rcf] 
 
 In Guilfordj&JTinecticut.

 
 A HISTORY 
 
 OF 
 
 I N 
 
 GUILFORD, CONNECTICUT. 
 
 
 AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BY THE RECTOR, REV. WILLIAM ^ 
 G. ANDREWS, IN SEPTEMBER, 1894, ON THE OCCASION 
 OF THE ioTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PARISH. 
 
 FROM THE PRESS OF 
 
 THE ECHO, GUILFORD, CONN. 
 1895.
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 The following address has been revised and somewhat 
 enlarged, and portions omitted in the delivery are now inserted. 
 A few corrections have been made. It is based to a consider- 
 able extent on early records faithfully preserved by the Rev. 
 David Baldwin, and now courteously transferred to the parish. 
 They were consulted many years ago by the historian of Guil- 
 ford, Hon. Ralph D. Smith, but had long been lost sight of. 
 Other sources of information are mentioned in the notes. I 
 must, however, express more distinctly my obligations to one of 
 Mr. Smith's manuscripts, kindly placed in my hands by his 
 grandson, Bernard C. Steiner, Ph. D., of Baltimore, and to Dr. 
 Talcott's priceless collection of genealogies, made easily accessi- 
 ble to residents of Guilford by the unselfish diligence of the late 
 Mr. Alfred G. Hull and his associates in the task of copying the 
 volume. Guilford is uncommonly fortunate in having had among 
 her citizens two such untiring students of local records as Mr. 
 Smith and Dr. Talcott. It is impossible to name all who have 
 aided me in my work, grateful as I have had reason to be to 
 many friends in Guilford and elsewhere for assistance of various 
 kinds. But I must add to the names given in the notes those 
 of Mr. Charles H. Post of Guilford, the Rev. Wilfred H. Dean 
 and Mr. Jerome Coan of North Guilford, Mr. Eli F. Rogers of 
 Branford, the Rev. J. Frederick Sexton of Cheshire, Miss Eliza- 
 beth M. Beardsley of New Haven, and Mrs. Susan Johnson 
 Hudson and Miss Russell of Stratford. All who may be inter- 
 ested in the story of the parish owe much to the enterprise and 
 historical tastes of Mr. Frederick C. Norton of Guilford for the 
 appearance of the address in its present form. 
 
 Some account of our commemorative services ought to be 
 given, though there is space only for an outline. At ten o'clock 
 Bishop Williams (who warmly sympathized with the gladness 
 which his presence so much increased), confirmed two candi- 
 dates (having confirmed a larger class in May), and addressed 
 
 rv^ 
 
 201323?
 
 6 Introductory. 
 
 the congregation. He spoke of the significance of such anniver- 
 saries in their threefold bearing on the past, the present, and 
 the future. At the second service, held at a quarter before 
 eleven, the Bishop was assisted in the celebration of the Holy 
 Communion by the Rev. Dr. Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, the 
 Rev. Dr. Samuel Hart, and the rector. The sermon was preached 
 by the Rev. Dr. George D. Johnson from i Kings xix. 4 : 
 " Now, O Lord, take away my life ; for I am not better than 
 my fathers." The sentiment underlying Elijah's half-despair- 
 ing cry was developed with much force and beauty. As life 
 goes on and we look back over our past, we often seem to our- 
 selves to have failed. But God's work is advancing, and His 
 faithful servants cannot really fail. 
 
 Drs. Pynchon, Hart and Johnson are all of Guilford stock. 
 The first, formerly president of Trinity College, is descended from 
 the two Congregational pastors whose name he bears ; the second, 
 also of Trinity College, and secretary of the House of Bishops, is 
 descended from the Rev. John Hart of East Guilford (now Mad- 
 ison), who in 1722 had nearly resolved to apply for episcopal 
 ordination with Timothy Cutler and Samuel Johnson ; the third 
 is descended from the distinguished clergyman last named, a 
 native of Guilford, as also from the great Puritan divine, Jona- 
 than Edwards. 
 
 In the evening prayers were read from the old folio Prayer 
 Book, probably brought from England in 1764 by the Rev. Bela 
 Hubbard. The Rev. W. H. Dean, rector of St. John's Church, 
 North Guilford, which was until 1834 generally united in one 
 cure with Guilford, performed this service. His English birth, 
 combined with his American orders, gave his participation addi- 
 tional interest, since the predecessors of the existing congrega- 
 tion, while Americans by birth, not only belonged to the Church 
 of England, but thought of themselves as Englishmen and of 
 England as "home." 
 
 Among those who took part in the commemoration as wor- 
 shipers were descendants of Samuel Smithson, of Nathaniel 
 Johnson, of Bela Hubbard, of Andrew Ward, of Friend Collins, 
 of Thomas Powers, and doubtless of various others who are 
 named in the following pages. In the evening the Methodist 
 and the two Congregational churches were closed, and their
 
 Introductory. 7 
 
 pastors, the Rev. Otis J. Range, the Rev. Geo. W. Banks and 
 the Rev. Frederick E. Snow, were present by invitation, with 
 many members of their congregations, to rejoice with us as 
 being all members of one Body. The prayer, " For the Unity 
 of God's People," which Samuel Johnson can hardly have found 
 in Samuel Smithson's Prayer Book, though it had already been 
 set forth in England (1714), is in our venerable folio. Its use 
 on this occasion might have recalled Dr. Johnson's efforts in 
 behalf of comprehension, as well as the belief of Thomas Rug- 
 gles, that the early days, when perhaps not a single Christian in 
 Guilford had consciously separated from the Church of England, 
 still continued. 
 
 A beautiful set of communion linen, the gift of Mrs. Aletha 
 C. Graves, was used for the first time in the morning. And the 
 anniversary was a far more joyful one for the knowledge that 
 the effort to signalize it by the extinction of a debt of between 
 eleven and twelve hundred dollars, begun just before Lent, had 
 been entirely successful. Summer parishioners, as well as 
 former members of the congregation or their representatives, 
 had given indispensable aid, but the greater part of the task was 
 performed by those whose homes are here, and at least half of 
 it bv the ladies.
 
 OF 
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 
 
 AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE CELEBRATION OF THE ONE HUNDRED 
 
 AND FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PARISH, SEPTEMBER 16, 
 
 1894, BY THE RECTOR, WILLIAM G. ANDREWS. 
 
 On the fourth of September, 1744 (old style), or one hun- 
 dred and fifty years ago yesterday, what was then called a 
 " vestry," and would now be called a parish meeting, "was 
 held at the house of William Ward in Gilford. Nathaniel John- 
 son and William Ward were appointed Church Wardens for the 
 year ensueing ; and Samuel Collins appointed Clerk. It was 
 likewise agreed upon that the Professors of the Church of Eng- 
 land meet in order to Carry on worship by reading a form of 
 Prayers & Sermons by themselves." The "Memorandum" 
 which I quote, and which is the oldest of our parish documents 
 (unexpectedly recovered, with others, during the past year), is 
 signed by "James Lyons, minister," and the two wardens. 
 The action which it records was the organization of the parish, 
 as is clearly proved by a statement of two who took part in it, 
 made many years later. 1 But although the proper date of our 
 anniversary is tr^us fixed, the gradual process of which the organ- 
 ization was one result, had begun nearly thirty years before. And 
 we must go even farther into the past than this. The minister 
 of the First (Congregational) Church, Thomas Ruggles the 
 younger, afterwards virtually accused the conformists of commit- 
 ting schism in setting up worship " by themselves." They had, 
 he declared, no sufficient ground for their proceedings, inasmuch 
 as his church was and always had been a congregation of the 
 
 / Church Documents, Connecticut, ii. 126-7.
 
 to Early History of 
 
 Church oi England. 1 We ought, then, to look back at least 
 two hundred and fifty years in order to ascertain what the 
 national church really was to the Puritan emigrants, and 
 whether they had preserved enough of what most Englishmen 
 valued it for to satisfy reasonable Christians. This will help us 
 to decide whether Nathaniel Johnson and his friends had, in 
 fact, committed schism. 
 
 To the larger part of the early Puritans, in New England as 
 in England, the national church was unquestionably their spir- 
 itual mother, communicating to them as they gladly confessed 
 their part "in the common salvation. " : It embodied the Chris- 
 tianity of their nation, and in the belief of Puritans, not less 
 than of Anglicans, it was its office as a national church to main- 
 tain the religious unity of English Christians, and, still more, 
 to provide every Englishman, who did not plainly show himself 
 unworthy, with access to all the means of grace, that he might 
 live and die as becomes a Christian. To have such access was 
 a dearly cherished right, though in a national, and especially in 
 an established church, it might be grievously abused. By slow 
 degrees Episcopal government and liturgical worship had be- 
 come, in Puritan eyes, first offensive and then unlawful. But 
 these were regarded as only blemishes on the system, and might 
 be removed without destroying it. And the founders of Guil- 
 ford had hardly finished their first dwelling-houses, and probably 
 had not begun their first meeting-house, when the Long Parlia- 
 ment met (Nov. 3, 1640), with the purpose of reforming the 
 church. And about three months after they had reared their spir- 
 itual house of Christian souls on its seven "pillars" 3 (June 19, 
 1643) , the commons of England had sworn to abolish Episcopacy, 
 and, by implication, to abandon the Prayer-Book. (Sept. 25, 
 1 643 . ) As these and similar changes were accomplished it did not 
 seem to the exiles that the Church of England was disappear- 
 ing, but rather, that she was becoming "all glorious within." 
 And although the English establishment was never fully con- 
 
 1 History of Guilford," in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Societv, First 
 Senes, iv. 186. 
 
 2 "Humble Request," etc., 1630. Quoted from Hutchinson's History of Massachu- 
 setts, i. 431, by Coit, Dexterand others. 
 
 3 The word "pillars" does not appear in the Guilford Records, but is likely to have 
 been used here as in New Haven.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. n 
 
 formed to the New England model, it grew so attractive to the 
 emigrants that many of them went back to enjoy the fruits of 
 the new reformation. One of these returning pilgrims was 
 Henry Whitheld, the first minister of Guilford, and first of the 
 seven pillars. He is understood to have accepted a living in the 
 city of Winchester, and, if so, he was, during the last years of 
 his life, in his own belief, as truly a minister of the Church 
 of England as when, long before, he had been the conforming 
 rector of Ockley. And in one important particular he must 
 have departed from the New England model. Besides dispens- 
 ing with bishops and a liturgy, the Puritans here, unlike those 
 of England and Scotland, had attempted, not unnaturall} 7 , 
 though with some misgivings, to guard the sacraments against 
 the approach of unholy men, by requiring a ''relation of experi- 
 ences" from all who desired to be communicants, while only 
 communicants could obtain baptism for their children. This 
 rule excluded a large number of sincere Christians of calm tem- 
 perament from the use of the sacraments, and was at least as 
 serious an invasion of those equal rights which it belongs to the 
 church to maintain as was, for example, the requirement, so 
 offensive to man}' Puritans, of kneeling at the Lord's table. In 
 Winchester, if he had a parish there, and if the ordinances of 
 Parliament were obe)*ed, Henry Whitfield could deprive no 
 member of his congregation of full Christian privileges unless 
 he were grossly ignorant or openly wicked, of which matters 
 Parliament was to be the final judge. 1 
 
 The second of the seven original members of the Guilford 
 church John Higginson. Whitfield 's son-in-law, associate and 
 successor would have returned to England in 1659, but for a 
 shipwreck which finally fixed his home in Massachusetts. And 
 he doubtless would also have served in the national church 
 while it remained under Puritan control, and would have con- 
 formed to the churchly rule about the administration of the sac- 
 raments which he and Whitfield had helped to set aside here. 
 And we have, I think, sufficient reason for believing that he 
 treasured in his memory to the end of his long life, words which 
 he heard from the lips of his own father, as the}' looked back 
 
 i NeaPs History of I'uritans. London, 1837 ; ii. 276, 370-1, 379, 51:, 6ro-n.
 
 12 Early History of 
 
 together, from the deck of the ship which was bearing them 
 westward, on the granite cliffs of Cornwall. Then, as we are 
 told, Francis Higginson utterly repudiated the names which the 
 Separatists gave to the English church, of "Babylon" and 
 "Rome," and cried: "Farewel, dear England! Farewel, 
 the Church of God in England ! . . . We do not go 
 as Separatists ... but ... to practice the positive 
 Part of Church Reformation." 1 
 
 It is also highly probable that two more of the seven, 
 Whitfield's other son-in-law, Samuel Desborough, and John 
 Hoadly, who acted for a while as a Puritan minister in Scot- 
 land, both died in the communion of the Church of England, 
 after bishops and Prayer Book had been restored. Whether 
 this was true of Hoadly or not, we know that two of his sons, 
 born near the northwest corner of the Green, took episcopal or- 
 ders. It is practically certain that the first natives of Guil- 
 ford who assumed the ministerial office the first "ministers 
 raised up," as the phrase is, in the ancient Puritan congregation 
 established here were Episcopalians. If that congregation was 
 not, in those days, as Mr. Ruggles declared, a congregation of 
 the Church of England, the separation was scarcely felt, and 
 even a return, in England, to the historic order and worship, 
 was not difficult. 
 
 And while John Higginson was still pastor of Guilford, that 
 right of access to the sacraments on the part of reputable profes- 
 sors of Christianity which it was characteristic of Congregational 
 Puritanism to limit unwarrantably, and which Whitfield must, 
 and Higginson probably would, have conceded at home, began 
 to be demanded in the colonies (1656, or earlier). The de- 
 mand was soon urged in the name of the Church of England by 
 men, undoubtedly Puritans and nonconformists, who neverthe- 
 less declared themselves members of that church. Some of 
 them, as recent emigrants, must have been members of it under 
 the commonwealth, and all believed that they had not forfeited 
 the right of Christian Englishmen by removing to the English 
 colony of Connecticut. And there was a strong disposition to 
 redress what was evidently felt to be a wrong, though the meas- 
 
 i Magnolia, Hi. 74, as quoted in Dexter's Congregationalism as seen in its Literature* 
 414-5, and note.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 13 
 
 ures adopted were inadequate, and their inadequacy has much 
 to do with the welcome afterwards given to the Anglican mis- 
 sionaries. * 
 
 One fact more, belonging to the seventeenth century, brings 
 into view an attractive aspect of the relations then existing be- 
 tween Congregationalists and the mother church, while it 
 throws a pleasant light on the origin and primary aims of those 
 missionary labors in the eighteenth century, of which even such 
 tolerant Congregationalists as Thomas Ruggles finally com- 
 plained as proselytism. 
 
 More than once we find the name of William Leete, still 
 another of the seven pillars of the First Church, attached to an 
 account of certain funds received from England for the support 
 of Indian missions. The illustrious John Eliot derived part of 
 his income from this source, and his son Joseph, the third pas- 
 tor of Guilford and ancestor of many members of this congrega- 
 tion, was once, at least, thus paid for work among the Indians 
 of Massachusetts. 2 Now the contributions which Governor 
 Leete, as from time to time one of the Commissioners of the 
 United Colonies, had a share in administering, came from a 
 society established "for the Propagation of the Gospel in New 
 England and the Parts Adjacent." At the head of it, for about 
 thirty years, stood a famous Anglican layman, Robert Boyle, 
 who, with the support of the Earl of Clarendon and others, had 
 been its preserver and second founder. Yet it was, in fact, a 
 Puritan society, incorporated by the Long Parliament six 
 months after it had beheaded the king (July 2j, 1649). It 
 owed its origin largely to the interest aroused by Eliot's earlier 
 labors, an interest which Henry Whitfield, going home in 1651 
 to share the Puritan triumph, helped, by his writings, to inten- 
 sify. But the Christ-like longing to save the souls of the 
 heathen of North America, which the society embodied, had al- 
 ready moved devout Puritans and Anglicans to work together in 
 imparting what was to both, and must be to all Christians, "the 
 common salvation." 
 
 After Boyle's death, his society (or "company" as it was 
 
 1 Petition, etc., Oct. 17, 1664; first printed in American Church Review, April, 1857, 
 pp. 106-7. Trumbull's History of Connecticut, i. 297-9, e t c - 
 
 2 Hasard's State Papers, ii. 442-3, 496.
 
 ! 4 Early History of 
 
 then called) doubtless passed under the control of nonconform- 
 ists, who had now secured toleration, and could administer 
 openh- their own institutions. But the missionary impulse, 
 neither Puritan nor Anglican, but Christian, was still strong in 
 the national church. Within ten years (1701) it took form in a 
 new society, with one of Boyle's dearest friends, Archbishop 
 Tenison, at its head. It adopted a name so like the old that 
 the two have often been confounded, and borrowed, with no 
 great change, the device on the original seal of Congregational 
 Massachusetts. And it so manifestly perpetuated the life of the 
 Puritan company that the continued existence of the latter 
 seems sometimes to have been overlooked by modern noncon- 
 formists. It was, in short, the great institution which American 
 Episcopalians know and thankfully honor as the Society for the 
 Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. 1 It would be im- 
 proper to describe the Anglican society as the successor of the 
 Puritan company, but the latter was, in a real sense, the parent 
 of the former. And the society became the main channel of 
 that stream of Christian feeling and purpose which we can trace 
 back through the joint labors of Anglicans like Robert Boyle, 
 and Puritans like Richard Baxter, and the missionary zeal of 
 fierce revolutionists at the beginning of the commonwealth, to 
 the associated efforts of high church bishops and reforming 
 presb} r ters to send the Gospel to America in the reign of Charles 
 the First. 2 The vast growth of the English settlements here 
 had made the religious wants of the settlers a more pressing 
 burden on the consciences of Christian Englishmen than those 
 of the Indians or the negroes, though the new society did care 
 for all, as ultimately fqr non-Christian races in the East, but its 
 primary object, as defined by its charter, was to provide "an 
 Orthodox Clergy to live amongst" such of the king's "Loveing 
 
 1 Collection of Massachusetts Historical Society, \. 211-19; Ed. of 1806; Anderson's His- 
 tory of the Colonial Church , 2d Ed., London, 1856, ii. 10-15, 188-90, 193-4. 208-9,495-9; Mission- 
 ary H 'i/d. an Encyclopedia, etc., 84; Brown's History of Missions, Philadelphia, 1820, i. 
 65-8, and note, ii. 482. 485, 488 ; "Guilford and Madison in Literature, by H. P. Robinson (a 
 descendant of Whitfield) in Proceedings at the Celebration of the zsolh Anniversary, etc., 
 118. 
 
