Windsor, Connecticut

“ Connecticut begun.%—In the same year that Roger Williams began his settlement at Providence, several hundred people from the towns near Boston went off and settled in the Connecticut valley. For a long time past there had been growing up in Massachusetts a strong feeling that the law that none but church members should vote or hold office was oppressive. This feeling became so strong that in 1635 some hardy pioneers from Dorchester pushed through the wilderness and settled at Windsor. ”

“ In October of 1635 a colony of sixty persons from Boston settled at Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield. Earlier [Pg 107] in the same year the younger Winthrop, son of the governor of Massachusetts, arrived in New England. Under his direction a fort was built at the mouth of the Connecticut. Such was the founding of Saybrook, named in honor of Lord Say-and-Seal and Lord Brooke.
3. To the early annals of Connecticut belongs the sad story of the Pequod War. The country west of the Thames was more thickly peopled with savages than any other portion of New England. ”

“ On the 14th of January, 1639, the freemen of the three towns, Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield, assembled at Hartford, and drew up a constitution, consisting of eleven articles, which they called the “Fundamental Orders of Connecticut,” and under this law the people of Connecticut lived for nearly two centuries, as the Charter granted by King Charles II., in 1662, was simply a royal recognition of the government actually in operation. Another writer says:
“We honor the limitations of despotism which are written in the twelve tables ”

“ From Franconia we proceeded to Bath, on or near the Connecticut, and entered the lovely valley of that river, which is as beautiful in New Hampshire, as in any part of its course. Hanover, the seat of Dartmouth College, is a pleasant spot, but the traveller will find there the worst hotels on the river. Windsor, on the Vermont side, is a still finer village, with trim gardens and streets shaded by old trees; Bellows Falls is one of the most striking places for its scenery in all New England. The coach brought us to the railway station in the pleasant village of Greenfield. ”

“ The religious passion, kindled in 1735 by Edwards, and hardly less by his devoted and spiritually-minded wife, had in Connecticut swept over Windsor, East Windsor, Coventry, Lebanon, Durham, Stratford, Ripton, New Haven, Guilford, Mansfield, Tolland, Hebron, Bolton, Preston, Groton, and Woodbury. ”

“ Churches of this character were formed in New London, Stonington, Preston, Norwich, Lyme, Canterbury, Plainfield, Windsor, Suffield, and Middletown. Some of these churches and congregations were nearly as large as some of the standing churches. There were ten or twelve churches and congregations of this denomination, first and last, in the colony. Some of them carried their enthusiasm to a greater extent than others. ”

“ Within ten years, about twenty thousand Englishmen, mainly Puritans, crossed the Atlantic, and took up their abode in New England. In the ecclesiastical system each church was self-governing, except as the General Court was over all. There were no bishops, and the liturgy was dispensed with in worship.
SETTLEMENT OF CONNECTICUT.—After the Dutch had built a trading-post on the site of Hartford, people from Plymouth formed a settlement at Windsor, on the Connecticut, six miles above. From Boston and its neighborhood, there was a migration which settled Hartford. ”

“ The country in the neighbourhood of the town is exceedingly beautiful, being agreeably diversified with hill, dale, and lawn. The luxuriance of the meadows,—the chain of high hills on the south and west, clothed with wood of variegated foliage,—and the white sails of vessels gliding through the serpentine windings of the Avon and St. Croix,—are amongst the leading features of this interesting landscape. Windsor is an extremely neat and pretty town, with a Protestant church, and Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, and Roman Catholic chapels. ”

“ Windham, the second county in the ancient kingdom of Sassacus, or colony of Saybrook, is hilly; but the soil being rich, has excellent butter, cheese, hemp, Indian-corn, and horses. Its towns are twelve.
Windham resembles Rumford, and stands on Winnomantic River. Its meeting-house is elegant, and has a steeple, bell, and clock. Its court-house is scarcely to be looked upon as an ornament. The township forms four parishes, and is ten miles square.
Strangers are very much terrified at the hideous noise made on summer evenings by the vast number of frogs in the brooks and ponds. ”

