TERCENTENARY COMMISSION OF THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT COMMITTEE ON HISTORICAL PUBLICATIONS LIV Migrations from Connecticut after 1800 LOIS KIMBALL MATHEWS ROSENBERRY PUBLISHED FOR THE TERCENTENARY COMMISSION BY THE YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS ry/4.b I936 TER LIV Cc cticut State Library Lib; <y S f-vice Center 786 South I via in Street 50008375; Middletown, Connecticut 06457 TERCENTENARY COMMISSION OF THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT COMMITTEE ON HISTORICAL PUBLICATIONS LIV Migrations from Connecticut after 1800 LOIS KIMBALL MATHEWS ROSENBERRY1 I HE keynote to the history of the United States in the nineteenth century is to be found in its westward expansion. The pur- chase of the Louisiana territory in 1803 Tdoubled the area of the United States, thereby facilitat- ing the opportunity for new settlements. No state, in proportion to its size and population, played a more important role in this expansion than Connecticut. In a previous study2 there has been shown the large emigration, after 1783, from Connecticut, western Massachusetts, and Vermont (both districts originally settled by pioneers from Connecticut) into central and western New York. This emigration continued after 1800, and was typical of later emigration into the North- west Territory. The restless and discontented elements often moved first; but the next settlers were a more sub- stantial group, farmers in the "meridian of life" whose families made up the settlements. Generally, they were 'The author is indebted to Mr. Roland Mather Hooker for assistance in putting the manuscript into final form. 2 See Lois K. M. Rosenberry, Migrations from Connecticut prior to 1800 (No. XXVIII in this series). supplied with enough money not only to buy farms, but also to make improvements, and therefore were exempt from the privations of the earlier pioneers who had sold out to these later comers and migrated farther west. Mechanics followed farmers, with the hope of attaining greater prosperity than they had enjoyed in their old homes, "by adding the business of a farm to their mechanic employment." Mills were erected, and the whole community took on an appearance of permanence, which it had lacked in the earlier days. Here, however, in consequence of the intermixture of emigrants, diversity in thought and taste was apparent; the churches, town meetings, and schools were no longer precisely of the Puritan type, though the traditions of all were preserved in the new institutions. With the arrival of the first emigrants from Connecticut, in the early days of New York, the incoming missionaries had been a great stimu- lus to education, and as the interior of the state offered them opportunity, churches were widely extended as the population increased. Yet, "Every new method in religion, every new suggestion in theology, found hospi- table reception there," though the theories were not always sane or practical. Warsaw will serve as a type of the growth of a town in New York between 1812, and 1837. Settled in 1803-1804 from Vermont by way of Granville, it had not many inhabitants in its early years. One of the early settlers, at the age of forty, had already moved six times since, in his childhood, his parents had left his birthplace of Bozrah, Connecticut. In Colchester and Hebron, in Sandisfield and Great Barrington, in Green River and Genesee, he had tried his luck, and had finally settled in Warsaw. Many of his neighbors came from the Con- necticut towns of Canaan, Lebanon, Canterbury, Chesh- 1 ire, Hartford,Warren, Guilford, Hartland, and Colchester. After the War of 1812 the interest in settlement cen- tered elsewhere; "the West" moved on into Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The overflow from New England still carried settlers to New York and Pennsylvania; but the process was one of filling in those states whose organization had been perfected, and whose institutions had passed beyond the formative stage. The emigrants from New England took their thrift and enterprise with them, and contributed substantially to the prosperity of their adopted homes. It seemed to Timothy Dwight that the inhabitants of New York and New England were substantially one people, "with the same interests of every kind inseparably united." That observant traveler noted the increase in New York's population from 1790 when it was 340,120, through 1800 when it was 484,620, till 1810 when it had reached 959,220. He estimated that from three fifths to two thirds of this increase had originated from New England, and thought the population increasing continually; he considered New York would be ultimately but "a Colony from New- England," whose inhabitants crowded in for commercial as well as agricultural betterment. This Connecticut and New England invasion of New York, while well received by those who had lived there previously, had at least one interesting