 2 Bishop Lake, of Bath and Wells, acted with John White, a conforming Puritan, in 
 promoting the settlement made at Salem in 1629; Robert Sanderson, afterwards Bishop 
 of Lincoln, approved a petition in behalf of Indian missions along with Edmund Calamy 
 of the Presbyterian party (Hist, of Col. Ch. ii. 10-16, i88etseq).
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 15 
 
 Subjects" as might "want the Administration of God's Word 
 and Sacraments." This was a legitimate and, indeed, indispen- 
 sable enlargement of the task of the original company, and 
 New England Congregationalists felt that missionaries were 
 needed in almost every colony except Massachusetts and Con- 
 necticut. And in those two colonies the earliest missionaries, 
 in spite of a zeal for Episcopacy not shared by all their succes- 
 sors, were warmly welcomed by some of the Congregational 
 ministers, enjoyed their hospitality, and preached in their pul- 
 pits. 1 
 
 We find, then, that from the time when Guilford was settled 
 to the period in which our own parochial history begins, influ- 
 ences had been at work favorable to kind feeling on the part of 
 the settlers and their children towards the Church of England 
 in England. And of this, Mr. Ruggles's willingness to believe 
 that he and his people were members of the national church is 
 a striking illustration. We also find that the settlers soon 
 wished for and asked for Christian rights, which the Church of 
 England conceded, sometimes quite too easily, and which Con- 
 gregationalism then denied. We even find that not only had 
 the famous society which helped to reproduce in America 
 features of Anglican Christianity least agreeable to our Puritan 
 lathers, received into its life a strong current colored by Puri- 
 tanism, but that as we ascend the stream towards its remoter 
 sources we seem to discover a faint reflection of the thatched 
 meeting-house on Guilford green. What we do not find is 
 proof that the First Church was a congregation of the Church of 
 England in the year 1744. Had it been in England its assem- 
 blies would have become unlawful in 1662 ; after 1689 it would 
 have been a legalized society of dissenters, wholly separated 
 from the establishment. The church was in New England, and 
 whether the Act of Uniformity and the Toleration Bill were law in 
 America or not, it is not quite reasonable to regard the Atlantic 
 Ocean as creating an ecclesiastical union which would not have 
 existed without it. The separation, however accomplished, was 
 a fact, and was accepted as such by both parties. And it follows 
 that those who saw the fact which Mr. Ruggles was disposed 
 
 i Keith's "Journal," in Publications of the Protestant Episcopal Historical Society, 1851, 
 pp. 7, 8, 10, 26-7.
 
 1 6 Early History of 
 
 not to see, and who might have held his half-filial attitude 
 towards the mother church, when they finally desired that as fai 
 as they were concerned the separation might be done away, 
 were not cherishing a spirit which he should have thought 
 schismatical. As little was this the case when they also desired 
 to enjoy all the good things which were offered by the Church 
 of England, and could not be obtained at his hands, even if he 
 had been right in thinking himself one of her ministers. When 
 they began to long for the majesty and sacred beauty of her 
 worship, for the pastoral oversight of her historic ministry, as 
 old as Christianity, above all, for the freedom of approach to 
 the ordinances of Christ, which, however sadly abused in Eng- 
 land, was, nevertheless, their right as far as they tried to keep 
 their baptismal covenant when they longed for these things, 
 and he could promise none of them, he could not wonder if they 
 sought them elsewhere. Why they desired them and how they 
 found them, remains to be told. 
 
 Not far from the year 1707, and during the pastorate of the 
 elder Thomas Ruggles, an Englishman named Samuel Smith- 
 son came to Guilford. By the will of his kinsman, Thomas 
 Macock, he became, in that year the possessor of a farm lying 
 just bej'ond West river, and extending towards the sea at Mul- 
 berry Point. Though a member of the Church of England, he 
 doubtless fell in with the religious usages of his neighbors, and 
 when he died, in 1718, he was, I suppose, the collector of the 
 minister's rate for the First Society. 1 His two daughters, Han- 
 nah and Doroth}% married the Congregational pastors of Kil- 
 lingworth (Clinton) and North Guilford, Jared Eliot and Sam- 
 uel Russell, though descendants of the former, are now 
 communicants in this parish. But Samuel Smithson brought to 
 Guilford a love for those good things with which the Church of 
 England enriches her children, and he was able so to transmit it 
 that it has borne fruit, here and elsewhere, a thousand-fold. 
 One of the sixteen volumes (besides his Bible) which formed 
 his library was a Prayer Book. That he lent about two years 
 before he died (1716) to a young man of nineteen or twenty, 
 
 i New Haven Probate Records, Hi. 108-12; Guilford Book of Teriyers. etc.. from 1648, 
 PP- 3- 57 : Guilford Land Records, i. 105-6 ; Records of Votes and Acts of the West Society Lib 
 I., A.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Gnilford, Conn. 17 
 
 named Samuel Johnson. He \vas the son of a deacon of the 
 First Church, and grandson of another, and a recent graduate 
 of the Collegiate School at Saybrook. 1 Previous reading had 
 prepared young Johnson to enjoy the Prayer Book, and later 
 studies, prolonged for years, were needed to convince him, 
 after entering the Congregational ministry, that he must seek 
 for valid orders in the Church of England. And, partly in vir- 
 tue of personal temperament, partly through reading which he 
 pursued after his earliest study of the Prayer Book, he attained 
 a type of piety distinctly unlike that of the good men around 
 him, or even of most of his contemporaries in England. It was 
 more filial and joyous than theirs ; it was more sympathetic and 
 charged with a larger hope, because resting on a truer, clearer 
 vision of God than that of the older Puritans. In many re- 
 spects it nearly reproduced the inner life of the Anglican saints 
 of the seventeenth century. Samuel Johnson's personal character, 
 I believe, did more than the labors of other men to promote the 
 growth of the Church of England in this commonwealth, and 
 did more than his talents and learning to make him what the 
 first President Dwight called him, "the father of Episcopacy in 
 Connecticut." And it was such a character as the Book of 
 Common Prayer, intelligently and devoutly used, is better fitted 
 than most human compositions to produce. When that book 
 was placed in his hands, probably the strongest force in his 
 spiritual history was put in action. And we may look back to 
 the good deed of Samuel Smithson, performed more than a 
 quarter of a century before, our parish was founded, as its true 
 beginning, and to Mr. Smithson himself, though he had then 
 long been in his grave, as in a real sense its founder. 
 
 It was at least seven years, or in the autumn of 1723, be- 
 fore Mr. Johnson came to his father's house in Guilford as a 
 presbyter of the Church of England. He was on his way to the 
 one mission which the Society for the Propagation of the Gos- 
 pel had thus far established in Connecticut. It had been under- 
 taken chiefly for the benefit of recent emigrants at Stiatford, 
 who were already Episcopalians. The Society, therefore, 
 
 i New Haven Probate Records, iv. 540-1 ; v. 14-15 ; Talcott's Guilford Genealogy 
 (MS.) ; Samuel Johnson's Autobiography (MS.) : Beardsley's Life and Correspondence of 
 Samuel Johnson, 12.
 
 1 8 Early History of 
 
 which had now been in operation more than twenty years, was 
 not making very strenuous efforts to convert Congregationalists, 
 neither, so far as it appears, was Samuel Johnson. He said 
 long afterwards, "I never once tried to proselyte dissenters, nor 
 do I believe any of the other ministers did." 
 
 The Society was not indifferent to the performance of the 
 task which its missionary seemed to disclaim, for that was the 
 reconciliation of separated brethren, the healing of a schism 
 which in England had but lately become complete (1689). It 
 instructed its representatives in America that their duty towards 
 "Parishioners" opposed to or dissenting from the Church of 
 England was to seek "to convince and reclaim them with a 
 spirit of meekness and gentleness." Its first missionary (1702- 
 4), George Keith, a converted Quaker, not eminent for "meek- 
 ness and gentleness," though a good man, was prompt in sug- 
 gesting measures which he believed "would effectually 
 contribute to the proselyting the main body of the Dissenting 
 People, to their Ancient Mother, the Church," towards which he 
 found many of them, even in New England, cherishing a filial 
 spirit. 2 Keith's mission was primarily one of investigation, 
 and his reports determined the choice of positions to be occu- 
 pied. That the Society, nevertheless, as informed by him, 
 regarded other parts of America as more in need of its help than 
 the two Congregational colonies, everywhere furnished with 
 ministers and meeting-houses, appears from the fact that in 
 1728 it had but two missionaries in Connecticut, and, apparent- 
 ly, but three in Massachusetts. 3 It was the strong and persist- 
 ent pressure on the part of the colonists themselves which led 
 the Society to establish its New England missions, and it was 
 never able fully to meet the demand. The eagerness of young 
 men to "go home for orders" from Connecticut, had to be 
 checked, and the sincerity and extent of the popular desire was 
 thoroughly tested by throwing on the people not only the ex- 
 pense, no trifling matter, of sending the young men "home," 
 and of building churches, but also of paying part of the stipend, 
 
 1 Beardsley's History of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut, i. 196. 
 
 2 Anderson's Hist, of Col. Ch., iii. 66-7, 229; Collect. P. E. Hist. Soc., 1851. pp. ix., xviii., 
 26-7 etc. 
 
 3 Humphreys, "History of the Propagation Society," in Ch. Rev. (vols. iv., v.), Jan., 
 1852, p. 614 ; Jan. 1853, pp. 621-32.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 19 
 
 with the serious additional cost of providing a house and a glebe. 1 
 Samuel Johnson, then, was acting in the spirit of his instruc- 
 tions, as interpreted by the attitude of the Society (more dis- 
 tinctly cautious as the century advanced) , when he contented 
 himself with aiding those who sought information or advice, 
 and vigorously defending his church against attacks, made with 
 growing bitterness. That the Church of England steadily in- 
 creased in this commonwealth was due far less to "aggressive 
 work" on the part of the Anglican clergy than to the fact that 
 the Anglican church supplied what Puritanism had taught men 
 to value as their lives, and New England Congregationalism, 
 with an honorable, though misguided zeal for the holiness of 
 God's House, had placed almost out of their reach. Their 
 "Ancient Mother" entered New England in response to the cry 
 of her wandering children, and the Venerable Society, upon the 
 whole, simply pursued the course denned by its title, in labor- 
 ing to propagate the Gospel by the method prescribed in its 
 charter, of providing for the wants of English subjects with 
 "The Administration of God's Word and Sacraments." The 
 history of the parish at Guilford, the home of Johnson's family, 
 whom he often visited, and likely, one would have thought, 
 soon to furnish material for a conforming congregation which 
 the Society would carefully watch over and sustain, is a striking 
 illustration of all this. 
 
 The earliest proof of any leaning towards conformity here 
 which I have found, appears nearly four years after Johnson's 
 return from England. His father, Deacon Samuel Johnson,' 
 died in 1727 (May 8), and the son w r rites that he "would have 
 communicated with us if he had lived." But the missionary 
 adds that his father did not "think it necessary to leave the 
 Dissenting communion," although he had already renounced its 
 theology. 2 The statement shows, it may be observed, that Mr. 
 Johnson followed the Catholic usage of the mother church, 
 never departed from, I suppose, in this parish, of recognizing 
 the right to the Holy Communion conferred in baptism, and pre- 
 
 1 Humphreys, in Ch. Rev., Oct., 1851, p. 457; Abstract of Proceedings of S. / J . 6".. 1763, 
 1773; Conn. Ch. Docs., i. 96, 216, 233-4, 237,269; ii. 103: Beardsley, Hist, of /'.K. Ch. in 
 
 Conn., i. 103. 
 
 2 Beardslev's Life mid ( 'nrrespondftice of Samuel Johnson, 59. 
 
 \
 
 2o Early History of 
 
 served by a godly life, and that he acknowledged as valid the 
 baptism of his Congregational brethren. This is the more note- 
 worthy because he himself, after communicating at King's 
 Chapel, Boston, in virtue of his own baptism at the hands, pre- 
 sumably, of Thomas Ruggles the elder, satisfied his personal 
 scruples by receiving hypothetical baptism in London. 1 Several 
 months after Deacon Johnson's death, his younger son, Nathan- 
 iel, then twenty-two years old, was appointed a rate-collector in 
 the First Society, being, evidently, still a Congregationalism*' 
 It maybe that within three years, or in 1730, he and one or 
 two others declared their conformity, but I have found no con- 
 temporary evidence to that effect. 3 In the mean time the 
 Church of England was slowly growing in Fairfield county, 
 where Samuel Johnson's parish lay, and in New London 
 county, where there were English Episcopalians of note, and 
 by the year 1736 six clergymen, all born in New England, 
 though one resided just west of the border, were caring for 
 missions within those limits, as well as for scattered families 
 elsewhere. 4 In 1736 the first missionary was settled in New 
 Haven county, in the person of Jonathan Arnold, formerly pas- 
 tor at West Haven, as Johnson had been before him. He lived 
 in that village, but he practically took the county for his mis- 
 sionary district, while he often went beyond it. 3 And in May, 
 1738, the name of Nathaniel Johnson, with two others after- 
 wards found in our parish records, appears in a list of seventy- 
 three adult male members of the Church of England under Mr. 
 Arnold's care." It is at least highly probable that all the 
 three were at that date residents of Guilford, and that, in the 
 families of Nathaniel Johnson, Thomas Walstone and David 
 Naughty, we have the nucleus of this congregation. It is also 
 probable that the second of these families conformed in Branford 
 as early as 1728, and lived there fully two years longer. 7 Pos- 
 
 i Life and Correspondence, 23, 34. 
 
 i Record of Votes and Acts, etc. (Dec. 19, 1727). 
 
 3 Church Review, April, 1848, p. 15. 
 
 4 Beardsley, Hist, of P. E. Ch. in Conn., i. 92, 100-101. 
 
 5 Ibid., i. 111-2; letters in possession of S. P. G., Vol. A. 26 (189). Copies of letters re- 
 lating to this region were made in 1893 for the Rev. Dr. Harwood of New Haven. 
 
 6 Ch. Rev. April, 1857, p. 113. One of the names is Waughtv, almost certaiiilv a mis- 
 print. 
 
 7 Registry Book (Christ Ch.. Stratford), 6, 8. There was a Nathanael Johnson of 
 Branford, hut he can hardly have declared himself in 17^0. Bailev's Triiiitv Church, 
 Branford, 6. 8, n.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 21 
 
 sibly Samuel Johnson received in 1730 declarations of conform- 
 ity from his brother and Mr. Naughty, either at Guilford or at 
 Branford, where he baptized two members of the Walstone fam- 
 ily on the twentieth of October. This might account for the 
 statement to which I have alluded, that there were conformists 
 here in that year. Be this as it may, it is in 1738 that the first 
 indications known to me of the existence of anything like a 
 company of Episcopalians in Guilford appear in early records. 
 And it was six years longer before a parish was organized. 
 There may have been more than one cause for this slow 
 rate of progress, in virtue of which at least eighteen parishes in 
 Connecticut were organized earlier than ours. It seems to me 
 not impossible that Samuel Johnson's own influence with his 
 friends in Guilford was thrown against haste on their part. 
 For we know that during some portion of the period before 
 1740 he cherished strong hopes of a general adhesion to the 
 Church of England, if entire conformity were not demanded. 
 In 1732 he had submitted to the Bishop of London certain pro- 
 posals looking towards a "comprehension" of the colonists 
 under episcopal government, but without imposing "all the 
 ceremonies and constitutions of our Church." Such proposals 
 he had been asked by several of his Congregational friends to 
 draw up, and there can be little doubt that he would have been 
 ready to unite with them and other Christians on the broad 
 basis laid down by our Bishops a century and a half later, of the 
 Scriptures, the Creed, the two Sacraments and the Historic 
 Episcopate. It is, moreover, a very reasonable conjecture that 
 Thomas Ruggles of Guilford was one of the "several ingenious 
 men among the dissenters" who seemed to have thought a com- 
 prehension possible. In the following year (1733) when, after 
 a long and bitter struggle, the now extinct Fourth Church had 
 practically achieved its independence, the First Society protested 
 against a recent attempt of the legislature to impose the decis- 
 ion of a council convoked by itself upon the church, and 
 appealed to the opinion of a high authority in England that the 
 calling of synods by the colonial assemblies was "a breach of 
 the royal prerogative." Towards the end of the same year 
 (Dec. 10, 1733,) Mr. Johnson wrote to the Bishop of London on 
 the same subject at the request of some "dissenting minis-
 
 22 l-'.arly History of 
 
 ters." 1 It is almost impossible to doubt that Mr. Ruggles, who 
 must have known Johnson, about eight years his senior, 
 from childhood, was one of these ministers, and very easy to 
 believe that the two had previously discussed the question of 
 comprehension. And if Thomas Ruggles, who long afterwards 
 declared his people members of the Church of England by in- 
 heritance, was at this period thinking kindly of a possible rec- 
 ognition of him and them on the generous terms suggested by 
 Samuel Johnson, we can well believe that the latter would not 
 have been eager to promote a second separation from his Con- 
 gregational brother's flock. 
 
