THE
TWO HUNDREDTH
ANNIVERSARY

OF THE SETTLEMENT OF THE TOWN OF

NEW MILFORD, CONN.

June 17th, 1907.

ADDRESS
DELIVERED BY
DANIEL DAVENPORT,
Of Bridgeport, Conn.

Press of
The Buckingham, Brewer & Platt Co.
Bridgeport, Conn.

ADDRESS

DELIVERED AT NEW MILFORD, CONN., JUNE 17TH, 1907,
BY DANIEL DAVENPORT OF BRIDGEPORT, CONN.,
ON THE TWO HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY
OF THE SETTLEMENT OF THE TOWN.

The settlement of New Milford began in 1707, exactly a century after that of Jamestown, Va. At that time, although Milford and Stratford at the mouth of the Housatonic had been settled almost seventy years, and the river afforded a convenient highway into the interior, for much of the distance, this place, only thirty miles from the north shore of Long Island Sound, was still beyond the extreme northwestern frontier of New England, and indeed of English North America.

The inhabitants of Connecticut then numbered about fifteen thousand, settled in thirty towns, mostly along the shore of Long Island Sound, and upon the banks of the Connecticut and Thames Rivers. During the thirty years next before, a few families from Norwalk had settled at Danbury, from Stratford at Woodbury, from Milford at Derby, and from Farmington at Waterbury. With these exceptions, hardly more than pin points upon the map, and a few settlements about Albany, N. Y., the whole of western and northwestern Connecticut and of western Massachusetts and northern New York was a savage wilderness, covered with dense forests, and affording almost perfect concealment for the operations of savage warfare.

Though the northwestern portion of Connecticut was then a most formidable and inhospitable wilderness, strenuous efforts were already being put forth by the Colony to encourage its settlement. For, strange as it seems to us now, at that time, owing to imperfect modes of cultivation and the difficulty of subduing the wilderness, the settled portions of the Commonwealth had begun to feel overpopulated. Twenty-five years before, the Secretary of the Colony had reported to the Home Government, that "in this mountainous, rocky and swampy province" most of the arable land was taken up, and the remainder was hardly worth tillage.

This need of more land, and the protection from invasion which the settlement of this section would afford the communities near the coast, and the innate love of adventure and desire to subdue the wilderness which have characterized the American people from the beginning, were the impelling causes which led to the planting of New Milford.

So pressing did this movement become that, though what is now Litchfield County was then as remote and inaccessible to the rest of the Colony, as were Indiana and Illinois to our fathers in the middle of the last century, within forty-five years after the first settler had built his log cabin and lighted his fire here, twelve towns had been settled and the county organized with a population of more than ten thousand.

In order that we may appreciate, somewhat, the broader political conditions under which the first settlers took up their abode here, which largely engrossed their thoughts and vitally affected them and their children for two generations, it is necessary, before taking up the narrative of their actual settlement here, to advert briefly to the state of affairs at that time in England, and on the continent of Europe, and in the English, French and Spanish Colonies of North America.

By 1707, it had become apparent to the people of Connecticut that, soon or late, they must fight for the very existence of their chartered privileges and natural rights, not alone the British Crown, but the English people. The disposition of the people of England to reap where they had not sown had become very clear. In April, 1701, Connecticut was named in the bill then introduced in Parliament to abrogate all American charters. She resisted with all her might through her agent, but it passed the second reading, and would have become a law but for the breaking out of the French War. Its principle was supported by the mercantile interests and the great men of England. Then for the first time the people of Connecticut fully realized that their foes were to be, not the exiled house of Stuart, but the English people themselves, and that though they changed their dynasties they did not change their own nature.

In 1707, the principal kingdoms of Europe and their colonies were ablaze with war. Anne was Queen of England. In that very year she attached her signature to that long projected and most important constitutional arrangement, the Act of Union between England and Scotland, which made them one kingdom, the crown of which, by the Act of Settlement passed a few years before, had been forever vested in the person and heirs of Sophia, the electress of Hanover, the present reigning dynasty. Anne's accession to the throne in 1702 had been followed by the acknowledgement, by Louis XIV, of the son of James II, the deposed and fugitive king of England and the determined foe of the rights of the Colonists, as the rightful king, although in the Treaty of Ryswick, in 1697, he had solemnly stipulated to the contrary. This act of perfidy roused the English to fury. The primary cause of the war, then raging, was the acceptance by Louis of the crown of Spain for his grandson Philip despite a previous formal renunciation. But the immediate occasion was his espousal of the cause of the son of James II as pretender to the British throne, which enabled the English Government to form a great European alliance to wrest Spain from Philip and prevent Louis from becoming the absolute master of Europe.

The year before, 1706, had witnessed the humbling of the pride and ambition of Louis by the defeat of his armies, at Ramillies by the Duke of Marlborough, in Piedmont by Prince Eugene, and in Spain by Lord Galway. Charles XII of Sweden had advanced to Dresden in Saxony, an English and Portuguese army had occupied Madrid, and an attack of the combined fleets of Spain and France upon Charlestown, S. C., then claimed by Spain as a part of Florida, had been repulsed by the vigor and martial skill of the Colonial authorities.

At that time, the valley of the St. Lawrence was occupied by about fifty thousand French settlers, imbued with bitter hostility towards the settlers in New England and New York. Already the vast design of LaSalle to acquire for the King of France the whole interior of the Continent seemed to have been accomplished. While as yet the English were struggling to secure a foothold upon the Atlantic seaboard, the French had explored the Mississippi and its tributaries to its mouth, and the whole vast region drained by them, between the Alleghanies and the Rockies, had been taken possession of by the French under the name of Louisiana, and a chain of military and trading posts from New Orleans to the St. Lawrence, admirably chosen for the purpose, had been established to hold it, and another chain was already planned to extend southward along the west side of the Alleghanies, to forever keep out the English. The French had been for fifty years hounding on the numerous tribes of Canada and northern New England to attack and exterminate the settlers of New England. The conquest of Canada by the English was therefore an object of the