paper as necessarily of English manufacture, mentions the noticeable variety in the inks that were used, and has a good deal to say about the chirography, some of which is "as clear and round and plain as the best handwriting of the present day," and "some in the scrawling hand of a man whose time was mostly spent in handling the hammer or the hoe, and whose spelling, even though he may have known better, was very apt to drop into the phonetic style." His added remark, that "some of it is phonetic to excess ' ' may be verified by any one who glances at the following pages. One need not go further than the first page to discern the extraordinary variety and the apparent lawlessness of the orthography, and on page after page may be found instances that almost suggest inventive ingenuity on the part of these scribes of two centuries ago. We find prejudice spelled in at least ten different ways, the most notable occurring in the phrase, " pragadishing hy wais and fooremer grants." We find such combinations as "to met at twelf a klok," and "agamed till the seckond tousedday," and "spakticell pond," this last representing not an Indian name, but one of the Spectacle Ponds now included in Hamilton Park. We have also "gaufe" for gave, and "unannymus" and "to ragolat misstaks." But the chief struggle of the recorders seems to have been with the bachelors and their accommodations. Among the seven or eight different guises in which they appear, "bagelders" and "bacheldtors" are perhaps the most startling, although we have also "bagelders acomandation " and "bagilldors a coming dation." It will be seen also that striking

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Preface variations of the same word occur on the same page and sometimes in the same sentence, showing that no rule of uniformity had been established or apparently thought of.

The remainder of the volume calls for little prefatory comment. At a meeting of the Proprietors held on November 2^, 1722, "it was agreed by vote that the several acts of the Proprietors from this time forward shall be entered in the Town Book."

The acts of the Proprietors as thus recorded have been carefully copied from the Town Book, and constitute Part Third of this volume. The volume contains therefore a full record of the proceedings of the Waterbury Proprietors so far as it is possible to obtain it. On December 10, 1764, a vote was passed to have the old record book, then in Captain Thomas Porter's possession, "examined to see if anything should be copied." For many years after that vote, no record of the doings of the Proprietors appears, and as certain lay-outs of land are mentioned between 1764 and 1802, which refer to a division of Proprietors' rights made at certain dates, and no record is to be found of such division, it is thought that a volume of records must have been lost. There are also in the town records various entries in which the laying out of highways and some other matters are treated as acts of the town, although they were in fact acts of the Proprietors. These entries are not reproduced in this volume.

Parts Fourth and Fifth seem to call for no comment. The brief Appendix contains two papers which had been mislaid at the time Part First was printed.

Mr. Kingsbury's comments on the handwriting of the Proprietors' Book convey but a faint idea of the difficulties involved in the decipherment of some por-

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Xlll tions of the manuscript. The transcription of the text, some of it crowded and crabbed from the first, and blurred and stained and worn by age, has been achieved by the industry and expert skill of Miss Katharine A. Prichard, with the assistance of Mr. Benjamin F. Rowland. The Index also is Miss Prichard's work.

Almost any one turning the leaves of this volume will find himself among the unused and obsolete placenames of an apparently unknown region. Yet we have here, although in disconnected passages and fragmentary form, the record of the development of one of the most remarkable and most conspicuous of New England towns. While the genealogist finds in these pages a storehouse of materials in the form of family names, the sociologist and the historian may well study here, in its minutest manifestations, the unfolding of that community life which has given New England its fame and honor. And others, no doubt, who are proud of Waterbury, will prize the book as a remnant of the past, a souvenir that cannot be duplicated.

Joseph Anderson.

January 24, 191 1.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. — Orders and Letters of the Grand Committee, 1673-1687 ..... I

II. — The First Proprietors' Book, 1677-1722 25