 But a deeper and more powerful influence than the senior 
 missionary's fair dream of comprehension kept in check the 
 impulse towards conformity in his native town. Long 
 before the close of the seventeenth century, under the 
 famous "Halfway Covenant," the sacraments had been made 
 more accessible. Those who "owned the covenant," that is, 
 formally acknowledged the obligations imposed in baptism, 
 might then bring their children to be baptized, or even obtain 
 baptism for themselves if necessary. In Massachusetts, though 
 never, I think, in Connecticut, it became common to allow such 
 persons, while supposed to be still unconverted, to receive the 
 communion. The mistake of using improper tests of conversion 
 was sought to be remedied by treating conversion itself as not 
 essential in the visible church." The Halfway Covenant was a 
 wrong method of righting a wrong. Nevertheless, it went far 
 towards silencing complaint, and keeping Congregationalists 
 within the Puritan fold. It did not wholly remove the griev- 
 ance, and in Connecticut it came into use rather slowly, so that 
 the early missionaries were met at once with requests for one or 
 both sacraments. 11 But the religious life of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury was everywhere comparatively feeble on the side of the 
 affections, and it is evident that the desire for the highest Chris- 
 
 1 Conn. C/i. /><>,. \. i. 151-4, 155-6; MS. of Hon. Ralph D. Smith, relating chiefly to the 
 Fourth Church. 
 
 2 Mather's .l/</jsr;;.. ii. 277-315; Stoddard's Appeal to tit,- Isarneii ; TrumbulTs Hist, of 
 ( 'min.. i. 297, 312, 471-2; ii. 19, 143; Conlrihut. to Kcrlrs. Hist, of Conn.. 411 ; Palfrey's Hist, 
 of .\fu KiiKlaint ii.4S7-94; Dutton's Hist, of .\orth Cli.. \ f u~ Haven, 10, 11-13, "2^-7 : etc., 
 etc. 
 
 3 Trutnbull. Hist. /Om., i. 477; <. CA. Docs., i. 10. ir, 17, 19, 21,, -,9. 2S~, : ii. 8. 29, 
 31. 55, 134. "69-
 
 Christ Church Parish, Gnilford, Conn. 23 
 
 tian privilege, that of admission to the Lord's Supper, was not 
 strong. It was indeed still regarded as much more than a priv- 
 ilege, and in 1732 forty-six persons in Guilford, who had 
 preaching but not the sacraments, complained that their souls 
 were suffering because "the spiritual food thereof was denied 
 them.'" But during sixteen years after that date the number 
 of communicants in the First Church slightly decreased. It 
 apparently continued to decrease for half a century longer," 
 although most of the adult members of that congregation had 
 probably "owned the covenant," therein pledging themselves to 
 "endeavor to observe all" the laws of God's kingdom (which 
 certainly included the use of the second sacrament), "so far," 
 in the words of the formula, "as he hitherto hath or hereafter 
 shall discover your duty to you." 3 
 
 In many communities the great revival of 1740, which, for 
 the time, intensified religious emotions, and which ultimately 
 brought new power into American Christianity, made the rela- 
 tion of experiences easy for multitudes, and these flocked into 
 the Congregational churches. It was, however, attended by 
 gross excesses, and by a narrowness and censoriousness which 
 some of its warm friends confessed and deplored. In this way 
 it promoted the growth of the Church of England, in which 
 large numbers of conservative Christians sought a less heated 
 atmosphere. But in Guilford the influence of Mr. Ruggles was 
 conscientiously thrown against the revivalists, as was that of Sam- 
 uel Smithson's son-in-law, Samuel Russell, in North Guilford. 4 
 With regard to opposition to a revival like that of 1740, on 
 the part of good men, it is worth while to quote the words of the 
 late Dr. Charles Hodge, a very eminent Presbyterian: "It is 
 well that there are such opposers, else the church would soon be 
 over-run with fanaticism." 5 Mr. Ruggles seems to have been 
 successful in his opposition, as far as his own church was con- 
 cerned, and he doubtless thereby kept the allegiance of mam- who 
 might have become conformists. In the Fourth Society, occu- 
 
 1 Sni it h MS. 
 
 2 fbitl.; Manual i>f I'irst Ciii;ivifa(iiial Church. 
 
 3 "Form of owning the Baptismal Covenant." in the handwriting of Rev. Aaron Out- 
 ton, but without date. Kindly copied for me by Mr. Wallace I). Norton. 
 
 4 Declaration of tin- Association of the County /\NV.v Harcn, etc. (1745). 
 
 5 Historv of tin- I'rfsbytcriaii Church. Pt. II.. 12. Phil.. 1851.
 
 24 Early History of 
 
 pyingthe same territory with the First, owning the covenant was 
 apparently not practiced until 1750, nor continued after 1771.' 
 In 1743, a year before our organization, James Sproat, an able 
 man, and a warm friend of the revival, became pastor, and 
 retained that position for twenty-five years.'' Some members of 
 his congregation were early supporters of this parish, and it is 
 not impossible that it was Mr. Sproat's zeal for the methods of 
 the revivalists which gave the final impulse to the cause of con- 
 formity. 
 
 On the whole, the spirit of eighteenth century piety, real, 
 but not very emotional, was strong in Guilford. Towards the 
 close of the century, when the Fourth Church had just dismissed 
 its last pastor and begun to decay (1789), the excellent pioneer 
 of New England Methodism, Jesse L,ee, reported "some lively 
 Christians" here "of the Baptist persuasion," as if the Guilford 
 Congregationalists did not conform to his standard of liveliness, 
 which is more than probable. 3 The Church of England was. 
 therefore, less in request than it often was elsewhere as a "haven 
 of refuge ; " it attracted the most earnest of the class excluded by 
 contemporary Congregationalism from the Holy Table, with 
 such as might become convinced that not Congregationalism 
 but Episcopacy is the kind of church government "exactly de- 
 scribed in the Word of God." 4 Accessions on both grounds 
 were to be looked for from among the friends and kindred of 
 Samuel Johnson. And it is a pleasant thought that the wish to 
 receive the communion, as a duty and a right, was one of the 
 chief forces which produced this parish. It is to be observed, 
 moreover, that the denial, in some places, of the first sacrament, 
 and of the second everywhere, to those from whom the Church 
 of England, even when controlled by Puritans, had never with- 
 held them, abundantly justified the Society for the Propagation 
 of the Gospel in planting missions in this Christian common- 
 wealth. For within its borders were great numbers of the King's 
 "loveing subjects," suffering that want of "the Administration 
 of God's Sacraments" which the society's charter required it to 
 supply. 
 
 1 Smith MS. 
 
 2 Smith, f/islnry i>f Guilford, 100-102 : Sprague, Annals of the Ai,->-ica>/ I'ulpit. iii. 125-9. 
 ;, Stevens. History of the .^ffffiodist Episcopal Church, ii. 428. 
 
 4 See "Cambridge Platform,'' Chap. I., 3.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 25 
 
 Jonathan Arnold, as in a loose sense, the first missionary 
 for Xe\v Haven county, may be regarded as the first appointed 
 for Guilford, which it is nearly certain that he visited as early 
 as the spring of 1738. In 1740 he was succeeded in his mission 
 by Theophilus Morris, an Englishman who also lived at West 
 Haven. 1 It was not as easy then as now, when far more fre- 
 quent intercourse with the \vorld tends to make everybody less 
 provincial, for men of foreign birth and training to adapt them- 
 selves to the ways of Connecticut people. Mr. Morris had diffi- 
 culties for which his personal qualities, rather than his English 
 nativity, were responsible, y but he did some good work in his 
 mission. I find no record of visits made by him at Guilford, 
 but as he had the oversight of the Wallingford conformists he 
 probably came here. 3 In 1743 what we may call the New Ha- 
 ven county mission passed into the care of the clergyman under 
 whose guidance the parish was organized, the Rev. James. 
 Lyons, a native of Ireland, who resided at Derby. Once more 
 the missionary's foreign birth was a disadvantage to him, and 
 he suffered from it in ways far more discreditable to others than 
 to himself. But, although he was diligent and useful, he had 
 an infirmity of temper which long afterwards exposed him to 
 severe and just censure. 4 
 
 Mr. Lyons visited Guilford presumably in 1743, and cer- 
 tainly made several visits before the parish was organized, 
 preaching and administering baptism. About four months 
 before the organization (May 8, 1744,), Dr. Johnson (as he had 
 now become) preached a week-day sermon here, the manuscript 
 of which is, by the kindness of his descendants, in my posses- 
 sion. It is extremely interesting to students of the history of 
 theology, as showing that Johnson had departed from the ordi- 
 nary Protestant view of the great doctrine of justification, and 
 had accepted the teaching of a famous Anglican divine, Bishop 
 Bull. That teaching might tempt men to overrate the value of 
 their own obedience, but it required nobody to be self-righteous, 
 and might, on the other hand, guard some against the tempta- 
 
 1 Digest of Records of S. P. G., 1701-1892; Beardsley, Hist, of Ch. in Conn., i. 115-7. 
 
 2 Conn. Ch. Docs., i. 198-202 ; Beardsley, Hist, etc., i. 135-6. 
 
 3 Conn. Ch. Docs., i. 138-9 (misplaced), 176, 202. 
 
 4 Digest of Kec. of S. P. G., 853; Conn. C/i. Docs., i. 102, 208-10; ii. 51, 67, 126-7; Cluist 
 Church Records.
 
 26 Early History of 
 
 tion to which the revivalists were greatly exposed, of attaching 
 too little importance to personal holiness. But the sermon, as 
 far as it influenced their religious thinking, would have helped 
 to remove the early Episcopalians of Guilford farther from the 
 sympathy of many of their fellow Christians. 
 
 On the day on which this sermon was preached, Mr. Lyons 
 wrote from Derby to the secretary of the Venerable Society to 
 the effect that eight families in Guilford, embracing thirty-six 
 children, had subscribed a paper declaring their conformity. 1 
 If we knew when this paper was signed we should have the date 
 of what was perhaps the first step towards organization. And if 
 we knew who signed it we should have the names of those who 
 effected the organization. Now a letter to the Society in Eng- 
 land from the churchwardens at Wallingford, dated December 
 i, 1743, being written "on behalf" also of "brethren inhabit- 
 ing in the neighboring towns of Guilford and Branford," : 
 makes it probable that there had already been some sort of joint 
 action here, and possibly the declaration of conformity was 
 made towards the close of 1743. And it so happens that we get 
 from our own records and otherwise, the names of exactly eight 
 men, heads of families, who had in various ways indicated their 
 disposition to accept the ministrations of the Church of England 
 before May, 1744. It is not certain that all these men lived in 
 Guilford, still less that all lived in this part of the township, 
 but it is a fair inference from what we do know that the major- 
 ity were present at the so-called "vestry" at which the first 
 churchwardens and clerk were appointed. Five of these names 
 have been mentioned already, those of the three officials, Na- 
 thaniel Johnson, William Ward, and Samuel Collins, and those 
 of Thomas Walstone and David Naughty, in whose households 
 at Branford and Guilford baptism had been administered. The 
 three remaining names are those of Caleb Wetmore, Abijah 
 Watrous (or Waterhouse) and Hezekiah Bishop, all parents of 
 children baptized in Guilford. 3 
 
 You would, of course, like to know something of those who 
 bore a part in founding the parish, or in carrying it through 
 
 1 Conn. Ch. Docs., i. 2oS. 
 
 2 ('mill. (.'/I. /W.v., i. 202. 
 
 T, I'hrift Ch. KIT.; AVy/.v/rr /iw>k, Stratford.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 27 
 
 the hard struggles of its first half century. It is impossible, in 
 some cases for want of material, in others for want of time, to 
 give information full enough to be interesting or valuable. I 
 feel bound, however, to tell as much of what I have been able 
 to learn about the founders as my limits will permit. 
 
 Nathaniel Johnson, brother of the distinguished clergyman 
 of whom I have spoken so often, was an important member, not 
 only of the parish, but of the community. In becoming an 
 Episcopalian he probably gave offence to many of his townsmen, 
 but it is creditable to him and to them that he evidently retain- 
 ed their confidence and respect. Within about eight years he 
 was commissioned first lieutenant, and then captain, of the 
 local military company. And he seems to have marched at the 
 head of it when Connecticut, having already furnished fourteen 
 hundred men, sent out five thousand more after the disaster at 
 Fort William Henry in 1757.* He was connected somewhat 
 closely by blood or marriage with at least eight families appar- 
 ently belonging to this congregation in the last centun r . His 
 first wife, Margery Morgan, the mother of his children, was a 
 descendant of Governor Eaton, and had near relatives who must 
 have been the principal supporters of the congregation after- 
 wards formed in Killingworth. His second wife, Diana, the 
 daughter of Captain Andrew Ward, and widow of Daniel Hub- 
 bard, was the mother of Rev. Dr. Bela Hubbard, of whom I 
 must speak later. Captain Johnson's son, Samuel, married the 
 daughter of Samuel Collins, and their descendant, Samuel Col- 
 lins Johnson, is still remembered with honor in the parish and 
 the town." Descendants of other names are with us, one being 
 our junior warden. 
 
 Of others I must speak more briefly. William Ward was 
 the son of William Ward of Wallingford, and nephew of An- 
 drew Ward of Guilford. His appointment as second warden, 
 and the fact that the parish was organized in his house, mark 
 him as a valuable member of the little company. He has, I 
 believe, descendants of the name living elsewhere. Samuel 
 Collins, a descendant, through his mother, of Governor L,eete, 
 
 1 Connecticut Colonial Ki'cords. ix. 420; x. 128; Trumbull, Hist, of Conn., ii. 3X2 ; Guil- 
 Jord Celebration. \^. (Paper of Bernard C. Steiner, Ph. D.) 
 
 2 Talcott's Guilford Genealogy (MS.), etc.
 
 28 Early History of 
 
 had been a collector of rates in the First Society, and in the 
 discharge of his official duty had been required to enforce pay- 
 ment thirteen years before on the separatists from that Society, 
 who established the Fourth. 1 I think that none of his posterity 
 now reside here. Among those found in other places is at 
 least one clergyman, also descended from Nathaniel Johnson." 
 Thomas Walstone must have removed from Branford to Guil- 
 ford before IJ47. 3 He interests us as the earliest of the Guil- 
 ford conformists, as far as yet appears from the records. He is 
 now represented among our communicants. David Naughty 's 
 name survives in various traditions, and his house seems to 
 have stood nearly where this church now stands. The first 
 baptisms known to have been performed here were those of two 
 of his servants (1739) . He had been one of the founders of the 
 Fourth Societ}-, and in his old age he apparently became an 
 attendant at the First Church/ Of Caleb Wetmore, as of Hez- 
 ekiah Bishop, I have not searched the town records far 
 enough to secure other information. Abijah Watrous (the 
 name appears in several forms, being long a prominent one) 
 was the son-in-law of William Ward. These frequent relation- 
 ships among members of the congregation show hew the parish 
 extended itself along family lines. 
 
 The fourth of September, old style, was a Tuesday, and 
 Mr. Lyons may have come hither from Wallingford, after hav- 
 ing officiated there on Sunday. If so, and observing that Wil- 
 liam Ward's father, of the same name, was then living in 
 Wallingford, we see why Mr. Lyons, in the memorandum pre- 
 sumably made by him, (accessible to you all in a facsimile,) 
 first wrote, "at the house of William Ward in Wallingford," 
 afterwards erasing the last word and substituting "Gilford." 
 This house, the birthplace of the parish, stood very near the 
 present residence of Miss Annette Fowler, in Whitfield street, 
 facing the Green, near the northwest corner. It was on the 
 home lot of Edward Benton, an early settler who has many de- 
 scendants in our parish. Immediately west was the home lot of 
 
 1 Smith MS. 
 
 2 The Rev. Samuel Johnson French, late rector at Sayre, Penn. 
 .; Christ Ch. Records. 
 
 4 Smith .1/.V..- Record of the Votes, etc.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 29 
 
 John Hoadly, on which, doubtless, were born, a century before, 
 (1643 and 1650) the brothers, Samuel and John Hoadly, who- 
 both died clergymen of the Church of England, and the elder of 
 whom became the father of Benjamin Hoadly, who died Bishop of 
 Winchester, and John Hoadly, who died Archbishop of Armagh. 1 
 Next west was the home lot which passed, in 1648, into the 
 hands of George Hubbard, whose descendants, members of this 
 congregation, still live on it, and on which Bela Hubbard, so 
 long reverenced by Episcopalians here and in New Haven, was 
 born a few years before the organization (1739). The first 
 owner of this home lot was Jacob Sheaffe, grandson of William 
 Wilson, canon of Windsor, who married the niece of Edmund 
 Grindal, Archbishop of Canterbury.' One of his sisters, the 
 wife of William Chittenden (another being the wife of Henry 
 Whitfield), lived in the next house to the west. A neighbor- 
 hood having so many associations with the Church of England 
 and episcopacy was a very proper one for the nativity of a con- 
 gregation which not only claimed to be a part of the Church of 
 England, but accepted episcopal government. 
 
 In the record of this first parish meeting, the wardens and 
 clerk are said to have been "appointed," as also in 1746, Mr. 
 Lyons being again present as "Minister." Later, the word 
 "chosen" is used. The English canons gave the minister the 
 appointment of one warden and of the clerk, (who then led, or 
 made, the responses, and led the singing). What powers Mr. 
 Lyons exercised in this case may, perhaps, be inferred from the 
 fact that within a year he personally appointed the wardens at 
 Middletown. 3 There were at first no vestrymen, and none are 
 mentioned until 1750. The resolution now adopted to hold ser- 
 vice "by themselves" implied lay reading, since they would not 
 often expect the presence of a clergyman. And by means of 
 lay reading chiefly, or largely, worship and religious instruction 
 were maintained in this parish for almost a century, or until 
 
 1 Letter of Charles J. Hoadley, L L. D.; sketch prefixed to Works of Bishop Benja- 
 min Hoadly. 
 
 2 Sprague, Annak, etc., i. 12-13; Capt. C. H. Towushend. in New Haven Journal and: 
 Courifr. June 26 and July 15. i s ^4. 
 
 3 Istt.ofS.P. G. (Harwood MS.), vol. B. 13. (136), quoted by Dr. Harwood in his. 
 "Historical Address," Sunday, Dec. 30, 1894; compare Conn. Ch. Socs. i. 41. 161, 296. 
 The wardens of 1768 describe the action of 1744 as "the choice of Churchwardens and. 
 appointment of a Clerk." Ibid.. ii. 127.
 