“ Notwithstanding the splendid success of Winthrop's mission, this same charge of insubordination was repeated in a long and later list of grievances against the colony.
The consolidation scheme was revived by the appointment of Governor Bellomont over New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and as military head of Rhode Island and Connecticut; but the governor never tried to enforce his authority in Connecticut. In 1701 and 1706, bills aiming at this proposed consolidation were introduced into Parliament. ”

“ So, a great part of the enjoyment of life is in the knowledge that there are people living in a worse place than that you inhabit.
Windsor, a most respectable old town round which the railroad sweeps, with its iron bridge, conspicuous King's College, and handsome church spire, is a great place for plaster and limestone, and would be a good location for a person interested in these substances. Indeed, if a man can live on rocks, like a goat, he may settle anywhere between Windsor and Halifax. ”

“ Connecticut showed her respect and affection for Winthrop, by annually electing him for fourteen consecutive years as her governor.
The result of this ample charter, this liberty of self-government, was a social condition so nearly approaching to the Utopia of philosophers, and the golden age of the poets, that we must be allowed to dwell somewhat at length upon the beautiful and refreshing picture. It stands almost alone in the history of man. ”

“ The affection and kindliness of the former governor of Massachusetts for his banished friend descended to his son. “Your loving lines in this cold, [Pg 116] dead season”—thus began one of Roger Williams’ letters to him—“were as a cup of your Connecticut cider.” Once Mrs. Williams sent Mrs. Winthrop a couple of papers of pins, as this simple necessity appeared to be scarce in Connecticut. Her husband added the suggestion that if Mrs. Winthrop herself did not need them, they might “pleasure a neighbor.” Writing paper seemed to be as scarce in Providence as pins were in Connecticut. ”

“ Their bodies, nevertheless, are buried in peace, and their names, merged, it may be, in “the long pedigree of toil,” live for evermore.
But though Old Windsor is reduced to an insignificant suburb of New Windsor, it was the royal dwelling-place when all was forest around, and when the solitary chalk hill, standing up from a tree-covered clay tract on the riverside, was uncrowned by feudal masonry. That was before the Norman took hold upon England. At the Conquest, Old Windsor was a manor belonging to the Saxon kings, who are conjectured to have had a palace here from a very early period. ”

“ The suburb of Windsor enjoyed its share in this evidence of prosperity, and sanguine speculators, viewing through the glasses of a happy optimism a rush of new inhabitants to the fortunate city, erected in gleeful haste a multitude of dwellings for their purchase and occupancy. ”

“ Friends would often write of such a wonderful specimen at some town or village. I would write to the address given and be told of this Bay of Naples paper again. They were all brought over and put on at about the same time.
One of the oldest houses in Windsor, Vermont, still has a charming parlor paper, with landscape and water, boats, castles, ruins and picturesque figures, which was imported and hung about 1810. This house was built by the Honorable Edward R. Campbell, a prominent Vermonter in his day, and here were entertained President Monroe and other notable visitors. ”

“ Winthrop the
Younger, son of Governor Winthrop, of Massachusetts, commissioned by
these last, built a fort at Saybrook. Till the expiration of his
commission the towns immediately upon the Connecticut were under the
government of Massachusetts. Their population in 1643 was three
thousand. A convention of these towns met at Hartford, January 14, 1639,
and formed a constitution, like that of Massachusetts Bay, thoroughly
republican in nature. Connecticut breathed a freer spirit than either
Massachusetts or New Haven, being in this respect the peer of Plymouth. ”

“ In the following year Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke, Lord Rich, Richard Saltonstall, and eight other leading men of the puritan party, having obtained a large tract of land by a patent from Lord Warwick and the New England Company, dated 19 March 1631–2, established a settlement on the river Connecticut, and appointed Winthrop governor. But the projected settlement was little more than a factory protected by a fort, and when emigrants from Massachusetts founded the colony of Connecticut the earlier settlement was absorbed in it. ”

