Sunday, February 26, 2017

Wolcott History – New England Religious Roots

Many of my genealogy connections to others are through my deep roots in New England. As the name implies, this part of the US was primarily settled by immigrants from England. Even though both my father’s name, Russell, and my mother’s maiden name, Pierpont, had their origins in Normandy, France, both those family lines went through England where the families moved in 1066 until family members came to Massachusetts around 1640.

The time period beginning in 1620 in New England was one of much change as various people groups came from England. Most people are aware of the Pilgrims landing first in Provincetown, then in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620. But only a few years later, in 1628, the Puritans established Massachusetts Bay Colony, centered in the Boston area. The charter for this group was in the Cambridge Agreement which was signed in 1629 which guaranteed that Massachusetts would be a self-governing colony, answerable only to the Crown.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony was quite successful, with about 20,000 people migrating to New England during the 1630s – my ancestors among them. But the Puritans were dominated by a small group of leaders and voting rights were limited to freemen who had been examined for their religious views and were formally admitted to the local church. As a consequence, they exhibited intolerance to other religious views. Harvard University was founded in 1636 to educate Puritan religious leaders.

The Plymouth Colony remained small. Unlike the Puritans, who maintained their loyalty to the British Crown, the Pilgrims were separatists who wanted the freedom to practice their own religion without interference from others. They were among the first of a number of such separatist groups who came to America, with many of the later groups settling in Pennsylvania which included in its 1681 charter the freedom of religious practice. These later groups included the Moravians (1740), the Amish (early 1700s), and the Mennonites (1683). The Quakers were also prominent in Pennsylvania, although an earlier group of them settled in Rhode Island in 1657. In 1691, under a revised charter, the Plymouth Colony was absorbed into the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Meanwhile, the large number of immigrants to the Boston area, coupled with various reactions to the religious views in that colony, spawned a number of groups to move to other parts of southern New England. In 1635, Roger Williams, who was serving as a pastor in the Salem church, was tried and convicted of sedition because of his view that the church was not sufficiently separated from the Church of England. In the spring of 1636, Williams and a number of his followers began a new settlement in Rhode Island, just sufficiently far away that they were outside the boundaries of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. By 1638, he had also come to accept the idea of believer’s baptism. This led to the founding of the First Baptist Church in America.

Like Roger Williams, Pastor Thomas Hooker also was struggling with the concept that only the church member freemen could vote. In 1635, he led a group of 100 settlers in a trek from Newtown (now Cambridge) Massachusetts west to the Connecticut River where they settled. Originally they also called this new settlement Newtown, but changed the name to Hartford in 1637 to honor the English town of Hertford where some of the men came from. In 1638, Hooker and others met to frame a written constitution in order to establish a government for themselves. Hooker preached the opening sermon of that meeting, declaring that “the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people.” The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut were signed and ratified in 1639. This was the first written constitution known to history that created a government. It marked the beginning of American democracy.

But just like those who wanted less influence of the church on society, there were also some who felt that it was not strong enough. In 1637, a small party of Puritans reconnoitered the New Haven harbor and wintered over. In April of 1638, the main party of 500 Puritans, under the leadership of Reverend John Davenport, left the Massachusetts Bay Colony and sailed to New Haven. They were hoping to establish (at least in their minds) a better theological community with the government even more closely linked to the church. The Quinnipiac tribe, under attack from the neighboring Pequots, sold their land to the settlers in return for protection. In 1664 the New Haven Colony, under political pressure from England, was merged into the Connecticut Colony in order to strengthen the case for the takeover of the nearby New Amsterdam from the Dutch (New Amsterdam had been founded in 1624, but they were taken over in 1664 by the British and it was renamed as New York). Some members of the New Haven Colony, seeking to establish a new theocracy elsewhere, went on to establish Newark, New Jersey.

In 1685, one of my mother’s ancestors, James Pierpont, who had been born in Roxbury, Massachusetts and trained at Harvard University, moved from Massachusetts to New Haven where he became the pastor of the Congregational Church. In 1698 he married Mary Hooker, the grand-daughter of Thomas Hooker, thus further cementing the relationship between Hartford and New Haven. This contributed to two events a few years later in 1701. First, James was the leader of a group of men who secured a charter from the Connecticut Colony for the establishment of the Collegiate College of Connecticut, which later became Yale University. That same year, New Haven and Hartford became co-capitals of the Connecticut Colony.

The major population centers in southern New England remained those that had harbors that facilitated travel and trade – Boston, Providence, and New Haven – and to a lesser extent Hartford on the Connecticut River. But these colonies were not as well-defined as we know them today as they encompassed the entire area around the harbor. In particular, the following Connecticut towns were part of the New Haven Colony and were split off prior to the founding of Wolcott in 1796: Wallingford (1670), Branford (1685), Cheshire (1780), Woodbridge (1784), East Haven (1785), Hamden (1786), North Haven (1786). Later splits created Meriden (1806), Orange (1822), North Branford (1831), Bethany (1832), and West Haven (1921).

The original settlers of Farmingbury came from many of the above, especially New Haven, Wallingford, and Branford, although there were also some from Waterbury, Farmington and a few other places. Here are some of the early Farmingbury families and where they lived prior to moving to Farmingbury: Alcox/Alcott (New Haven), Upson (Waterbury), Rogers (Branford), Beecher (Cheshire), Norton (Guilford), Frisbie (Branford).

Thus, even though Wolcott is in a state whose initial government was based on the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut where the power of government is derived from the “free consent of the people,” the initial settlers of the town had their roots from the Puritanism of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, then from the theocracy of the New Haven Colony. So when the early settlers of Farmingbury got together, they formed not a town, but a parish of the “First Ecclesiastical Society.” The minutes of the first meeting (taken from Orcutt’s History of Wolcott) note that after choosing officers, the next vote was “that we will procure preaching the year ensuing.” Orcutt later notes,

“Farmingbury did not become a Town until 1796. Hence many interests were attended to by the Parish Society which belonged properly to township authority, and not to the Church. In those days it was a principle of Christian duty to take special care of political matters and not to leave them in the hands of the neglectors of piety.”

“This is not Church and State united, but church men in the state, acting.”

Once again, a full understanding of things requires a composite view that includes geography, genealogy, history, and, in this case, religion.




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