 30 Early History of 
 
 your late honored rector, Dr. Bennett, began his earlier minis- 
 try in 1834, and the parish, for the first time, had the exclusive 
 use of its clergyman's services. The traditions of the congre- 
 gation affirm that the church, when built, was never closed on 
 Sunday, and it is known that weekly worship and the observ- 
 ance of Holy Days were maintained from the time of organization 
 with scarcely an interruption, for man}- years, through the zeal 
 and fidelity of laymen. 1 
 
 It is convenient to divide the history of the parish, as or- 
 ganized, into five periods. The first period, of about six years, 
 extending from 1744 to 1750, was one in which the administra- 
 tion of the parish was, properly speaking, in the hands of lay- 
 men. Mr. Lyons rendered most important services, and was, 
 not unnaturally, regarded by the people as their "Minister." 
 But it appears that Guilford was not named in his commission 
 from the Venerable Society, and that he had not the rights of a 
 settled minister before the law. Technically the parish was 
 vacant until 1750, as it often was practically long afterwards. 
 Mr. Lyons came to Guilford three or four times before the close 
 of the year 1746, when he probably removed to Long Island, 
 and he made one visit later." Dr. Johnson visited the parish at 
 intervals of a few months, apparently, and he was not the only 
 clerical visitor. But apart from this, worship must have been 
 conducted by members of the congregation. Among the first 
 lay-readers, as he is one of the most interesting of the pioneers 
 of episcopacy in Guilford, was, presumably, Mr. Edmund 
 Ward. As he was "appointed" churchwarden along with Mr. 
 Samuel Collins in April, 1746, he may be supposed to have 
 joined the parish as early as 1745, and he was, not improbably, 
 one of its founders. He was the son of Captain Andrew Ward, 
 graduated at Yale College in 1727 (his name standing third in 
 a class of ten, as indicative of his social position), and was or- 
 dained as first pastor of the Fourth Church, September 21, 
 1733, after having preached to the congregation for two or three 
 years. His pastorate seems to have lasted but little more than 
 a year, and in 1735 he ceased to be a minister. The causes, 
 
 1 Conn. Ch. Docs., ii. 126. 
 
 2 Christ Ch. Kec.; Lett, of S. P. C. (Harvvood MS ) vol. B. 13 (136) ; Conn. Cli. Do 
 237, ii. 127; Dig. of S. P. G. Kec. 848, 853.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 31 
 
 though not fulh- stated, were such as would doubtless have 
 prevented him for applying for orders in the Church of England, 
 had he wished at a later date to do so. They did not destroy 
 his usefulness as a citizen, and in after years he more than once 
 served as a selectman, and represented the town several times 
 in the Legislature. 1 Still less could they permanently exclude 
 him from the privileges of the church, though ten years had 
 passed since the events which led to his removal from the min- 
 istry before he is known to have appeared as conformist. 
 Thenceforth he evidently was, and deserved to be, honored and 
 trusted in this parish. 
 
 But while he and others were well qualified to act as lay- 
 readers, it had long been customary in Connecticut to employ 
 young men who were preparing to take orders, or had serious 
 thoughts of doing so. a And at length, perhaps in 1748, such a 
 reader was found for Guilford in the person of "Mr. Samuel 
 Johnson." 3 This I take to have been the elder son of the Rev. 
 Dr. Johnson, William Samuel, w r ho hesitated between divinity 
 and law, and w r ho for several years acted as a lay-reader else- 
 where. His task may be assumed to have included those of 
 catechist and of a kind of lay-pastor, and he spent six months 
 in the service of the parish..* He became one of the most use- 
 ful, as he was nearly or quite the most accomplished, of early 
 American statesmen, and it interests us to think of such a man 
 as probably fulfilling a lay-ministry in this congregation during 
 the first period of its history. His brother William, who did 
 take orders, but died in England in 1756, also read service here 
 occasionally. '"' But the young man who acted longest in this 
 capacity was Peter Beers. He, as the wardens write in 1768, 
 "continued with us better than twelve months, to our great sat- 
 isfaction."" This gentleman was probably a youthful parish- 
 ioner of Dr. Johnson's, resident in what is now the town of 
 Trumbull, though I have not been able to find proof of his hav- 
 
 1 Smith MS.; 'r<r.cn Records; Hist, of Guilford, 100, 169. 
 
 2 Cniiii. C/i. ihics.. i. 148. 
 
 3 Ibid., ii. 12-. 
 
 4 Beardsley's Life and Times of ll'illiam Samuel Johnson, 4-6. 
 
 5 Conn. C/i. Docs., i. 252. 
 
 6 Conn. C/i. Docs., ii. 127.
 
 32 Early History of 
 
 ing been either a student or a candidate for orders. 1 He must 
 have officiated at Guilforcl not far from 1750. 
 
 During this period the parish was making progress. Mr. 
 I/yons wrote to the Society, under date of May 30, 1745 : "The 
 Church at Gilford . . . increases. I administer the sac- 
 raments there, and they read Prayers and Sermons. " : Earl}- in 
 1749 Dr. Johnson reports eighteen families of conformists at 
 Guilford, 3 and our records contain the names of fourteen new 
 householders, as I suppose, in addition to the eight already 
 mentioned. But only twelve names appear in a list of rate- 
 payers preserved among our documents, and dated 1750. This 
 is the surest indication of the strength of the congregation at 
 the close of the first period. A new parish was struggling into 
 life in North Guilford, under the leadership of Dr. Johnson's 
 brother-in-law, Deacon George Bartlett, and it is more than 
 probable that Dr. Johnson included its members in his enumer- 
 ation. Some of the names recorded in connection with Guilford 
 certainly belonged to Branford.^ The new family names which 
 may be reasonably claimed for this parish are, in the order of 
 occurrence, those of Kimberly, Fraser, Judge, Norton, Pierson, 
 Dowd, Welch and Chittenden. Some names may be those of 
 parents who sought baptism for their children only because 
 they could not obtain it in their own congregations. The 
 Fourth Church did not formally grant this privilege to non- 
 communicants until 1750, and in 1746 seven children of Thomas 
 Norton, son of one of the founders of that church, and a gradu- 
 ate of Yale, were baptized by Dr. Johnson, 5 the eldest being 
 fourteen years old." In this case, as in man}' others, the desire 
 to secure the Christian rights of childhood probably led to full 
 conformity, as Mr. Norton's descendants are still represented in 
 our congregation. Among the other new names I can speak 
 particularly only of those of Ebenezer Chittenden and his son 
 Ebenezer. The former was a brother-in-law of the two John- 
 
 1 Letters from Profs. H. A. Beers and F. B. Dexter, Rev. N. E. Cornwall. Messrs. D. 
 G., J. B. and LeGrand G. Beers, and Mr. M. D. Mallett. 
 
 2 Utt. of S. P. G. (Harwood MS.), vol. B. 13. (136.) 
 
 3 Conn. Ch. Docs,, i. 251. 
 
 4 Those, for example, of Micha Palmer, Ebenezer Linsley and John Factor, entered 
 in the register at Stratford. 
 
 5 Registry Book, Christ Ch., Stratford. 
 
 6 Talcott's Guilford Genealogy.
 
 Christ Chitrch Parish, Gidlford, Conn. 33 
 
 sons, and his conformity is probably another illustration of the 
 influence of that family. The son who bore his name removed 
 to New Haven, where he became a warden of Trinity Church, 
 and his inventive genius brought him into association with the 
 famous Eli Whitney. 1 Another son, Thomas, was for about 
 twenty years governor of Vermont, and in that capacity he 
 narrowly missed being invited to consecrate a bishop in the 
 person of the Rev. Samuel Peters, author of an astonishing 
 "History of Connecticut," and inventor of the "Blue Laws." 
 Another son was Bethuel, a very useful clergyman of Vermont, 
 who strenuously and openly opposed the election of Dr. Peters 
 to the episcopate. 3 The family lived in East Guilford (now 
 Madison), but the sons must have been, in their boyhood, mem- 
 bers of this congregation. 
 
 The great achievement of the first period was the erection 
 of a church, though it was not quite finished so early, and was 
 not entirely furnished until many years later. The first record- 
 ed action on the part of the parish is the decision to build the 
 church by subscription, and the appointment of a committee, 
 the record being followed by the original subscription-list, 
 which contains but six names. The date as given is January 2, 
 1746, which, according to the legal usage at that time, corre- 
 sponds to the second (or, more exactly, the thirteenth) of Janu- 
 ary, I747- 4 The next step recorded was not taken by the parish 
 but by the meeting of proprietors, or owners of undivided lands, 
 including the Green. That body voted, April 13, 5 1747, "upon 
 petition of Messrs. Samuel Collens, Nathaniel Johnson and Ed- 
 mund Ward," that they might build a church on the Green, 
 "on the knowl before Mr. Naughty's House, nearest to the 
 Middle Path."" The petitioners named formed the committee 
 appointed by the parish to "carry on" the work, and this was 
 
 1 Talcott's Chittenden Family ; New Haven Colony Historical Society Papers, i. 60, 73. 
 
 2 Documentary History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Vermont, 43. 
 
 3 Ibid. 21, 43. 
 
 4 Until after September 2, 1751, the year began on the 25th of March, in the British 
 dominions, while all dates were eleven days earlier (for the eighteenth century) than 
 in most European countries. But it had long been common to use a double date for the 
 year (as 174 5-6), and sometimes new style was followed without notice, a very perplex- 
 ing circumstance to modern readers. 
 
 5 Old style, which I generally follow as to the day of the month. 
 
 6 Proprietors' Records, vol. D.; p. 131. Since the address was delivered, it has been 
 found necessary to correct the dates at this point.
 
 34 Early History of 
 
 the first meeting held by the Proprietors since their appoint- 
 ment. There appears to have been no reluctance on the part of 
 the Proprietors to grant such a privilege to Episcopalians, and. 
 there was certainly no strong disposition to crush the move- 
 ment towards conformity. 
 
 The first subscriptions amounted to ,270, four of the sub- 
 scribers pledging each ^50. The names are those of John Col- 
 lins, Ebenezer Bishop, Samuel Collins, Nathaniel Johnson, 
 Edmund Ward, and William Ward. John Collins, who has not: 
 been named before, was, I suppose, the brother of Samuel, and 
 one of the original members of the Fourth Church. He was at 
 this time residing in North Guilford. 1 Ebenezer Bishop. 
 was the son of Nathaniel Bishop, and married Meheta- 
 bel, the daughter of Joseph Chittenden. He, also, became 
 a resident of North Guilford. 2 Most of these subscribers, 
 paid more than they promised, besides afterwards en- 
 larging their subscriptions. Many others contributed as the 
 work went forward, including some who may not have become 
 Episcopalians, and more who were non-residents. A generous. 
 Killingworth contributor was Mr. Benjamin Gale, doubtless the 
 son-in-law of the Rev. Jared Eliot, and later well known both 
 as a physician and as a student of prophecy. Nathaniel John- 
 son rode to Newport on Captain Stone's horse, probably armed 
 with a letter from his Stratford brother to the Rev. Mr. Honey- 
 man, then near the close of his useful rectorship of almost half 
 a century at Trinity Church, and Newport gave ^113 out of 
 about ^200 obtained elsewhere than in Guilford. It is said that 
 nearly a thousand pounds were expended at this period, without 
 fully completing the church, 3 and of this amount between seven 
 and eight hundred pounds must have been raised at home,. 
 chiefly within, perhaps, a dozen families. It must, however,, 
 be remembered that the sum is reckoned not in pounds sterling, 
 but in the greatly depreciated paper of the colony, which may 
 then have been worth one-fifth of its face value. ' Speaking 
 
 Smith MS. 
 
 1 Rec.of Christ Ch, ; Talcott's Guilford Genealogy; Manual of First Church, p. 19;: 
 itk MS. 
 
 2 Guilf. Geneal.; Talcott's Chittenden Family, p. 26; Christ Ch. Rec. 
 
 3 ^"984 i8s 6d. Smith MS. 
 
 4 Bronson's "Connecticut Currency," pp. 24, 52, 65,. 74; in New ffa^eii Colony, His- 
 torical Society Papers, vol. i.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 
 
 35 
 
 loosely, we may say that the parish and its friends in Guilford 
 gave upwards of seven hundred dollars, in the course of three or 
 four years, towards so far building the church that it could be 
 occupied by people who cared less about their comfort than we 
 do. But this sum was in reality a very much larger one than 
 it seems at first sight. When the price of ordinary labor was 
 less than fifty cents a day, and one poor man gave the equiva- 
 lent of three dollars, or more than the value of a week's work, 
 we can feel that the founders of the parish, some of whom, 
 doubtless, gave much more largely in proportion to their ability, 
 
 FROM A SKKTCH MADE IN 1830 BY ANGELINE CLARK BASSETT (NOW MRS. DANIEL M. 
 PRENTICE), THEN TEN YEARS OLD. 
 
 were capable of making sacrifices for their religious convictions. 
 The early Episcopalians of Connecticut were sometimes accused 
 of conforming because, by the help of the Society for the Propa- 
 gation of the Gospel, they could get their ministers for nothing. 
 In fact, the law compelled them to pay their ministers' rates ex- 
 actly as before, and if the missionaries, making a shift to live 
 on stipends generally smaller than those of the Congregational 
 pastors, frequently chose, as they did, to apply the rates to the 
 building of churches, the payment of lay-readers and the like, 
 this only shows that ministers and people could both make sac- 
 rifices. And in Guilford. the help received from the Society,
 
 36 Early History of 
 
 though of real value, was far less than was received elsewhere. 
 It never became a distinct mission, and the chief burden always 
 rested on its own people. Of course, I cannot answer for all 
 the motives of all the early members of this church, but I am 
 certain that, for the most part, they were such as their descend- 
 ants and representatives have no cause to be ashamed of. 
 
 The church was of wood, in dimensions thirty-two feet by 
 forty, 1 though the accounts vary a little. It stood east of the 
 middle of the Green, facing west, nearly in front of this church, 
 on the rising ground, which was then somewhat higher than 
 now. Its Anglican character was faintly indicated by the 
 arched windows, and by the semi-circular chancel which pro- 
 jected from the east end. There was 110 pulpit for nearly 
 twenty years after it was occupied, and when it was first used 
 the windows were only partially glazed. The original seats 
 were probably mere benches ; square pews were built against 
 the north and south walls, by individuals, in 1769 and after- 
 wards. A little grove of poplars was planted beside it, and be- 
 neath their scanty shade the fathers of the parish one by 
 one lay down to rest. At the close of our first period, however, 
 in the spring of 1750, the building itself had probably not been 
 used at all, and the congregation must, during the greater part 
 of diose six years, have assembled in private houses. More 
 than one house thus doing duty as an Episcopal church may be 
 in existence to-day, among them the fourth dwelling-house 
 north of the foundry in Fair street, built, I suppose, by Nathan- 
 iel Johnson in 1746. Here, during the four or five years follow- 
 ing, we may reasonably believe that Dr. Samuel Johnson often 
 preached and administered the sacraments. Assuming this, no 
 building now remains in Guilford which has a stronger claim 
 upon us for reverent interest. 
 
 The second period of our history covers about fourteen 
 years, from 1750 to 1764, and is defined by the rather infrequent 
 ministrations of a clergyman who was, nevertheless, in some 
 sense the minister of the parish until almost the close of the 
 period. This was the Rev. Ebenezer Punderson of North Gro- 
 ton (now L,edyard), who had, for about sixteen years, held an 
 
 i Draft of letter dated 1752, in parish archives.
 
 Christ C /lurch Parish, Guilford, Conn. 37 
 
 appointment from the Venerable Society as an itinerant mission- 
 ary. Early in 1750 he took Guilford, with other places in this 
 neighborhood, under his care. 1 He had, what Mr. Lyons had 
 lacked, a formal commission for Guilford, and this gave him, as 
 he doubtless believed, a title before the law to the rates levied 
 on resident Episcopalians for the support of public worship, al- 
 though the local officials might not agree with him in his inter- 
 pretation of the law. By an act passed in 1727 the collectors of 
 rates were required to pay what was received from avowed con- 
 formists to any "person in orders, according to ye Canons of ye 
 Church of England, settled and abiding among them, and per- 
 forming divine service so near to any person yt hath declared 
 himself of the Church of England that he can conveniently and 
 doth attend the publick worship there." In such cases taxes 
 for building meeting-houses were not to be collected, and an 
 organized society of Episcopalians might levy additional taxes 
 for its own uses, if necessary. 2 The description of those thus 
 exempted from the obligation of supporting Congregational 
 worship was rather vague, and might be, as it was, interpreted 
 very different!}' by different collectors and magistrates. In 1728. 
 when the only missionaries in Connecticut were in Fairfield 
 county, namely, Samuel Johnson and his young friend, Henry 
 Caner of the town of Fairfield, the latter tells us that none were 
 regarded as living "near" an Episcopal church unless they 
 lived "within a mile or two." Episcopalians thought them- 
 selves wronged by a rule which, if applied to Coiigregationalists, 
 would have deprived every Congregational minister of a consid- 
 erable part of his salary, and some of them exposed themselves 
 to imprisonment by refusing to pay the ministers' rates. And 
 when Mr. Caner proposed that he be appointed missionary for 
 the whole territory west of Fairfield, changing his residence 
 from time to time, the Society obtained a legal opinion to the 
 effect that an appointment "to two or three places" would not 
 release conformists from payments to the local ministers. 3 But 
 a more liberal interpretation slowly gained ground among Con- 
 
 1 Christ Ch. Recs.; Abstracts of S. P. G.; Digest of Kec. of S. P. G., 46. 854 ; Beardsley's 
 Hist, of Ch. in Conn., i. 166. 
 