“ New Haven paid dearly for loyalty to its principles. In 1661 the younger John Winthrop, governor of Connecticut, went to England to obtain a charter for his colony. He had little of his father’s definiteness or force of character, but he was genial and attractive, a man of varied interests, able to commend himself to those who differed widely from him in religious and political views. He succeeded in obtaining for his colony a charter of singular liberality, which confirmed the existing system of government by governor, assistants and deputies. ”

“ Gov. Colden, of New York, on Dec. 28, 1763, issued a proclamation claiming the land thus held under the grants of Wentworth, basing his rights on the grants in 1664 and 1674 to the Duke of York of “all lands from the west side of the Connecticut River to the east side of the Delaware Bay.” On the 20th July, 1764, the king in council confirmed Colden’s view, and made the Connecticut River the boundary as far as 45° north latitude. When this decision reached Wentworth he had already granted 128 townships. ”

“ It is probable that he and some portion of his crew were the first men who set foot upon the virgin soil of New Windsor, but it was not until more than half a century later, in 1685, that a company of Scotch and Irish emigrants to the number of twenty-five families, with their servants, under the leadership of Colonel Patrick McGregorie, accompanied by his sons-in-law, David Foshack and Captain Evens, settled upon the extreme eastern extremity of the town, now known as Plum Point, an elevation of 118 feet above the river and consisting of eighty acres at the mouth of the Moodna Creek. ”

“ The Restoration in England left the New Haven colony under a cloud in the favor of the new government: it had been tardy and ungracious in its proclamation of Charles II.; it had been especially remiss in searching for the regicide colonels, Goffe and Whalley; and any application for a charter would have come from New Haven with a very ill grace. Connecticut was under no such disabilities; and it had in its Governor, John Winthrop [the younger, son of the first governor of Massachusetts] , a man well calculated to win favor with the new King. ... ”

“ From the summit the views are really magnificent; both up and down the river they are of surpassing beauty. Looking over Windsor, the eye ranges far away till it loses itself in the hazy distance, to which the royal pile gives an aërial grace, while it adds majesty to the whole view. Looking up the river towards Hedsor the charming seat of Lord Boston, we have a prospect little less splendid, though of a different character. A vast extent of country lies at one’s feet, covered with dense wooded tracts, from which ever and anon peeps up an old grey tower ”

“ The pleasantest way to Old Windsor is by the easily rideable towing-path for three-quarters of a mile, bringing one to a narrow lane, looking like a private road, leading to past the little church of that village. Old Windsor Church is a prettily situated building, itself of little interest, although there may be those who will find food for reflection in a sight of the last resting-place of “Perdita” Robinson, the discarded early favourite of the “First Gentleman in Europe.” Her career can at least serve to point a moral, if it cannot adorn a tale. ”

“ John Evelyn was at Windsor on June 8, 1654, and found the Castle rooms "melancholy and of ancient magnificence", but walking on the terrace, he thought that "Eton, with the park, meandering Thames, and sweet meadows yield one of the most delightful prospects". Ten years later, Pepys exclaimed: "Lord! the prospect that is in the balcony in the Queen's lodgings, and the terrace and walk, are strange things to consider, being the best in the world, sure". Swift told Stella that Windsor was "a delicious place". ”

“ Travelling northward from the township of Otis, the road leads for twenty or thirty miles towards Windsor, lengthwise upon that long broken spur of heights which the Green Mountains of Vermont send into Massachusetts. For nearly the whole of the distance, you have the continual sensation of being upon some terrace in the moon. The feeling of the plain or the valley is never yours ”

“ Apollo with his rosy footsteps lit up hill, meadow and lawn, and kissed away the sparkling dewdrops of bush and hedge, cheering us on our way through the towns of Thane, over the Chilton Hills, on to Great Marlow, Maidenhead and renowned Windsor, where forest and castle thrilled the beholder with admiration for the works of Nature and Art.
It was late in the afternoon when we entered the broad highway to Windsor, passing numerous yeomen and tradespeople on their way to and from the royal domain of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. ”