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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