 2 Conn. Ch. Docs., i. 282-3; Connecticut Colonial Records, vii. 107. 
 
 3 Conn. Ch. Docs.. \. 133-5, 235. 253-4. 278-9. etc.; Beardsley, Hist, of Ch. in Conn.. 71, 73- 
 4, 129, etc.
 
 3 8 Early History of 
 
 gregationalists, and in 1736 Mr. Punderson himself had secured 
 from Governor Talcott a recognition of his right to the rates of 
 conformists living in a neighboring town, in terms which 
 implied, what the laws in existence assumed, that citizens of 
 Connecticut had a right to select the Christian ministry and 
 worship which they should support, provided these were made 
 even moderately accessible. Governor Talcott not unnaturally 
 advised conformists not to refuse the payment of rates when 
 demanded in due form, but practically recommended payment 
 under protest, with resort to the county court for redress. 1 Mr. 
 Punderson, it would seem, had not always found this course 
 successful,'' but in the majority of cases, and in the case of Guil- 
 ford, it was not necessary for him to adopt it, his claim being 
 promptly acknowledged by the collectors. 3 The First Society 
 might well have grown heartily tired, in its long and fruitless 
 struggle with those who formed the Fourth Society, of attempts 
 to control separatists by the help of the civil law. It is quite 
 true that whatever friendly regard for the Church of England 
 had existed among the ' colonists gave place to strong dislike 
 when that church began to rear its altars in Connecticut and to 
 gather around them bands of worshippers recruited from the 
 families of Congregational ministers and deacons. But as a rule 
 the First Society exercised much forbearance towards the }-oung 
 parish of Christ Church, and probably saved many of its own 
 members thereby. This is more noteworthy because of what 
 was taking place in North Guilford, where the Third Society 
 (as it was then styled) was repeating the experiment of coercion 
 with the usual results. The death of Samuel Russell in 1746 
 had been followed by a struggle over the succession much like 
 the one which began eighteen years earlier in Guilford, except 
 that the seceding party became Episcopalians. Here Mr. Pun- 
 derson's claim to the rates was vigorously resisted, and the col- 
 lectors, trying to gather them for Mr. Russell's son-in-law, Mr. 
 
 1 Talcott Papets, ii. 9-13, forming vol. v. of Connecticut Historical Society Collections, 
 from advance sheets. 
 
 2 Conn. Ch. Docs., i. 257-8. 
 
 3 Conn. Cli . Docs., i. 262
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 39 
 
 Richards, lost "much blood," though not, presumably, from 
 blows that had reached any vital organ. 1 
 
 As Mr. Puiiderson lived more than thirty miles away, and 
 his missionary journeys extended beyond the limits of Connecti- 
 cut, his oversight of the parish was at first extremely limited. 
 He officiated here in May, 1750, and in the September following 
 he preached in the church, "to abundance," on a week-day. 2 
 This is the first use of the building of which I find a record, and 
 the walls then only consisted of beams and clapboards, while 
 windows had hardly been thought of. 3 It was not until the 
 thirteenth of March, 1751, that the church was formally opened 
 with a sermon by Dr. Johnson, from the words, "O worship the 
 Lord in the beauty of holiness" (Psalms xcvi. 9). At that 
 date, moreover, it was voted to use the church regularly on Sun- 
 days and holy days, and it was declared that its name was 
 1 ' Christ's Church, ' ' which was also announced as the name of the 
 parish. Another vote appropriated the rates, if Mr. Punderson 
 should consent, to putting in glass. This shows how mission- 
 ary stipends might help even a parish which enjoyed only a 
 small fraction of a missionary's services. It also shows that the 
 Guilford collectors put a generous construction on the law. It 
 would have been extremely easy to plead that their conforming 
 neighbors were not getting as much religious instruction, even 
 of the kind which they preferred, as the commonwealth of Con- 
 necticut intended they should get, and on that ground to have 
 turned the rates over to Mr. Ruggles, whom they could hear 
 every Sunday. It would have been rather hard to meet this 
 plea, for the conformists were not satisfied themselves with the 
 attention which Mr. Punderson was able to bestow upon them. 
 In the autumn of 1751 they determined, by his advice, to unite 
 with North Guilford and Branford in obtaining the services of a 
 candidate for orders for the winter. A little later, in December, 
 1751, and January, 1752, the three parishes, strengthened by 
 the accession of the younger congregation at New Haven, and 
 
 1 Contribut. to Eccles. Hist, of Conn., 453; Rec. of Third Soc., May, 1751, quoted in 
 Smith's MS.; Conn. Ch. Docs., i. 262-3, 28 - 290-1. The name "Cohassett," often occurriiiff 
 in the work last cited, should be read "Cohabit," the old name of North Guilford. 
 
 2 Conn. Ch. Docs., i. 263, 271-2. 
 
 3 Christ Ch. Rec.
 
 40 Early History of 
 
 guided by Dr. Johnson, formally constituted themselves a mis- 
 sion. In August, 1752, they invited the Rev. Solomon Palmer 
 of Cornwall, a native of Branford, to be their missionary. Mr. 
 Palmer's brother and Nathaniel Johnson of Guilford were sent 
 to notify the new missionary of his election. As he was then, 
 and continued to be for more than a year longer, the Congrega- 
 tional pastor at Cornwall, one imagines that the situation created 
 by the appearance of the Anglican embassy might have been a 
 rather embarrassing one. It seems that Mr. Palmer's inclina- 
 tion to enter the Church of England, though known to his 
 friends at Branford, had not yet become a purpose, and that the 
 invitation was premature. And when his adhesion to episcopacy 
 was made known to his Cornwall parishioners in March, 1754, 
 it surprised them very much. 1 
 
 In the meantime efforts were made to finish the church 
 building, still only partly glazed. In October, 1752, the ward- 
 ens, who were then Edmund Ward and Nathaniel Johnson, 
 under the advice of the latter's brother, wrote letters to two 
 clergymen in the distant province of South Carolina, asking for 
 assistance. One of them was the Rev. Jonathan Copp, a Con- 
 necticut man, who had lately visited Guilford, and may have 
 encouraged the appeal. The other was, beyond question, the 
 Rev. Alexander Garden of Charleston, commissary of the Bishop 
 of London for that portion of the colonies, with oversight of the 
 clergy. In that character the evangelist Whitfield, who had 
 previously pronounced him, very truthfully, " a good soldier of 
 Jesus Christ," had a taste of his righting qualities, and the Guil- 
 ford wardens allude sympathetically to the commissary's bearing 
 in the conflict. They state that the parish then contained but 
 twelve families, precisely the number of rate-payers in 1750. It 
 is clear that the growth of the congregation was extremely slow, 
 if indeed it was then growing at all. The wardens also state 
 that some of their North Guilford brethren, who would have 
 helped them, were, or had been, in jail for the non-payment of 
 the minister's rates. Nothing seems to have come of these 
 letters (drafts of which, probably in Mr. Ward's handwriting, 
 
 i Christ Ch. Rec.; Bailey's Trinity Ch., 7-9; Conn. Ch. Docs., ii. 128; Gold's Historv of 
 Cornwall, 49-51.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Gin/ford, Conn. 41 
 
 are among our parish documents), and it is even possible that 
 they were never sent. 1 
 
 In the summer of 1753 this parish attained the object which 
 had been striven for a year or two before. It was combined in a 
 mission with New Haven and Branford, and, as I infer, with 
 North Guilford also, by the act of the Venerable Society. The 
 missionary appointed was the man who had been serving them 
 under a less definite commission, and who now removed to New 
 Haven. In leaving his old post Mr. Punderson exchanged a 
 stipend of ^70 sterling from the Society, for one of ^50. But 
 thirteen persons in Guilford subscribed between six and seven 
 pounds sterling towards his support, and if the other parishes 
 gave as much in proportion, this difference was more than made 
 good. 2 The limitation of Mr. Punderson's territory to three 
 adjoining towns (or townships) may have helped to terminate 
 the struggle at North Guilford. An attempt had been made 
 there in 1752 to save the rates of conformists by employing a 
 young clergyman living at Middletown, Mr. Camp, who officia- 
 ted " steadily " among them. It failed because Mr. Camp was 
 not yet in the service of the Venerable Society, and had not 
 ' ' any place in particular assigned to him in his license ' ' (from 
 the Bishop of London). 3 But in September, 1753, the conform- 
 ists were granted land on which to build their church, 4 which 
 makes it probable that Mr. Punderson's claim, in virtue of his 
 appointment to the newly established mission, was felt to be too 
 strong to be resisted, or, perhaps, that the lesson of toleration 
 had at last been learned. How well it had been learned in the 
 First Society, is pleasantly shown by the fact that at the close of 
 the next year (December 4, 1754,) that society "Voted, That 
 the conformists to the Church of England shall have Liberty to 
 have the Bell rung upon their feast & fast days or other Holli- 
 days when it doth not interfere with any of the days for public 
 worship of the i th Society during the pleasure of s d Society. 
 They paying the Bellman. 5 
 
 1 Christ Ch. Rec.; Dalcho's Church of South Carolina, 128-46, 163-74, 176-8, 361 ; Tver- 
 man's Life of George Whitefield, \. 142, 361-3, 395-401. 
 
 2 Christ Ch. Rer.; Abst. of S. P. G. for 1762; Lett, of S. P. G. (Harwood MS.), vol. B. 
 23 (294); Conn. Ch. Docs., ii. 21. 
 
 3 Conn. Ch. Docs., i. 298-9. 
 
 4 Smith MS. 
 
 5 Ibid.
 
 42 Early History of 
 
 Mr. Punderson was a generous man, and a diligent and suc- 
 cessful missionary, as he had been a useful and honored Congre- 
 gational minister, though Dr. Johnson thought him not well 
 adapted to New Haven, now the principal scene of his labors. 1 
 He remained in charge of the new mission for about ten years, 
 or until 1763, but for that period the records of this parish almost 
 fail us, while Mr. Punderson's own manuscripts, which might 
 have thrown light on this period, were lost by shipwreck after 
 his death. 2 A printed letter of the wardens for the year 1768 
 (of which I have made much use), informs tis, however, that 
 Guilford gained less than it hoped for from the arrangement. 
 Mr. Punderson's work in the neighborhood of New Haven grew 
 on his hands, even if the church in that town did not thrive. 
 Six, if not seven, congregations were under his care within the 
 three townships assigned to him, and this congregation, which 
 had expected to see him once a month, at last did not see him 
 at all. 3 The desire naturally arose to become part of a less 
 extensive mission, and with it at least the hope that Guilford 
 might be the seat of. the mission. But to this end the Society's 
 demand of a house and a glebe, or tract of land, however small, 
 for the missionary's use, must be met. Great efforts were there- 
 fore made to secure money for the purchase of a glebe, and the 
 statement of the wardens, in 1768, that they "had obtained 
 everything" which they had "struggled for, except the Soci- 
 ety's patronage," almost seems to imply that their efforts had 
 been successful. Our defective records give us no information 
 about this matter, but it would appear that the requisite amount 
 could not be collected at home. Accordingly, as I suppose in 
 1763, the parish appealed for help to Mr. St. George Talbot, of 
 the province of New York, who had shown much interest in the 
 progress of the Church of England in Connecticut, and who did 
 assist other parishes very liberally. He was understood to 
 promise the sum of ,200, and is said to have left a blank space 
 
 i Beardsley, Hist, of Cli. in Conn., {.91-2, 166, etc. ; Conn. Cli. Docs., i. 311 ; ii. 21, 39-40, 
 42, etc. 
 
 2 Letter from Rev. X. A. Welton of Poquetanuck. 
 
 3 Conn. Ch. Docs., ii. 128; Dig. of S. P. G. Rec.. 854 ; Abst. of S. P. G. for 1763 ; Lett. <>/ 
 S. P. G. (Harwood MS.) vol. B., 23 (293). The seven congregations, never all named to- 
 gether, were those of New Haven, West Haven, North Haven, Branford, Northford. 
 Guilford and North Gnilford.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 43 
 
 in his will for a bequest to the parish of that amount. He died 
 about five years later without filling the blank, and though it 
 was hoped for a while that the Venerable Society, to which he 
 must have made a considerable bequest, would devote part of it 
 to Guilford, all such hopes were disappointed, and Guilford had 
 to take care of itself. And as we have explicit testimony to the 
 effect that Mr. Talbot's anticipated gift was to be used in buy- 
 ing a glebe, while the wardens do not say in so many words that 
 a glebe was bought, and as I have found no evidence of such a 
 purchase either in church or town records^ it is nearly certain 
 that the parish continued to lack, as it still lacks, this important 
 part of its endowment, and that it was for this reason that it 
 could not obtain " the Society's patronage" in the form of a 
 stipend for a resident minister. 1 
 
 Of course the services must have been conducted by lay- 
 readers during the long intervals between Mr. Punderson's 
 visits. And in 1759, when those visits were becoming still less 
 frequent, a j~oung man of twenty, already well qualified for this 
 duty, took his place in the congregation. This was Nathaniel 
 Johnson's stepson, Bela Hubbard, whose mother had become 
 the second wife of Captain Johnson in 1755. Mr. Hubbard had 
 graduated in New Haven in 1758, and had pursued his studies 
 for a year under the direction of Dr. Johnson, lately made first 
 president of King's College (now Columbia), in New York. 
 He designed to take orders, but was too young to be ordained, 
 and no doubt continued to study at home. Dr. Johnson recom- 
 mended him to the parish as a lay- reader, and he probably began 
 to act as such under the nominal incumbent, Mr. Punderson, at 
 least as early as 1760. At the beginning of 1761 he was formally 
 chosen -reader by the two Guilford parishes, and held the posi- 
 tion until he reached the age of twenty-four, required by the 
 canons for taking priest's orders. As he became twenty-four in 
 August, 1763, and sailed for England a little later, his term of 
 service lasted more than two years and a half. L> At this date 
 Mr. Punderson had already been transferred from the New 
 
 t Conn. Ch. Docs., ii. 26-7. 55-6, 121. 123-4, 127-8; Lett, of S. P. G. (Harwood MS. 1 ), vol. B. 
 23 (2); Beardsfey, Hist, of Ch. in Conn., i. 212-3, 238. 
 
 2 Conn. Ch. Docs., ii. 128; Records of St. John's Ch., North Guilford ; Talcott's Guilf. 
 Gen.; Sprague's Annals, v. 234.
 
 44 Early History of 
 
 Haven mission to Rye, and had been succeeded, in the summer 
 of 1763, by the Rev. Solomon Palmer, whose services Guilford 
 had tried to secure twelve years before. As Guilford and Bran- 
 ford still formed part of the mission, it is not unlikely that the 
 former town was visited by Mr. Palmer, as the latter is said to 
 have been. His incumbency at Guilford must, however, have 
 been even more purely nominal than that of Mr. Punderson. 
 Mr. Hubbard, nevertheless, may have acted, technically, under 
 Mr. Palmer's direction for a few months. But New Haven now 
 desired to be made a distinct mission, while Branford, which 
 Dr. Johnson would have had combined with Guilford and "their 
 villages, Cohabit and Pauge " (North Guilford and Northford), 
 not long after aspired to entire independence, although it had no 
 church building. At all events Guilford and North Guilford, 
 acting apart from Branford, but apparently with the expectation 
 of help from Killingworth, invited Bela Hubbard to become 
 their minister. They pledged ,30 sterling towards his support, 
 which provided him with the ' ' title for orders ' ' demanded by 
 the canon, that is, the assurance that there was "some certain 
 Place where he might use his Function." The Society, it was 
 hoped, would erect these congregations into a mission, with suf- 
 ficient additional salary to enable the missionary to live in com- 
 fort. In the meantime provision had had to be made here, per- 
 haps by Mr. Hubbard and his relatives, for the expenses of his 
 journey, not far from ,100 sterling. This was the posture of 
 affairs at the close of our second period, early in I764. 1 
 
 The parish had evidently made some progress, little as Mr, 
 Punderson had been able to do for it. The unquenchable zeal 
 of the laity was of more service than the infrequent clerical min- 
 istrations which were obtainable. In October, 1763, Dr. John- 
 son wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury that there were fifty 
 families and as many communicants in Guilford. This enumer- 
 ation is doubtless an estimate, and it must include members of 
 both the parishes in the town. The same writer, perhaps a very 
 little later, informed the Society that there were " 30 or 40 fam- 
 lies " in both. 2 It is, moreover, probable that at that time the 
 
 1 Conn. Ch. Docs., ii. 37-8, 39-45, 49-5:, 103, 128; Absts. of S. P. G.. 1764; Hist, of Ch. in 
 Conn., i. 209-10; Bailey's Trinity Ch., 9, 53. 
 
 2 Conn. Ch. Docs., ii. 54 ; Absts. of S. P. G., 1764.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 45 
 
 North Guilford parish, formed by the secession at one time of a 
 considerable minority from the Congregational Church, was 
 larger than ours. As lately as 1810 it must have contained sev- 
 eral more communicants, though fewer families. 1 But assuming 
 that there were only fifteen or twenty families in Christ Church 
 in 1763, leaving twenty-five or thirty for St. John's, North Guil- 
 ford, there had still been an advance since 1752, when there 
 were only twelve. The scanty local records of the period furnish 
 only two new family names which seem to belong to Guilford, 
 those of Stone and Benton, though- new Christian names are 
 much more numerous. The name of Hubbard should doubtless 
 be added, and there must have been others. It is a fact too. 
 interesting to be passed over that Joel Stone, the infant son of 
 Stephen, baptized here by Mr. Punderson in 1750, is commemo- 
 rated to-day, as Colonel Stone, by a painted church window, 
 containing his likeness in the dignified dress of a century ago^ 
 on the north bank of the St. Lawrence, in the Canadian town of 
 Ganonoque, Ontario, of which he is reverenced as the founder. 2 
 And it is worth observing that the migratory impulse, which has 
 cost Guilford so much, was already strong in the last century. 
 It has wholly removed many names from the lists of this parish, 
 while some which remain are borne by descendants of other 
 branches of the same families. The old Registry Book of Christ 
 Church, Stratford, supplies two individual names of interest. 
 One is that of the venerable Andrew Ward, father of Edmund 
 Ward, and grandfather of Bela Hubbard, and one of the origi- 
 nal members of the Fourth Church, who became a communicant 
 in the Church of England in 1750, at the age of eighty. The 
 other is that of young Theophilus Morgan, doubtless a nephew 
 of the first wife of Captain Johnson, and a resident of Killing- 
 worth, baptized as an adult in 1754. Here we meet one of the 
 earlier traces of attachment to the Anglican church in the parish 
 of Jared Eliot, Samuel Smithson's son-in-law, who long before 
 was himself almost persuaded to apply for episcopal orders. 
 