result in the founding by Washington Irving, in 1835, of a society of "old New Yorkers," which be- came known as the St. Nicholas Society, to combat the growing social influence of New Englanders in New York City. II BEFORE discussing the migrations to the Western states, mention must be made of Connecticut's influence in the 3 South. Lewis Judson of Stratford founded in Mobile, Alabama, soon after 1795, the trading establishment of John Forbes and Company, and Josiah Blakeley of New Haven moved to the same place about 1806, after a six- year residence in Santiago de Cuba. Joseph E. Sheffield, a native of Southport, Connecticut, and the founder of the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, was the leading cotton merchant in Mobile for some years prior to 1835. Significant, for the education of Southern women, was the incorporation in 1831 of the Huntsville Female Semi- nary at Huntsville, Alabama, an institution which has had a long and successful history. It was organized and carried on for a time by Miss Frances Strong and three other members who had been on the faculty of Miss Catherine Beecher's school, the Hartford Female Semi- nary. Farther to the south and west lies Texas. In 1820 Moses Austin made plans to remove his family and others in a colony to this Spanish outpost which lay on the extreme southwestern border of the great Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Born in Durham, Connecticut, in 1761, reared in Middletown, Moses Austin moved, as a young man, just at the close of the Revolutionary War, to Philadelphia. He had become interested in lead min- ing and smelting as he had seen it in Middletown, and, after a short sojourn, removed to Virginia, where oppor- tunities in this industry seemed larger. In 1798 he moved to Missouri where he established the town of Potosi "to which his own contribution was an improved fur- nace, a shot-tower and a mill for making sheet-lead, a saw-mill, a flour-mill, a store, and a house for his family." Here he prospered, and in 1816 he joined with others in organizing the Bank of St. Louis. But the panic of 1819 swept away everything he possessed, and it was then 4 that he made plans to move to Texas. He died before the transplanting of his colony was completed, and it was his son, Stephen, who became known as the founder of Texas. Ill TURNING again to the North, the settlements of Marietta and of the Western Reserve in Ohio belonged, in their inception, to the period before the election of Thomas Jefferson, although the greatest emigrations came after that event. A typical pioneer was James Kilbourne, born in New Britain, Connecticut. In 1802 he formed a com- pany, with seven associates, to move to the Northwest Territory. Kilbourne went ahead to explore the country and to pick out a tract for forty families. Upon his return a Scioto Company was formed, forty persons admitted, and the articles of association signed. In 1803 a school- house, a log church, a blacksmith shop, and twelve cabins were erected where Worthington now stands. A hundred persons settled there that year. Here was founded the first Episcopal church in Ohio; and Worthington College, with Kilbourne as president of the board of trustees, was chartered in 1817. Nor did that energetic pioneer confine his labors to his own town; he also served in the Ohio legislature and in congress. By 1810 the frontier line in Ohio extended in a curve from the shore of Lake Erie to the western border of the state. Connecticut men and women had built homes in half of the Western Reserve, in the Marietta region, and were scattered throughout the central and southern parts of the state as well. The War of 1812 retarded settlement in Ohio, due to fear of the Indians, but with the signing of the treaty of peace new lands were opened up and economic conditions in the East attendant upon the war 5 also stimulated emigration. The last years of the conflict had borne hard upon the population of the New England coast, what with the embargo, the seizure of numbers of coasting vessels, and coastal attacks such as that at- tempted upon Stonington. Prices had risen, in conse- quence of the war as well as from a succession of poor seasons for agriculture. Many persons who had been fairly prosperous before the war found themselves beg- gared and forced to begin life anew. Stimulated by re- ports of returning settlers and travelers, emigrants hastened again into the wilderness, pushing the frontier out to the Mississippi. The sales of public lands increased up to 1819, when the panic of that year caused a tem- porary decline; after 1822 the sales again increased; speculation reached a climax just before the panic of 1837. The abandonment, by the Government, of the credit system of land sales in 1821 probably affected the Connecticut emigrants but little, for they were accus- tomed to pay for their lands at once, and to make improve- ments with their remaining capital.