Halfway Brook

Laurilla and Zephina Smith saw Mrs. Willard (Emma Hart Willard) when they were in Hartford, in September 1821.

Soon after, Mrs. Willard opened her Female Seminary for boarding and day students, in Troy, New York. Finally, a school which offered mathematics, philosophy, geography, history, and science to women.

In 1823 Almira Hart Lincoln, Emma’s sister, became a teacher and Vice-Principal at Troy Female Seminary. A recent widow Almira, the youngest of seventeen children, had lived with the Smiths for several weeks (in 1813) so she could copy Laurilla’s paintings.

In January 1823 Emma Hart Willard, in her continual search for qualified teachers, wrote and asked Laurilla Smith to teach French. Julia did not want Laurilla to leave. But Laurilla wanted to go. So in February 1823 Laurilla, age thirty-four, left for Troy, New York, some 100 miles northwest of Glastenbury, Connecticut.

Learn Euclid, Teach French
Emma Willard needed someone to teach Euclidean geometry. She thought Julia would be that person. This was the plan: Mrs. Willard would teach geometry to Julia. To pay for those lessons Julia would teach French. After Julia learned Euclidean geometry, Julia would teach the subject to students at the Troy Female Seminary.

Hannah, Laurilla, Cyrinthia, Zephina, and Abby thought that was a good idea. Julia did not. Perhaps Laurilla’s tease that Julia would have to take a back seat to the young Eden ladies who (Laurilla said) “knew twenty languages,” was a challenge Julia could not pass up.

Julia quipped that she “would not take a back seat, for great books do not always make great scholars. When I see these young ladies I will ask them ‘nine plain questions’ from Steady Habits Vindicated; or, Nine Plain Questions to the People of Connecticut, a book on Federalism.” Many years later Julia commented to her friend Frances Burr:

I became a teacher of French and mathematics at Mrs. Willard’s and taught these very same young ladies, Aaron Burr’s friends, the Misses Eden, who knew so much. I wrote home that these young ladies who were going to make me take a back seat, were my scholars.
—Abby, Laurilla, and Mary Ann, p. 114.

Emma Hart was the sixteenth child of Samuel Hart and the ninth child of Mr. Hart and his second wife Lydia. Samuel encouraged his daughter Emma to love learning, reading, and to think for herself.

In 1802 when Laurilla and Cyrinthia Smith attended Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Female Academy, Emma Hart, fifteen, attended the Berlin Academy in Connecticut, for the first time. By 1806 Emma was in charge of the academy for a term.

In 1807 Emma was principal of the Middlebury Female Seminary, in Vermont, where Emma met and married physician John Willard.

(In March of 1813 Emma’s younger sister Almira Hart stayed at the Smith home for three or four weeks to copy Laurilla’s paintings.)

In 1814 Emma, champion for equal education for young women, opened a boarding school for girls in her own home (in Vermont) so they could study the same subjects her nephew took at College.

Emma Hart Willard strongly believed that young women should be offered the same subjects as men took in college. At the time finishing schools, which mainly taught social graces, were thought to be the correct education for girls. Emma faced similar opposition to educating women as Sarah Pierce had in 1790.

Using her teaching experience in Vermont, Emma wrote a pamphlet, A Plan for Improving Female Education. In 1819 hoping the New York Legislature would fund a seminary for women as they did men’s schools, Emma presented her plan. She explained that some of the weakness in female education was because the Legislatures undervalued “the importance of women in society.” Finishing schools, which majored on protocols and etiquette, were expensive and not a good value. “Another error” was that educating women had been “to prepare them to please” men. Continue reading →

James Eldred Homestead
At the end of 1815 James Eldred, his wife Polly Mulford, and their five children arrived from Orange County, New York. Ten days later their daughter Phebe Maria Eldred was born.

The Eldreds settled in a log cabin beside a sawmill on two cleared acres near the middle of Halfway Brook, two miles north of the Hickok family. There was no building for a mile in any direction.

The northwest corner of Mr. Eldred’s property was the location for the future Halfway Brook Village—much later renamed Eldred.

James Eldred lumbered and farmed. He became involved with the local government, overseeing schools, and building roads in this new community. (James and his children play a significant role in the life of Asa’s daughter Hannah.)