 Our third period begins with the return of Bela Hubbard 
 from England in June, 1764, and covers about three years. Mr. 
 Hubbard came home a priest of the Church of England, and 
 
 i Convention Journal ', 1811 (reprint), p. 65. 
 Communicated by Mrs. N. A. H. Moore. See also Can. Reporter, Dec. 15, 22, 1894.
 
 46 Early History of 
 
 brought with him, no doubt, a license to officiate from the 
 Bishop of lyondon, whose jurisdiction embraced the colonial 
 churches. But he did not come as a missionary of the Society 
 for the Propagation of the Gospel, and Guilford was no longer 
 recognized by the Society as even a part of one of its missions. 
 Dr. Johnson had predicted this result, while he had pleaded the 
 cause of the parish in a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 but its members continued to hope that help would soon be given 
 them. 1 The resources of the Society were no doubt heavily 
 taxed, and it may have been really unable at that time to erect 
 a new mission. But had those whom the Society represented 
 been as eager to ' ' episcopize ' ' New England as they were sup- 
 posed to be, the resources of the Societ}- would have been more 
 abundant, and Guilford, with the claim established by its long 
 struggle, and supported by the powerful influence of Dr. John- 
 son, would not have been almost wholly neglected. Our parish 
 is an important witness to the real aims of the Venerable Society 
 in its work among a people already provided with such Christian 
 institutions as satisfied most of them. It sought simply to aid 
 those, desirous of conforming to the Church of England, who 
 were earnest enough and numerous enough to bear a large part 
 of the burden themselves. It planted its New England missions 
 where the soil gave the fairest promise of a vigorous growth ; 
 perhaps not a bad example for other missionary societies in sim- 
 ilar circumstances, though its rule bore hardly upon Guilford. 
 
 Mr. Hubbard, therefore, had to content himself with the 
 thirty pounds sterling which his congregations offered him, 
 increased by some private income of his own. In those days a 
 country minister might perhaps live on what he received, but he 
 could scarcely support a family on it. One mark of the Vener- 
 able Society's favor he probably did bring back with him, and 
 it remains as a memorial not only of his ministry here, but of 
 that of the lay-ministers who served under him and after him. 
 This is the folio Prayer Book, used here to-night, and bearing 
 abundant marks of use during the later years of the colonial 
 period, especially in those parts of the volume which a layman 
 could read publicly. 
 
 I Conn. Ch. Docs., ii. 53-4.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 
 
 47 
 
 Mr. Hubbard's services were for a while required at North- 
 ford, and he did work as an itinerant at Branford, New Haven, 
 Saybrook, and even Litchfield. 1 Of the three congregations 
 which formed his permanent cure Killingworth deserves further 
 mention. This name, it must be remembered, belonged then, 
 and for many years afterwards, to what is now Clinton, the pres- 
 ent Killingworth being then a society, or parish, in the same 
 township, but known as North Killingworth. If there could be 
 any doubt as to the identification of the eastern part of Mr. Hub- 
 
 BELA HUBBARD, D. D. 
 
 bard's cure with Clinton it would be removed by hi sown descrip- 
 tion of the place as " a seaport Town 10 miles distant." 1 Jared 
 Eliot, the Congregational pastor of Killingworth, who, after 
 openly declaring in 1722 his doubts about the validity of his 
 ordination, had found his doubts removed, nevertheless remained 
 all his life friendly to the Church of England. 3 He died in the 
 spring of 1763, and before Mr. Hubbard's departure in the 
 autumn it seems certain that a number of families at Killing- 
 
 1 Lett, of S. /'. (,'. (Harwood MS.), vol. B. 23 (166); Conn. Ch. Docs. M. 107. 
 
 2 I^tt. of S. P. G.. as in last note. 
 
 3 Beardsley, Hist, of Ch. in Conn.,\. 28-30.
 
 i 
 
 48 Early History of 
 
 worth had made known their attachment to episcopacy, while 
 others were understood to be ready to declare themselves con- 
 formists. 1 It may fairly be guessed, though I find no authority 
 for affirming, that regard for Mr. Eliot had prevented any earlier 
 attempt to establish a congregation of conformists. And Mr. 
 Hubbard's language, in the letter to the Venerable Society just 
 referred to, shows that at least as respects most of the new con- 
 gregation, the final act of conformity took place after his return 
 from England. Between thirty and forty families, he tells us, 
 then conformed. Another contemporary authority gives the 
 number of heads of families, at the close of 1766, as about thirty- 
 four. This congregation must have been the largest of the 
 three, though perhaps the weakest financially, in spite of the 
 presence of two or three wealthy and influential men.' They 
 were apparently not strong enough to build a church, and this 
 placed them at a serious disadvantage. 
 
 Less than two years ago (December 4, 1892,) I gave an 
 account of Dr. Hubbard in this place. I need only say now 
 that he was a man of extraordinary sweetness of character, while 
 inflexible in his devotion to duty and to truth, and capable of 
 playing a hero's part, as he did afterwards at New Haven, when 
 in the face of the pestilence he stood firmly at his post, and even 
 added, it is said, the duties and risks of a nurse to those of a 
 pastor. His preaching undoubtedly did his hearers good, and he 
 could say of the fathers of this congregation that they ' ' gener- 
 ally adorn the Doctrine of our Lord and Saviour, by sober, exem- 
 plary Lives." 3 To a large extent, no doubt, they came from 
 that class of Congregationalists which used to ' ' own the cove- 
 nant ' ' without becoming communicants. They came because 
 their consciousness of religious obligation was so deep that they 
 must be communicants when they might. And the letters of 
 ths missionaries make it clear that they were more faithful in 
 this respect than their successors are now, and that in all respects 
 they were as good Christians as most others were then. It 
 would be hard to find a better example of one fine type of Chris- 
 tian living than is furnished by the unselfish, blameless, patient, 
 
 1 Conn. Ch. Docs., ii. 54. Killingworth is not named, but no other place can be meant. 
 
 2 Conn. Ch. Docs., ii. 105-7. 
 
 3 Lett, of S. P. G., as above ; cf. Conn. Ch. Docs., ii. 106.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 49 
 
 beneficent life of Bela Hubbard, and what he was his people, 
 who dearly loved him, must in their various degrees have 
 aspired to be. 
 
 The outward growth of the parish seems to have been slight 
 during Mr. Hubbard's incumbency. In January, 1767, a few 
 months before it closed, he reported upwards of eighty families 
 in his three congregations. As we must assign upwards of thirty 
 families to Killingworth, we have about fifty for the two 
 Guilfords, or the same number as we find in Dr. Johnson's letter 
 of October, 1763. But as Johnson gives a smaller number in a 
 nearly contemporary report, having been furnished, we may 
 infer, only with estimates, there is room for a probable assump- 
 tion that this congregation had increased a little. It would not 
 have been strange, however, had there been a decided decrease. 
 A powerful influence, unfriendly to growth, came into operation 
 here and elsewhere during Mr. Hubbard's pastorate. The 
 Stamp Act was passed in 1765, in violation of all the traditions 
 of English liberty, since it involved the taking of men's money 
 without their consent. Opposition to it was almost universal, 
 far more so than the determination to resist other unconstitu- 
 tional exactions by force, a few years later. The old lay-reader 
 of Guilford, William Samuel Johnson, was perhaps the most 
 important member of the Stamp Act Congress, called to obtan. 
 the repeal of the act, and even his father thought the course of 
 Parliament " very ill-judged." But Mr. Hubbard, with others 
 of the younger clergy, and some not young, regarded it as 
 " nothing short of rebellion . . . to avow opposition," and 
 their people generally agreed with them. 2 Such an attitude 
 must have done as much as anything could have done to check 
 the growth of the church. And another unfortunate result fol- 
 lowed, which was an additional blow to the hopes of the Guil- 
 ford Episcopalians. This was the determination of the Society 
 for the Propagation of the Gospel, adopted in 1766, in conse- 
 quence of the commotions established by the Stamp Act, to 
 establish no more missions in New England. 3 For several years 
 complaints against the Society had been frequent and bitter, 
 
 i Autobiography, (MS.) sect. 54. 
 
 2. Conn. Cli. Docs., ii. 81, 106-7, etc. 
 
 3 Ibid., it. 102-3; Beardsley, Hist, of Ch. in Conn.' i. 102-3.
 
 5O Early History of 
 
 and the fear lest Bishops should be sent to America, to be sup- 
 ported by general taxation and to exercise secular authority as 
 at home, became a very active element in the popular discon- 
 tent. The fear, though not warranted by the attitude of sober- 
 minded Episcopalians, was neither unnatural nor wholly unrea- 
 sonable, and the willingness of the home government to set aside 
 colonial rights, which was betrayed in the Stamp Act, made a 
 farther violation of rights seem more probable. Guilford itself 
 was the scene of a most important step in the struggle against 
 an American episcopate when, in 1766, the General Association 
 of Connecticut sat here, with Thomas Ruggles as its moderator, 
 and received, and readily responded to, proposals from the Pres- 
 byterian Synod for an alliance in the struggle. Altogether, the 
 brief period of Mr. Hubbard's ministry abounded in evil portents 
 for the future of the Church of England. 
 
 Nevertheless this was the brightest period in the history of 
 the parish during the last century, as it was the only one, as far 
 as I can learn, when it had a resident minister. And when, in 
 the summer of 1767, acting under the advice of his clerical 
 brethren, Mr. Hubbard took charge of the mission at New 
 Haven, to be honored and loved there for nearly half a century, 
 the people were heart-broken. His removal seems to have been 
 inevitable if he w r ere to have a home of his own. Dr. Johnson 
 testifies that the people could not "provide a tolerable support 
 for Mr. Hubbard," though neither could "bear part." He 
 long hesitated, and even at one time felt ' ' compelled to tarry 
 among them." 1 As his marriage took place in less than a year 
 after he left Guilford (May 15, 1768), it is probable enough that 
 his purpose to marry finally settled the question. 2 There is a 
 pathetic letter to the Society from the churchwardens, Nathaniel 
 Johnson and Samuel Collins, written in July, 1768, a yeai after 
 Mr. Hubbard's removal, of which I have made much use, which 
 vividly portrays the sorrow of the congregation. The loss, say 
 the writers, was " so distressing to us, that words cannot express 
 it. . . . Some of us are almost ready to say our wound is 
 incurable. . . . The removal of Mr. Hubbard has given 
 the Church the heaviest blow that ever it received." 3 
 
 1 Conn. Ch. Docs., ii. 103, 107. 
 
 2 Talcott's Guilf. Geneal.; Sprague, Ann. of A met: Pulp., v. 
 
 3 Conn. Ch. Docs., ii. 129.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 51 
 
 The new family names appearing in the records during these 
 three years, and which I can do no more than mention, are 
 Bradley, Ludinton, Shelley, Fairchild and Campbell. It will 
 be remembered that these names are not taken from lists of 
 parishioners, which do not exist for this period, but are given 
 as they occur for various reasons in the records. There were 
 probably some members of the congregation whose names do 
 not appear at all, and some may have entered it long before 
 there was any occasion, such as the baptism of a child, for 
 recording their names. 
 
 We have traversed less than half the first fifty years of our 
 parochial life, but we can make a briefer passage through the 
 rest. And the next stage shall be a long one, of seventeen 
 years, carrying us through the Revolution, and ending in 1784. 
 This period, the fourth, has its limit defined for us with toler- 
 able accuracy by the continuance of Mr. Hubbard's pastoral 
 oversight in such measure as his new duties permitted him to 
 maintain it. This parish, however, and doubtless the whole 
 cure of three congregations, naturally desired more constant ser- 
 vices than he could possibly give, and made an effort to secure 
 them. And the leaders of our congregation, with those w r hom 
 they led, never appear to better advantage than when all hearts 
 were still aching with the wound inflicted by Mr. Hubbard's 
 removal. The veteran churchwardens, both now past sixty, 
 spoke in the spirit of Thomas Hooker of Hartford when, testify- 
 ing for the "Congregational way," he declared that "Christ, 
 the King of his Church and Master of his House, he only in 
 reason, can make laws that are Authenticke for the government 
 thereof." 1 To these Guilford Episcopalians, presumably drawn 
 towards the Church of England, at first, by their desire to enjoy 
 the sacraments on Catholic terms, the order of that Church, the 
 historic order of Christendom, had come to seem that which 
 their King and Master had established. And so they were 
 " assured," thej- " firmly believed," that theirs was "the cause 
 of Christ;" they might well, with the same Thomas Hooker, 
 have regarded church government as ' ' a fundamentall point of 
 Religion." In the strength of this conviction, much stronger in 
 them than in those who then controlled church action in Eng- 
 
 i Survev of the Stinnne of Church Discipline, Pt. I., 5.
 
 52 Early History of 
 
 land, and hoping against hope, they appealed once more, in 
 1768, to the Venerable Society. They had unanimously invited 
 John Tyler of Wallingford, a candidate who had been serving 
 among them as lay-reader, "to go home for orders," and he 
 had consented to come back to Guilford if the Society would 
 grant only a small addition to the salary which could be given 
 by the people of his cure. Before the letter was written Mr. 
 Tyler had received priest's orders, and then the Society sent 
 him to Norwich. 1 
 
 But Mr. Hubbard had stipulated with his New Haven flock 
 that he should visit his old parishioners four times a year,' 1 and 
 he was their minister in as real a sense as Mr. Punderson had 
 been. Our records show that he was often here on Sunday, and 
 we may fairly suppose that he went sometimes to North Guil- 
 ford and Killingworth. He gave the Holy Communion to the 
 people, he baptized their children, he married their young peo- 
 ple, he buried their dead. He was even recognized by the civil 
 authorities as the incumbent of the parish ; rates were paid to 
 him in 1770 and 1776 ; in 1780 he presided at a parish meeting. 
 His ministrations did not wholty cease until near the close of the 
 century, 3 if they ceased then, but during the present period cl 
 seventeen years, it does not appear that this parish secured, or, 
 after the failure of Mr. Tyler's case, attempted to secure, any 
 other minister than Bela Hubbard. His, however, were not the 
 only clerical sendees which were rendered here. Seven of the 
 Connecticut clergy besides Mr. Hubbard are recorded at least 
 once as visiting Guilford, often on a Sunday. Among them 
 were Abraham Jarvis, afterwards our second Bishop, Jeremiah 
 Learning, the first choice of the clergy for our first Bishop, and 
 Roger Viets, uncle and early instructor of Bishop Griswold of 
 the Eastern Diocese. But I may be pardoned for speaking with 
 pleasure of the fact that the first clerical name thus introduced 
 into our records, and the name which occurs oftenest, is that of 
 Samuel Andrews, the missionary at Wallingford. He had 
 promised a yearly visit on a Sunday or a Holy Day, 1 and he 
 evidently kept his promise until his loyalist sympathies, as tradi- 
 
 1 Conn. Cli. Docs., ii. 129 : Life and Corresp. of Samuel Johnson, 333-4 : Hint, of Ch . hi 
 Con n., \. 270. 
 
 2 Lett, of S. P. (,'. (Harwood MS.), vol. B., 23 (168). 
 
 3 Dr. Hubbard's .\otftia Parochialis, at New Haven, contains the record of many 
 official acts performed here, as well as elsewhere out of New Haven.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 
 
 53 
 
 tion says, limited his journeys to his own premises, except by 
 written permission of the Wallingford selectmen. Among the 
 children baptized by him was Roxana, daughter of Eli Foote, 
 who became the wife of the famous layman Beecher, and the 
 mother of children still more famous. I venture to think of 
 this kinsman of mine as for about seven years Mr. Hubbard's 
 chief assistant in the care of Christ Church, Guilford. 
 
 CHRIST CHURCH, GUILFORD, CONSECRATED DEC. 12, 1838. 
 
 Loyalist sympathies undoubtedly prevailed in this congre- 
 gation, to its detriment, when the war broke out, although Guil- 
 ford Episcopalians and their sons were found among the patriot 
 soldiers. And I imagine that we should obtain a nearly com- 
 plete list of the men of the parish if we could find an enrollment 
 made by the town's order on the twelfth of July, 1781. This 
 was less than a month after a marauding expedition, in which 
 were some refugees, had landed at Leete's Island, and Simeon 
 Leete and Ebenezer Hart had lost their lives in beating the 
 
 I Conn. Ch. Dors., ii. 192.
 
 o 
 
 54 Early History of 
 
 plunderers off. 1 Doubtless under an angry impulse given by 
 this tragedy, "Sundry inhabitants" were put on record "as 
 Inimical to the Liberties " of their country. I trust that nobody 
 now believes that this was a fair description of men many of 
 whom, however mistaken in opinion, loved American liberty 
 with all their hearts, but believed, with that spotless patriot, 
 William Samuel Johnson, that liberty might be safe under the 
 free constitution of the mighty empire of which they all had 
 long been proud of being subjects. And in less than nine years 
 the town of Guilford seems to have come to this view of matters. 
 On the twelfth of April, 1790, it was ordered that the names 
 thus enrolled be expunged, and that the "s d enrollment no 
 longer form any part of the Records of this Town." The 
 expunging process must have consisted in burning a loose sheet 
 of paper, for there is no space for the enrollment in the existing 
 records, and it can never have been placed there. Even in an 
 hour of intense and natural exasperation the Guilford instinct of 
 justice was too .strong to permit good neighbors and true friends 
 to be branded for life. 
 
