Jump to content
Main menu
Main menu
move to sidebar
hide
Navigation
Main page
Recent changes
Random page
Help about MediaWiki
Special pages
Niidae Wiki
Search
Search
Appearance
Create account
Log in
Personal tools
Create account
Log in
Pages for logged out editors
learn more
Contributions
Talk
Editing
North Stonington, Connecticut
(section)
Page
Discussion
English
Read
Edit
View history
Tools
Tools
move to sidebar
hide
Actions
Read
Edit
View history
General
What links here
Related changes
Page information
Appearance
move to sidebar
hide
Warning:
You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you
log in
or
create an account
, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
Anti-spam check. Do
not
fill this in!
===Colonial era and Revolutionary War: 1670sβ1770s=== For much of the 17th century, North Stonington was thinly populated by the Pequots and European settlers. Starting in the [[1630s]] and [[1640s]], the English established coastline settlements in Wequetequock, which is now [[Old Mystic, Connecticut|Old Mystic]], and [[Pawcatuck, Connecticut|Pawcatuck]]. However, the pressure of a growing population and continued immigration in succeeding decades caused homesteading to steadily push northward. The end of hostilities following [[King Philip's War]] of 1676 and a partial resolution of border disputes among [[Connecticut Colony|Connecticut]], [[Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations|Rhode Island]], and [[Massachusetts Bay Colony|Massachusetts]] colonies also encouraged enterprising pioneers to move inland to stake claims. The first settlers to North Stonington were Ezekiel Main and Jeremiah Burch in 1667, who established settlements in the areas which became the village of North Stonington and Clark's Falls, respectively. Main was formerly of Massachusetts; he had served in King Philip's War and received a land grant in return for his military service. Burch had been a [[blacksmith]] in England before making the crossing to America and establishing a land stake. Other pioneers soon followed; families arrived during the 1670s and 1680s who formed the backbone of the town. They were the Mains, Miners, Wheelers, Browns, Palmers, Hewitts, and Averys, to name a few. Among those were John Swan and his family in 1707, for whom Swantown Road is named. For most of the [[18th century]], the town's inhabitants focused on carving out homesteads and farms from virgin forests. This was a slow, generations-long process, as pioneers [[girdling|girdled]] massive, centuries-old trees until they rotted and fell to the ground, and then began the difficult work of clearing ground and moving boulders. Roads began to be forged through the receding wilderness, beyond just cattle paths and old Pequot trails. Colonial surveyors in 1753 marked out the future route of the Pawcatuck-Voluntown Road (today known as [[Connecticut Route 49|Route 49]]). One of those who worked on this project was 16-year-old [[Silas Deane]], who later represented Connecticut during the [[First Continental Congress|First]] and [[Second Continental Congress]] and served briefly as one of the United States' first diplomats in [[France]]. In 1768, a weekly stagecoach was opened between [[Norwich, Connecticut]] and [[Providence, Rhode Island]] via North Stonington and Pawcatuck; this road became the Norwich-Westerly Road, today known as [[Connecticut Route 2|Route 2]]. The reluctance of settlers to walk the great distance every Sunday to the Road Church in Stonington led to the establishment of a northern [[Congregationalism in the United States|Congregational society]] in 1717, in which the northern part of Stonington aimed to build its own meeting house. This "North Society" defined a boundary line that is identical to the border today between North Stonington and Stonington, although disagreements lasted until 1723 concerning this line and the location of the northern meeting house, requiring the colonial assembly's intervention several times. In 1724, North Stonington gained its name by decree of the Connecticut Assembly. A church was finally erected in 1727 located on a knoll at the junction of Wyassup and Reutemann roads. It gained a permanent minister in 1731, when the Rev. Joseph Fish arrived, newly ordained from [[Harvard College|Harvard]]; he served until his death at 76 in 1781. This meeting house stood for about a century and became known as the "Black Church", perhaps because its board walls were never painted and became dark with age. [[Image:Narragansett Trail - First Baptist Church on Pendleton Hill (opposite Groton Sportsman Club preserve).jpg|thumb|left|300px|First Baptist Church on Pendleton Hill in 2011]] The [[First Great Awakening|Great Awakening]] swept through the American colonies in the early- to mid-1740s. One of the main results of this [[Christian revival|revivalist]] movement was the rapid growth of the [[Baptists|Baptist Church]] in America, and North Stonington became a bastion of this denomination in Connecticut. Much of the congregation for this church came from Rev. Fish's flock, and the new Baptists established their own meeting house in 1743. This was the first Baptist church for both Stonington and North Stonington. The original building sat a couple miles south of the 1830 church atop Pendleton Hill on land donated by Luther Palmer in the town's northeastern corner. A stone marker is at the site of the original church. Turmoil within Rev. Fish's congregation culminated in the departure of another group that formed a "Strict Congregationalist Church" in 1746 more than a mile west of the Village. This schism was deeply traumatic for the Rev. Fish, who later wrote that the "order of families as well as of churches and religious families, is vilely broke, dissolved and lostβ¦ the reins of government are thrown upon the neck, and nothing but anarchy and confusion reigns." During 1817β1827, the Congregationalist and Strict Congregationalist churches reunited and built a common church, which is the current location of the town's Congregational Church. The establishment of the other two Baptist churches was considerably less dramatic. The Rev. Waite Palmer organized the Second Baptist Church in 1765, located at the intersection of Pendleton Hill Road and Stillman Road. The third Baptist Church was established in 1828 to serve the rapidly growing population of millworkers in the village of North Stonington. Men from the town participated in the [[French and Indian War]] of the 1760s; some marched as far as the [[Battle of the Thousand Islands|siege of Montreal]]. But it was the [[American Revolutionary War|Revolutionary War]] that garnered the town's enthusiasm. It is difficult to determine the precise number of townsmen who joined the fight, given that North Stonington still formed part of Stonington and clerks did not distinguish between the two locales. However, pension records and other documents from the 19th century indicate that numerous men joined various Continental and militia units, particularly the 6th and 8th Militia Regiments, the latter of which joined Gen. George Washington's army in the [[Battle of Long Island]] in the autumn of 1776. Three North Society men assumed notable roles in the war: * Thomas Wheeler served first as a junior officer in the militia during a successful standoff against a British naval raiding party against Stonington Borough in August 1775, then served as a company commander in the Eighth Regiment of Militia during the following year's campaign in New York. * Elias Sanford Palmer served as a lieutenant in Wadsworth's Brigade during the Long Island campaign in late 1776 and remained in the militia service during the war and beyond; by the 1790s, he was commander of the 30th Militia Regiment. * Charles Hewitt, an enlisted man, was part of a 40-member raiding party that captured General [[Richard Prescott]] at his home in [[Newport, Rhode Island]] during the night of July 10, 1777. Prescott was the British commander of a large occupation force of [[Hessian soldiers]]. In contrast to Wheeler and Palmer, Hewitt died young, perishing of [[yellow fever]] while at sea in 1779.
Summary:
Please note that all contributions to Niidae Wiki may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see
Encyclopedia:Copyrights
for details).
Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)
Search
Search
Editing
North Stonington, Connecticut
(section)
Add topic