One Clock, Three Watches
In 1816 only four frame houses, nine frame barns, and a gristmill sat on Lumberland’s large acreage. The animals included 19 horses, 34 oxen, and 34 cows. There were ten wagons. One person owned a clock which furnished the time for the town. James Eldred owned one of three watches.

Congregational Church
A Congregational Church met in log cabins and barns in remote areas near the Delaware River, in Lumberland. In the fall of 1814 some of the meetings were held at the Hickok Farm.

In 1815 Sylvia Hickok, daughter of Asa and Esther, died at the age of thirty-four. Sylvia was buried in what is now the Old Eldred Cemetery.

In September 1818 revival meetings were held in the Hickok barn. The entire Hickok Family joined the church. As did James and Polly Eldred.

The following year James Eldred, a careful Bible student, was elected a church deacon. Church Services were then held at the home of James and Polly Eldred.

The meetings were so meaningful that at the 1899 Eldred Church Centennial, James’s daughter Eliza Eldred Gardner, at age ninety-nine, commented, “If I were thirty years younger, I would walk up to Eldred, even in a storm, if I might see the same spirit of love there, now, that I saw in those early days.”

In the 1780s Hannah Hickok Smith borrowed and diligently read her uncle Asa Hickok’s geography book. From 1802 to 1812 Uncle Asa, Aunt Esther, and their six children (Hannah Smith’s first cousins) lived in Burlington, part of original Farmington, Connecticut.

In 1812 Asa and Esther and their children: Hannah Hickok (age twenty-three), Reuben, Sylvia, Louisa, Justus, and David (his wife and son Asa Royer Hickok), left Burlington. Their journey of 125 miles took them across the Hudson River, to the remote, rugged wilderness region of Lumberland, in Sullivan County, New York.

This Hickoks settled on property two miles north of the Delaware River. Nearby Halfway Brook rambled through the middle of Lumberland’s 150,000 acres of rolling hills carpeted with huge, ancient trees, interspersed with streams and ponds.

Asa and his sons built their house and barn on land which today includes Hickok Falls on Hickok Brook. Hickok Brook connected with Halfway Brook on its way south to the Delaware River, the town’s southwestern boundary, and the New York-Pennsylvania border. The family built a sawmill near the Hickok Brook and Falls. (Asa’s brother Gideon had run a sawmill in the Greenville, New York area.)

Near the juncture of Halfway Brook and the Delaware River was a hamlet, later called Barryville. A crude, rope-guided ferry was the only way to cross the Delaware River from Barryville south to Shohola, Pennsylvania.

In 1854 Abby and Laurilla Smith crossed from Pennsylvania to New York, on that same ferry. Abby found Lumberland a pleasant place which agreed with her health. Laurilla, the artist, took notice of Halfway Brook. Continue reading →

It was the start of a new century. Daily life continued much the same for Zephaniah and Hannah Hickok Smith, of Glastenbury, Connecticut.

Along with Zephaniah’s law practice, the couple maintained (or hired help for) their large two-story house (Kimberly Mansion) on 133 acres. And tried to keep one step ahead of their five especially bright young daughters (ages three to thirteen), Zephina, Cyrinthia, Laurilla, Julia, and Abby.

Hannah organized and assigned responsibilities to her daughters. Outdoor tasks included tending the gardens and orchard and caring for the animals. Inside there were meals to be made, dishes to be washed, ironing, sewing, spinning, weaving, cooking, and a multitude of other tasks.

But always there was reading!

In 1800 the Smith parents considered two schools in Connecticut: Sarah Pierce’s Female Academy in Litchfield, and the Norwich Boys Academy (which allowed girls to attend). Both schools were boarding situations.

Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Female Academy
Miss Sarah Pierce, a descendant of the early New Englanders, believed that women and men were intellectually equal. Convinced that girls should be taught the same subjects as boys, Sarah founded the Litchfield Female Academy, one of the earliest schools for girls in the United States.

Miss Sally, as her students called her, wisely integrated an innovative curriculum of academic subjects with the usual “female” skills (that parents expected their daughters to learn) which included music, dancing, singing, needlework, drawing, and painting.

Geography and history lessons were reinforced with maps and charts the students drew and painted. Students’ embroideries and watercolor paintings illustrated poetry, literature, myths, and Bible stories. Continue reading →