 Before the war the parish must have grown faster than one 
 would have expected, if, as a fragment of a letter apparently 
 written in 1774 reports, it then contained thirty-seven families." 
 But there may have easily been an abatement of unfriendly feel- 
 ing towards the Church of England after the repeal of the Stamp 
 Act, and in 1772 Mr. Hubbard wrote from New Haven that his 
 congregation had increased one-third in less than five years, and 
 that he had ' ' the happiness to see the greatest unanimity reign- 
 ing amongst " his people and their fellow Christians. 3 During 
 the war the parish must have lost ground, and I have the author- 
 ity of Dr. Bennett for the statement, coming down, I suppose, 
 as a tradition, that the church building suffered from lawless 
 violence. The lead of the window sashes (bought, as our 
 records show, from the First Society,) is said to have been 
 appropriated by zealous patriots, and run into bullets to be fired 
 at King George's soldiers. But it is also said that the services 
 on Sunday never ceased, though laymen commonly conducted 
 
 1 Smith's Hist, of Guilford, 49-50. 
 
 2 Christ Ch. Kec. 
 
 .; Onni. C/i . Dors., ii. iSi.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 55 
 
 them, and we now know that during all those stormy years a 
 priest of the Church led here from time to time the worship of 
 the congregation according to the order of the Church of Eng- 
 land. One office or another of the Prayer Book, as Bela Hub- 
 bard's New Haven records show, was used by him throughout 
 the period of the war, as well as before and after. And probably 
 no year passed without his offering here the memorial sacrifice, 
 to maintain their share in which his friends and kinsmen, fulfill- 
 ing a priesthood as real as his own, had so often and so long 
 offered themselves as a living sacrifice. 
 
 In the early part of this period, too, (1769,) they built the 
 pulpit which could be so seldom filled, and again and again gave 
 permission for the building of pews for worshippers whom their 
 fear of God, and not their admiration for a man, might be trusted 
 to draw to the House of God. And they could not, till they 
 must, relinquish the hope that what they so longed for and had 
 struggled so hard to secure, the regular ministrations of the 
 Church, the Society in England would at last consent to give 
 them. In spite of its resolution to establish no more missions in 
 New England, and suspending its rule requiring a house and 
 glebe as the condition of a grant, the Society had sent a mission- 
 ary to Pomfret in 1772. This exception was made out of regard 
 to the wishes of a wealthy layman, Godfrey Malbone, who him- 
 self gave largely to the new mission, and in the expectation that 
 the usual additional provision for the missionary would soon be 
 made. 1 Even before this excuse for a fresh application had 
 been given, or in January, 1771, the "parish had directed the 
 wardens to write to the Venerable Society, asking that a mis- 
 sion might be established here. ' And after the favorable action 
 in the case of Pomfret, in September, 1773, the principal layman 
 of New Haven, Enos Ailing, himself a member of the Society, 
 addressed a letter to the secretary, warmly pleading the cause of 
 Guilford. 3 Samuel Johnson, their most influential friend, was 
 dead, but a few days later the clergy of Connecticut, assembled 
 in "a voluntary Convention," mentioned the desires of this 
 
 1 Abst. of S. P. G.. 1773; Hist, of Ch. in Conn., i. 273-5. 281. 
 
 2 Christ Ch. Rec. 
 
 3 Lett, of S. P. G. (Harwood MS.), vol. B. 23 (2).
 
 56 Early History of 
 
 parish to the same official. 1 In August, 1774, the parish made, 
 or began to make, what was perhaps its last appeal, in which 
 Abraham Jarvis, afterwards Bishop of this diocese, may have 
 lent his assistance. 2 But the Society was inexorable, and Guil- 
 ford was left to practice the lesson, for which it has had much 
 use, of self-reliance. 
 
 Towards the close of our present period, in November, 1783, 
 we find an entry which suggests that the parish had produced, 
 and was making use of, another candidate for orders. This was 
 young Andrew Fowler, son of Andrew, and grandson of Mrs. 
 Johnson's sister, Andrea Morgan. He had just graduated at 
 New Haven, where for two years he had acted as lay-reader 
 under Mr. Hubbard, with the sanction of President Stiles. He 
 was afterwards ordained in New York by Bishop Provoost, and is 
 remembered for many useful labors, among the rest for having 
 presented the first class for confirmation in the diocese of South 
 Carolina. 3 Of the ministers who had thus far been reared with- 
 in the territorial limits of the First Society, at least one-third, as 
 far as I can learn, took episcopal orders. 
 
 Seventeen new family names appear on the records between 
 1767 and 1784, those of Geers, Powers, Ranney, L,eete, Ruggles, 
 Hotchkin (Hotchkiss), Ebair, Hill, Miller, Fowler, Foote, 
 Smith, Hall, Cruttenden, Ingraham, Caldwell and Redfield. I 
 cannot be sure, however, that all of them belong to Guilford. 
 
 The next and last period of our early history, with which 
 the narrative reaches the point where the old records, newlj- 
 discovered, meet those long in our possession, measures sixteen 
 years. Opening July 5, 1784, it closes December 22, 1800, 
 within a few 'days of the beginning of this century. Throughout 
 most of this period the parish was engaged in efforts, more or 
 less successful, and made in connection with other parishes, to 
 secure clerical services. Such efforts, put forth in a time of 
 great weakness everywhere, show the inextinguishable energy 
 and courage with which the children and grandchildren of the 
 founders of the church sought to perpetuate the good work of 
 
 1 Conn. Cli. Docs., ii. 191. 
 
 2 Ch. Ch. Rec. 
 
 3 Christ Ch. Rec.; Sprague, Annals, v. 428; Perry's History of the American Episcopal 
 Church, ii. 189.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 57 
 
 their fathers. The effects of the war had been disastrous to the 
 cause of episcopacy, and the Venerable Society could not, under 
 its charter, employ missionaries outside of the British dominions. 
 All stipends were to cease on the twenty-ninth of September, 
 1785. * Guilford had never enjoyed a large share of the Society's 
 bounty, and for twenty years it had received nothing. Now, all 
 hope of assistance from that quarter was finally cut off. But 
 many congregations had leaned on the Society too heavily and 
 too long, and it was on the whole a very good thing for Ameri- 
 can Episcopalians that they were at last compelled to pay their 
 own bills. 2 The stimulating effect of the new situation seems 
 illustrated by the case of Branford, where the parish, flourishing 
 in 1766, then practically disappears from view until 1784, and 
 the organization must have lapsed. Life was not extinct, how- 
 ever, and the names of fifty-four members in the year last men- 
 tioned indicate greater strength than our own parish possessed. 
 And at Branford, on the fifth of July, 1784, a meeting was held 
 for consultation about the employment of a clergyman, in which 
 representatives of North Guilford and, undoubtedly, of Guil- 
 ford took part. The parishes wished to secure the services of 
 Mr. Ashbel Baldwin, of Ljtchfield, then a lay-reader waiting for 
 the coming of a Bishop to ordain him. Attention may have 
 been drawn to Mr. Baldwin by the fact that he had married, or 
 was soon to marry, a granddaughter of Captain Johnson of Guil- 
 ford. Her father, Mr. Samuel Johnson, was authorized to make 
 terms with Mr. Baldwin, and it would seem that the latter must 
 have shown some disposition to accept the cure, since on the 
 fifteenth of November the parishes voted to offer him, for a year, 
 ^"80 of the currency of the commonwealth (about ,40 sterling). 
 Branford paying half the amount. But by this time he had 
 probably received overtures from his birthplace, and he became 
 the incumbent of St. Michael's, Litchfield, on his ordination a 
 few months later. 3 But before the end of November Branford 
 had begun negotiations with another clergyman, the Rev. James 
 Sayre, and on the twentieth of December, 1784, this parish 
 
 1 Abst. ofS. P. G., 1785. 
 
 2 Conn. Ch. Docs., ii. 8, q. 
 
 3 Bailey's Trinity Church. 10, 20-1 ; Sprague's Annals, v. 352; Bronson's "Conn. Cur- 
 rency." 135-6, in .iV. H. Col. Hist. Soc. Pap., vol i. The date of Mr. Baldwin's marriage is 
 not known.
 
 58 Early History of 
 
 appointed a committee to act with representatives of Braiiford 
 and North Guilford in making an engagement with Mr. Sayre. 
 He appears to have served the three parishes during the year 
 1785, residing in Branford, and they desired to retain his send- 
 ees for another year. Guilford, seconded by North Guilfoid, 
 offered him inducements to remove his residence to the former 
 place. As one of these inducements was the payment of one- 
 fourth of the rent of a house it is clear that at that period (Jan- 
 uary, 1786,) this parish had no rectory, and the presumption 
 that it had never been able to purchase a glebe and house, as 
 required by the Venerable Society, is strengthened. Mr. Sayre, 
 however, could not be persuaded to keep the cure, and in Feb- 
 ruary, 1786, the three parishes were consulting about another 
 minister. Their late incumbent, a Scotchman by birth, though 
 a graduate of the college at Philadelphia, in the class of Bishop 
 White, was evidently a good and long a useful man. But his 
 conservatism was so intense and so stubborn that he refused to 
 accept the Prayer Book as revised in 1789 by the newly formed 
 Protestant Episcopal Church, tempted one or two Connecticut 
 parishes into flat rebellion, and finally died insane. 1 For two 
 years whatever pastoral oversight this parish enjoyed seems to 
 have been that of its old friend, Bela Hubbard. 
 
 In common with other parishes, however, our own had now 
 a share in the ministrations of a chief pastor. The first Ameri- 
 can Bishop, of what we call the Anglican Communion, Samuel 
 Seabury, had arrived in Connecticut in June, 1785, after having 
 obtained in Scotland, at the request of the clergy of Connecticut, 
 the consecration which was refused him in England. Complete 
 reports of Bishop Seabury's episcopal visitations do not exist, 
 but we know that he came to Guilford in July, 1786. On the 
 twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh of that month he had ordained 
 Benjamin Lindsay successively deacon and priest, and Mr. 
 Lindsay was then ' ' Licensed for North Carolina. ' ' : The Bishop 
 of Connecticut had for the time being, and in a certain degree, 
 taken the place once held with respect to the American churches 
 by the Bishop of London, and candidates for orders, from New 
 
 1 Bailey, 21-3; Rec. of Christ Ch.; Rec. of St. John's Ch. (North Guilford); Hist, of Ch. 
 in Conn., i. 415, 421-7 ; Life and Correspondence of Rev. William Smith, D. D., i. 365. 
 
 2 Journal of Connecticut Convention, 1882, p. 154.
 
 Ctnist Church Parish, G nil ford, Conn. 
 
 59 
 
 Hampshire to Georgia, now made the journey to Connecticut as 
 they would once have made the journey to England. Bishop 
 Seabury had as yet no jurisdiction beyond Connecticut, but 
 Episcopalians who recognized and sought the benefit of the 
 powers inherent in his office, would respect the licenses to offi- 
 
 LORENZO T. BENNETT, D. D. 
 
 ciate which he gave, as well as his letters of orders. That a 
 man should be made deacon one day and priest the next was in 
 accordance with Anglican usage, when the candidate (as, prob- 
 ably, in the present instance) could not conveniently remain 
 long within easy access to a Bishop. But it shows how little
 
 60 Early History of 
 
 importance was attached to the office of deacon, in itself consid- 
 ered, as is unhappily still the case. Whether confirmation was 
 administered at this time I have been unable to learn. But if 
 this was Bishop Seabury's first visit it seems almost certain that 
 Mr. Hubbard, who was present, had the happiness of claiming 
 the apostolic rite for the few surviving founders of the parish, 
 with their children and their grandchildren. Mr. Hubbard's 
 mother was still living, with her husband, 1 Captain Johnson, 
 and it would not be very hard to construct a long list of persons 
 who might then have been confirmed. Classes were large in 
 those days, when they often included all or most of the com- 
 municants of a congregation. Bishop Seabury is reported to 
 have found the church building so nearly a ruin that he thought 
 that little remained but to say the burial office over it. And if 
 other information is correct the structure may at least have been 
 reduced to something like the condition in which it was when 
 its builders first, began to use it, with unglazed windows. But 
 the "spiritual house," the real church, although it was also 
 weakened, and may even have become weaker, still stood, and 
 continued to stand, on the One Foundation. 
 
 Our own records fail us for nearly twelve years after August 
 28, 1786, or until April 23, 1798. The two Guilford parishes 
 and Branford did not maintain their association throughout this 
 period, and North Guilford, which now had a parsonage to offer, 
 seems to have attempted in 1787 to obtain the ministrations of 
 Ashbel Baldwin, asking two-thirds of his time. Mr. Baldwin, 
 one-half of whose time was required at Litchfield, was present 
 at a vestry-meeting at North Guilford in June of that year, and 
 probably gave the proposal serious consideration. It is not un- 
 likely that our own parish was expected to employ Mr. Baldwin 
 a third of the time, but he decided to remain at lyitchfield." 
 While the matter was pending, as I infer, Branford invited the 
 churchmen of the two Guilfords to share the privilege of 
 listening to the Rev. Dr. Learning on the Sunday after Easter- 
 
 1 Her name seems to have remained until her death on the list of members of the- 
 First Church. But it appears there only as that of the wife of Daniel Hubbard, and she 
 is likely to have become an Episcopalian with her father, brother and children. 
 
 2 St. John's Ch. Rec., North Guilford ; St. Michael's Ch. Rec.. I,itchfield, communicated 
 by the Rector, the Rev. Storrs O. Seymour.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 61 
 
 And when we find that in 1788 that parish is believed to have 
 passed under the charge of the Rev. Edward Blakeslee (then in 
 Deacon's orders), who remained there until April, 1790, one 
 conjectures, though one can do little more, that his cure may 
 have included Guilford, if not also North Guilford. 1 For the 
 year 1791 we have no information whatever. June i, 1792, 
 Bishop Seabury visited Killingworth and Guilford for consulta- 
 tion, and as a result the Rev. David Butler, ordained deacon on 
 the tenth of June, was licensed for the old cure of Bela Hub- 
 bard, including North Guilford. A year later, having been 
 ordained priest, he was regularly appointed to the cure. 2 Bran- 
 ford probably expected to have a minister of its own, though the 
 hope does not seem to have been realized. 3 During Mr. Butler's 
 incumbency confirmation was twice administered in each of his 
 three parishes. At the first visitation, October 17, 18 and 19, 
 1792, seven persons were confirmed in North Guilford, one in 
 Guilford and five in Killingworth ; at the second, in June, 1794, 
 twenty-four were confirmed in North Guilford, four in Guilford, 
 and twenty-seven in Killingworth. 4 The small size of the 
 classes at Guilford strengthens one's belief that most of those 
 of sufficient age had been confirmed in 1786. But it is also 
 probable that this church was at that time the least prosperous 
 of the three, and that St. John's, North Guilford, was the 
 strongest. And the fact that in 1794 the Bishop remained three 
 days, including a Sunday, at North Guilford, and gave but one 
 day to Guilford, confirms the opinion, otherwise supported, that 
 Mr. Butler's residence was at the former place, where was, 
 apparently, the only parsonage in the cure. At Killingworth, 
 where Mr. Hubbard had doubtless conducted occasional services 
 during the twenty-seven years which had passed since he relin- 
 quished the cure, and whither he took the Bishop in October, 
 1791, to meet the " scattered Church people," there seems to- 
 have been no church building. Bishop Seabury was therefore 
 twice indebted to the hospitality of Congregationalists for a 
 
 1 Bailey's Trinity Ch.. w.Journ. of Conn. Conv., 1882, pp. 157, 158. 
 
 2 Jour, of Conn. Conv.. 1882, p. 158 ; MS. Diary of Bishop Seabury. For the last refer- 
 ence I am indebted to the Rev. W. J. Seabury. D. D., of New York. 
 
 3 Bailey's Trinity Ch.. 22-3,32: Life of Seabury. 440. 
 
 4 Diary (by the kindness both of Dr. Seabury and of Dr. Hart, of Trinity College); 
 Life of Seabury. 426. 440.
 
 62 Early History of 
 
 place in which to exercise one of his chief episcopal functions. 
 And, perhaps largely because it had no house of worship, the 
 Killingworth congregation now disappears from our ecclesias- 
 tical records even more suddenly than it had appeared. We 
 hear no more of an Episcopal church there for eighty years, the 
 Church of the Holy Advent, Clinton, being organized as a wholly 
 new congregation, in 1874. 
 
 Mr. Butler is said to have assumed the rectorship of St. 
 Michael's Church, Litchfield, which Mr. Baldwin relinquished 
 in 1793, in June, 1794, but the records of St. John's, North 
 Guilford, show that he rendered clerical services there until Jan- 
 uary, 1795. He was afterwards for many years the highly 
 valued rector of St. Paul's Church, Troy, N. Y., and his son, 
 the Rev. Dr. Clement M. Butler, became distinguished as a 
 scholar and professor. * 
 
 For the three following years, 1795, 1796 and 1797, all sources 
 of information fail us, unless we apply to this period a family tra- 
 dition which asserts that for a while only two men went to 
 church, their families forming the congregation, and one of the 
 two reading service. ' As the parish showed some activity im- 
 mediately before and immediately afterwards, these years may 
 reasonably be regarded as the time when it reached the lowest 
 point of depression. It would seem that there was a raiding of 
 its energies at the close of the war, but that the difficulty of 
 securing permanent clerical services, and the weakness, not to 
 say the unpopularity, of the Church everywhere, discouraged its 
 supporters here. But the parish could not die as long as there 
 was even a single household whose members were weekly sum- 
 moned by its head to worship in God's House. On the twenty- 
 first of January, 1798, we find Dr. Hubbard spending a Sunday 
 in Guilford, and three months later (April 23) Charles Collins 
 and Thomas Powers were elected wardens. The same choice, 
 the second name being put first, was repeated for many years, 
 and Thomas Powers, the one man who, it is said, never even 
 thought of allowing his children to renounce the worship and 
 
 1 Sprague, Annals, v. 389-91 ; Gen. Conv.Jour., Reprint of Hawks and Perry, i. 175. 212. 
 
 2 Information given by Mrs. Daniel M. Prentice, a native of Guilford, and grand- 
 daughter of Mr. Thomas Powers, one of those mentioned above.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 63 
 
 order of the historic church, was the chief officer of this parish, 
 almost if not quite continuously, until two years before he died, 
 at the age of eighty, in 1822. * But these facts show that others, 
 who might have lost all hope, as good and faithful men have 
 sometimes been forced to do, proved their essential fidelity by 
 gathering again about the standard of the Prayer Book. What 
 had been probably the darkest period of our history was now 
 over. 
 
 On the sixteenth of May, 1798, it was voted that " M r 
 Friend Collens and Tim Johnson be a Committee with the 
 Wardens to repair the publick Building belonging to ' ' the con- 
 gregation. If the phrase "publick Building" describes the 
 church (and I do not know what else it can mean), it seems to 
 show a somewhat secularized conception of things ecclesiastical, 
 such as was common enough in those days. We wonder, too, 
 whether the dilapidations of the war had gone so long unre- 
 stored. If so, there had certainty seemed to be no help for it, 
 and the present action exhibits the reviving courage and higher 
 purpose of the people. At the beginning of the next year 
 (1799) rates were levied by the parish, as the existing law per- 
 mitted, and a committee was appointed, consisting of the two 
 last named, "to consult with the other parishes Respecting a 
 Minester." The " other parishes " were probably North Guil- 
 ford and Branford, nothing more being heard of Killingworth. 
 A word should be said here of those who may be called the 
 second founders of the parish, though others entitled to mention 
 must be passed by without notice. Thomas Powers, evidently 
 at this period the leading man, was not of Guilford stock, hav- 
 ing come here from Groton upwards of thirty years before. 
 Charles Collins, his associate in the wardenship, was, it would 
 seem, one of the younger children of Samuel Collins, the first 
 clerk of the parish. Friend Collins was the grandson of Oliver 
 Collins, the brother of Samuel, and his descendants remain 
 among us. Timothy Johnson was, I suppose, the grandson of 
 Captain Johnson by his son Nathaniel, and though a much 
 younger man than the others, was now clerk, and a very com- 
 
 i Christ Ch. Kec. (old and new); Smith's Hist. ofGnilfttrd. no.
 
 64 Early History of 
 
 petent one. The old families of the parish were therefore active 
 and useful, while it was proving the value of new blood. No 
 vestrymen had been elected at this date, the parish contenting 
 itself, as at the beginning of its history, with churchwardens 
 and clerk. 
 
 In the years 1799 and 1800 the Rev. Ashbel Baldwin, 
 though now settled at Stratford, is believed to have disposed of 
 some spare Sundays at Branford. And on the third of Decem- 
 ber, 1799, " this Society " directed its "Committee" (chosen 
 in November, and perhaps corresponding to a vestry), to engage 
 Mr. Baldwin for ten Sundays of the next year. Our records do 
 not inform us that the committee was successful, nor do those 
 of Stratford help us. But as Mr. Baldwin almost at the close of 
 his rectorship in the latter parish could give a third of his time 
 to Trumbull (1821-2) it is highly probable that he gave a fifth 
 of it to Guilford in the year 1800. Mr. Baldwin, so much in 
 request in this neighborhood, was for years one of the most im- 
 portant members of our Diocesan Convention, and was six times 
 elected secretary of the House of Deputies in the General Con- 
 vention. 1 He is still pleasantly remembered here by descend- 
 ants of his wife's family. 
 
 On the twenty-second of December, 1800, a committee was 
 appointed to meet committees from Branford and North Guil- 
 ford "to agree with them in procuring Mr. Burgis to preach 
 with us." Thus steps were taken which led to the first rector- 
 ship of the present century, Mr. Nathan Bennett Burgess, rep- 
 resented to-day among our communicants by his daughter, Mrs. 
 William Bushnell of Madison, being ordained the following 
 month, and serving the parish for the next five years. 2 
 Although it carries us a little beyond our limit, it is proper to 
 say that Branford seems never actually to have formed a part of 
 the cure of Mr. Burgess, and that the new " North Bristol Epis- 
 copal Society," organized in July, 1800, promptly took its place. 
 North Bristol (now North Madison) was then part of this town- 
 
 1 Christ L'h. Rec.; Bailey's Trinity Ch., 32 ; Jour. Conn. Conv., 1822, p. 6 ; Sprague 
 Annals, v. 352; Bishop White's Memoirs of the Protestant Episcopal Ch.. ad ed., 43,47, 50, 
 209, 216, 224. MS. notes in my copy of the Memoirs show that Mr. Baldwin disliked the 
 drudgery of his office. 
 
 2 Christ Ch. Rec.; Jour. Conn. Conv., 1882, p. 161.
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 65 
 
 ship, and Episcopalians living there, and still farther east, in 
 North Killingworth, had long been connected with St. John's 
 parish. Before Mr. Burgess resigned there were large additions 
 to the new congregation from North Killingworth, and what is 
 now known as Emmanuel Church was built a little east of the 
 Hammonassett (\vhich forms the boundary), in 1804. That 
 parish has therefore no historical connection with the earlier 
 congregation at Killingworth (Clinton), though when the town 
 was divided the northern portion took the ancient name, and the 
 present Killingworth church has sometimes been confounded 
 with that gathered by Bela Hubbard on the shore. 1 
 
 The numerical strength of this parish, at the close of our 
 last period, can only be vaguely estimated. Three years later, 
 on the first of January, 1804, a list of parishioners was begun, 
 which contains eighty-seven names, but it is not probable that 
 all were members of the congregation at one time. In the spring 
 of 1807 (March or May), a few months before the Rev. David 
 Baldwin began his long and faithful rectorship, the parish con- 
 tained forty families; in 1811 there were forty-eight, North 
 Killingworth then having forty-nine. On the whole, taking 
 into account the depressed condition of the church in the last 
 decade of the eighteenth century, it seems a fair inference that 
 it numbered much less than fort}' families in 1800, and that it 
 rapidly gained strength under Mr. Burgess. 2 
 
 The new names which appear during this period are nine ; 
 Parmelee, Halleck, Handy, Lee, Ames (or Amis), Hoadley, 
 Loyzell, Spencer and Loper. More than half of them have now 
 disappeared, and many which have long been household words 
 among us are absent from the records during the first half cen- 
 tury. One individual name, foremost from the beginning, 
 accompanies us almost to the close of our story. Captain 
 Nathaniel Johnson, having passed his eighty-eighth birthday, 
 laid aside a heavy load of age and misfortune on the twenty - 
 ninth of June, 1793. He survived his associate,. William Ward, 
 by more than thirty years. Edmund Ward had died in 1779; 
 
 1 Ibid.; Bailey's Trinity Of, 32 ; Emmanuel Ch. Kec. (kindly communicated by Rev. 
 W. C. Knowles, rector); St. John's Ch. Kec. 
 
 2 Christ Ch. Rec.;Journ. of Conn. Corn'., 1811, Reprint, p. 65.
 
 66 Early History of Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn. 
 
 Samuel Collins in 1784 ; Dr. Samuel Johnson, at least as much 
 concerned as an}- other native of Guilford in the task of laying 
 foundations here, in 1772. Captain Johnson may have been, as 
 it was fit that he should be, the last survivor of those whom 
 higher hands had framed into this our spiritual house fifty 
 years before. 
 
 In closing this long narrative, defective in spite of its length, 
 I need only say that the qualities which in a manner compelled 
 the church to live, and to live on for five generations, when hos- 
 tility and neglect combined with poverty and disappointment to 
 crush its life, are present in vigor to-day, as the admirable 
 achievement of the last few months has shown. We can trust 
 them to endure, and to perpetuate the life which they have 
 maintained, for five generations more, if they are still nourished 
 by that fear of God, and that love for the ordinances of Christ, 
 in which the life of this church began. It will still live, and 
 still glorify God and bless men, only as it still bears the dew of 
 its birth.
 
 WILLIAM G. ANDREWS, D. D.
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE. 
 
 Mr. Burgess seems to have held the rectorship until Sep- 
 tember i, 1805. He was born on the fourteenth of September, 
 1771, in that part of Woodbury which is now Washington. He 
 continued to reside in Connecticut, where he served two or three 
 parishes, until 1835. He was then transferred to the diocese of 
 New York, and long officiated in that portion of it which is now 
 Central New York. He died in Utica, February 20, 1854, at 
 the age of eighty-two. " His end was calm and peaceful." 
 
 I am informed that Mr. David Baldwin began to serve the 
 congregation in November, 1806. At that period candidates for 
 orders were allowed to preach, as do Congregational licentiates, 
 and though Mr. Baldwin was formally declared the choice of the 
 parish for its minister on the twelfth of the following March, he 
 was not ordained deacon until the first of September, 1807. He 
 was a native of Litchfield, where he was born February 4, 1780, 
 land he was the son of William Baldwin, a first cousin of the 
 clergyman so often mentioned in the latter part of the address. 
 His cure was the same as that of Mr. Burgess, including there- 
 fore North Guilford and North Killingworth, then still some- 
 times called North Bristol. In this cure Mr. Baldwin may be 
 said to have remained throughout his ministry of half a century, 
 since he held the last-named parish until 1858, when the infirm- 
 ities of age compelled him to desist from pastoral work. He 
 resigned the Guilford church, however, at Easter (March 30), 
 1834, immediately taking that at Branford, to which he gave a 
 third of his time for the next four years. He relinquished North 
 Guilford in 1851, but when he finally retired in 1858 he united
 
 jo Early History of 
 
 the cure of Zion Church, North Branford, with that of Killing- 
 worth. At this date, Bishop Williams, describing him as " The 
 Senior Presbyter of the Diocese," said that he "carried with 
 him into his retirement the affectionate veneration of his breth- 
 ren, and the blessing of those to whom he had so long and so 
 faithfully ministered." His home continued to be at Guilford, 
 where in 1816 he had married Ruth, the daughter of Wyllis 
 Elliot (a member of a family first named on our records in 1803) , 
 and where he died on the second of August, 1862. His connec- 
 tion with this community, and in some sense with this congrega- 
 tion, therefore lasted almost fifty-six years, throughout which he 
 was to all men a model of Christian fidelity. And the members 
 of his widely scattered flock, whom he never neglected in heat 
 or cold, in sunshine or storm, though often exposed, as he went 
 to and fro on horseback, to severe hardship, and to whom his 
 house was open for unstinted hospitality, found in him a noble 
 example of that unswerving devotion to pastoral duty which 
 distinguished the early representatives of Connecticut church- 
 manship. 
 
 From the first of July, 1834, until Easter Monday (April 
 21), 1835, the parish was under the care of a deacon, who was 
 ordained at the former date, and who preached his first sermon 
 in the old church on the Green, L,orenzo Thompson Bennett. 
 For the first time this congregation now claimed the entire ser- 
 vice of its minister. Mr. Bennett was temporarily separated 
 from a people already warmly attached to him, by an invitation 
 from Trinity Church, New Haven, of which he became assistant 
 minister. Three short rectorships followed. On the nineteenth 
 of May, 1835, the Rev. William Nassau Hawks was chosen 
 rector, but the failure of his voice compelled him to resign in 
 the following October. Mr. Hawks was a native of Newbern, 
 North Carolina, and the brother of two distinguished clergymen, 
 both of them, like himself, canonically connected for brief 
 periods with this diocese. One was Francis lyister Hawks, very 
 eminent for many years in New York. The other was Cicero 
 Stephens Hawks, for nearly twenty-four years Bishop of Mis- 
 souri. Mr. Hawks returned to his native state, where he was 
 able after a while to resume his ministry. During the latter
 
 Christ Chunk Parish, Guilford, Conn. 71 
 
 part of his life he was rector of Trinity Church, Columbus. 
 Georgia. He died, as I infer, early in the year 1866. On the 
 twenty-seventh of March, 1836, the Rev. Levi Hannaford Corson 
 assumed the rectorship, which he seems to have retained until 
 the nineteenth of March, 1838. Mr. Corson was ordained in 
 this diocese in 1831, and had served the parish at Windham. 
 While here he conducted a school, and I am told by one of his 
 pupils, Mr. Henry Rogers, formerly of Stony Creek, and now of 
 New Haven, that he furnished the design of the present church, 
 adapting it from that of St. Thomas's Church, New York, of 
 which Dr. F. L,. Hawks was then rector, and which stood on 
 the corner of Broadway and Houston street. The corner-stone 
 of our church was laid during Mr. Corson's rectorship, June 24, 
 1836, and Mr. Bennett came from New Haven to deliver the 
 address. Mr. Corson removed from Guilford to Branford, where 
 he succeeded Mr. Baldwin, and where he remained about two 
 years. He resided in the parish, as Mr. Baldwin had not done, 
 and " the parish flourished under his ministry." About 1840 
 he was transferred to Western New York, and before 1856 to 
 Michigan, where he continued his labors nearly thirty years 
 longer, for the last ten years at Jonesville. He died February 
 23, 1884, in his eighty-third year. On the eighth of April, 1838, 
 the Rev. Edward J. Darken, M. D., recently rector of Reading 
 and Weston, took charge of the parish, of which he continued 
 rector until the tenth of June, 1840. During his rectorship the 
 new church was consecrated by Bishop Brownell, December 12, 
 1838. In accepting his resignation the vestry testified to the 
 value of his " public ministrations." He remained for several 
 years in Connecticut, though not in eh-arge of a parish, and, if I 
 mistake not, engaged in the practice of medicine. He contin- 
 ued, however, to be a clergyman, and about 1844 was transferred 
 to the diocese of Massachusetts, and almost immediately, as it 
 would seem, to that of Illinois, thence going to England, of 
 which country he is said to have been a native, and where he is 
 supposed to have died. 
 
 On the twelfth of July, 1840, the Rev. L. T. Bennett was 
 heartily welcomed back to this parish, and began his mem- 
 orable rectorship of forty years. It was closed by his resigna-
 
 72 Early History of 
 
 tion, due to his advanced age, on the anniversary of his settle- 
 ment, July 12, 1880. He was still connected with the parish as 
 rector-emeritus, and assisted at the celebration of the Holy Com- 
 munion the day before his death, which occurred very suddenly 
 on the second of September, 1889. He had then nearly com- 
 pleted his eighty-fourth year, though apparently as vigorous in 
 body as he was in mind. Including his service here during his 
 diaconate, he had been a minister of this parish only about three 
 weeks less than half a century, while his ministry and Mr. Bald- 
 win's cover more than three-quarters of a century. In what 
 belongs to outward progress the most noteworthy event of Dr. 
 Bennett's rectorship was the erection, in 1872, at the cost of 
 $5,000, of a new chancel, in which the altar, the symbol and 
 chief instrument of worship, was raised to its proper place, and 
 which, as containing the two divisions of sanctuary and choir, 
 gave room for all parts of worship within its own limits. But a 
 still better evidence of the worth of his services to the congrega- 
 tion is the record of forty years of unbroken peace, accompanied 
 by a growing diligence and zeal in all Christian labors. Of all 
 that was admirable in Dr. Bennett's ministry it is impossible to 
 speak here, but his Bishop's testimony, given at the Diocesan 
 Convention of 1890, should be treasured in this parish: 
 " Wherever he had served and wherever he was known, his 
 memory is warmly cherished, and he is remembered with deep 
 respect, as a godly man and a faithful and self-sacrificing ' min- 
 ister of Christ.' As I stood by his grave on a calm, peaceful 
 and bright day in September la.st a day that was a fit emblem 
 of his character and life and committed his body to the earth 
 to await its resurrection, there came to my mind the words of 
 our Lord spoken of Nathaniel, 'An Israelite indeed in whom 
 there was no guile.' ' Dr. Bennett was born in Galway, Sara- 
 toga county, New York, November 13, 1805, though of Con- 
 necticut ancestry. His youth was spent in New Haven, under 
 the pastoral care of Dr. Harry Croswell, of Trinity Church. He 
 graduated at New Haven in 1825, and then received a commis- 
 sion in the navy, in which he served six or seven years. He 
 began his theological studies under Dr. Croswell while still a 
 lieutenant, and thus he belonged to Connecticut, as a man and
 
 Christ Church Parish, Guitford, Conn. 73" 
 
 a minister, as truly as in his pastoral life he belonged to Guil- 
 ford. A superb altar, made in Italy, has very recently been 
 presented as a memorial gift, by his daughter, Mrs. T. H. 
 Bishop, to the church in which her father was trained and began 
 his service in the priesthood, and of which she is herself a 
 member. 
 
 The present rector took charge on the Sunday after Easter 
 (April 24), 1881. 
 
 The parish now numbers (according to the report presented 
 to the Bishop in June, 1894,) one hundred and ten families, 
 with one hundred and sixty-five (registered) communicants. It 
 holds property which had yielded, during the year ending last 
 Kaster, $523.62, and the total amount of income and contribu- 
 tions for that year was $2,299.08. 
 
 NOTE The publisher is indebted to Miss Elizabeth M. Beardsley of 
 New Haven for the engraving of Dr. Johnson. It was prepared for the 
 late Dr. Beardsley's Life and Correspondence of Sainuel Johnson, and was 
 kindly forwarded by Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., of the Riverside 
 Press, Cambridge. The cut of the present rector of Christ Church was 
 loaned by the Rev. J. Frederick Sexton, of St. Peter's Church, Cheshire, 
 editor of The Rector's Assistant\-ao\i The Connecticut Churchman), in 
 which it first appeared. 
 
 POSTSCRIPT. 
 
 Since this address was put in type I have found 
 reason for believing that the admission to the Lord's 
 Supper of those who owned the covenant was not 
 uncommon in Connecticut. Some portions of the 
 address should therefore be considerably modified, 
 though it is of course impossible, now, to make the 
 changes.
 
 A 000105891 6