“They put the fishnet into the river, but they catched no shad.”—David Hickok, South Britain, Connecticut, April 1771.
Shad, a fish in the herring family, was prevalent in early Farmington and the Great River, now known as the Housatonic River, Southbury’s southwestern border.
David Hickok was the older brother of my ancestor Asa Hickok, who settled in Lumberland. David and Asa each had a daughter named Hannah Hickok.
David Hickok was involved in at least one skirmish in the French-Indian War. He spoke fluent French, which he learned at Yale College. David was not able to complete a college degree because of health issues, which continued to plague him.
David was a mathematician, astronomer, teacher, farmer, inventor, and watchmaker. For a few years David taught “scholars” in the Bullet Hill School District of Southbury. (It is not known for sure if a school was there at the time.)
In his 1769–1783 journals, David detailed daily life in the South Britain section of Southbury, Connecticut. David built fences, planted, harvested or threshed grains, paid his rates (taxes), traded for rumb at Ensign Hinman’s, took grain to the Levenworth Mill, took apples to the mill to be made into cider, “measured a bushel of corn” for his pigs, helped rebuild bridges, wound many wruns of linen thread (which he had processed) or wool (from their sheep), and helped his wife with her weaving.
Some terms from David’s journals and other sources
(included in Abby, Laurilla, and Mary Ann)
• Cradle: A scythe set in a frame of wood with a row of long curved teeth projecting above and parallel to the scythe. A cradle laid the grain in bunches as it was cut.
• Hogshead: In America, a cask containing from 110 to 120 gallons; as a hogshead of spirit or molasses. “Hogshead” was possibly a corruption of the Germanic word for “oxhead.” It may be “the name arose from the branding of such a measure with the head of an ox.”—Webster’s 1828 Dictionary; Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911.
• Quill: spool or bobbin.
• Sheaves: bundles of grain stalks of wheat, rye, oats or barley stacked lengthwise and tied together.
• Shock: sixteen sheaves of wheat, rye, or other grains.
• Wrun/run: A run of spun wool is 1600 yards.
Locations of David’s Journals
(Some entries may have been transcribed by his daughter.)
• Connecticut State Library: Diary of David Hickok, 1771–1783 covers 1771 and a few entries for 1775, 1776, 1778 and 1783.
• Historical Society of Glastonbury: David Hickok’s Diary, 1769–1770.
Lake George is without comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw; formed by a contour of mountains into a basin…finely interspersed with islands, its water limpid as crystal, and the mountain sides covered with rich groves…here and there precipices of rock to checker the scene and save it from monotony. —Thomas Jefferson, May 1791.
Hudson River, Lake George, and Lake Champlain created a waterway connecting New York City, in Britain’s New York Province, to Montreal, in French-Canadian territory. The French and English built garrisons or forts along that inland water route.
Lake George in northeastern New York is 32 miles north-south, almost four miles wide, and up to 200 feet deep. The short La Chute River drops 230 feet from the north of Lake George, as it drains into the southern end of 107-mile-long Lake Champlain.
Lake Champlain, 14 miles at its widest point, lies mainly in Vermont and New York and reaches to St. Johns (Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu), Quebec, Canada.
In 1734 the French built Fort St. Frédéric on Lake Champlain, some 105 miles south of St. Jean (John).
In 1755 the French built the star Fort Carillon ten miles south of Fort St. Frédéric, where La Chute enters Lake Champlain near northern Lake George. The fort will be the British Ticonderoga.
In 1755 the British built Fort William Henry (40 miles southwest of Fort Carillon) and Fort George (southeast of Fort William Henry) at the southern end of Lake George. The same year the British also built Fort Edward, 15 miles south and a bit east of Fort George, near where the Hudson River veers west.
The French destroyed Fort St. Frédéric in the summer of 1759, before the British army arrived.
Taking a short break from the 1700s. Here is a photo I think was taken in the Town of Highland, I assume at either the Eldred or Barryville Methodist Church. I love the round glasses.
My grandmother Myrtie Briggs is second from the left, on the front row. The lady to her right looks familiar, but I don’t know who she is.
Does anyone know the other people?
The Julian Calendar, which the English continued to use from 1582–1752, started the new year on March 25. So December was the tenth month.
Parliament declared that the day after September 2, 1752 was to be September 14, 1752. The change to the Gregorian Calendar, happened in several steps:
• December 31, 1750 was followed by January 1, 1750.
• March 24, 1750 was followed by March 25, 1751.
• December 31, 1751 was followed by January 1, 1752
• September 2, 1752 was followed by September 14, 1752.
By September 14, 1752 the English (including the Colonies) had switched to the Gregorian Calendar and were using the same dates as the rest of Europe. The year 1752 was 72 days shorter.
Is it all clear now?
Any document dated January 1st through March 24th, before 1752, is one year off.
The Stanley-Whitman House on 37 High Street (east of Main Street) in Farmington, Connecticut, is an example of early New England architecture and homes the early Colonists had known in England.
A center chimney flanked by parlor and hall with two chambers above provided both living and storage space. The Colonists built houses from wood, the plentiful resource in the area, and used post and beam construction for the frame. The second floor extends beyond the first on the front façade, creating an overhang.—stanleywhitman.org/history.
Note: See: stanleywhitman.org/cemeteries-village-green for a map of old Farmington which includes Mr. Sinner’s home.
English, Irish, and Scottish indentured servants did the majority of work on Barbados Plantations, until the 1640s.
Unable to compete with tobacco from Virginia, Barbados Plantations switched to raising sugar cane which was in demand for tea, coffee, and cocoa.
Processing sugar cane required intense labor and many workers. After the harvested cane was crushed, the juice was cooked down in dangerous boiling houses. The result was a coarse brown sugar called muscovado, and molasses.
The increasing request for sugar and molasses accelerated a demand for more Slaves and free labor.
Around 1650 Connecticut merchants, including those from Wethersfield and Hartford, invested in ships to trade Connecticut goods with Barbados for sugar and molasses.
In Connecticut molasses was made into rum, shipped to Africa, and sold to buy more Africans, who were sent on ships across the Atlantic, to be enslaved on sugar cane plantations. This was one of several horrific Atlantic Slave Trade triangles. New England ships continued to exchange farm and other products for West Indies sugar and molasses.—from connecticuthistory.org.
France, Netherlands, and Spain also used Slaves to harvest sugar on the West Indies Islands they owned. Around 1660 the British Parliament began passing Navigation Acts (which were rarely enforced) to regulate colonial trade. All trade to and from the Colonies was to be on British ships.
In the 1700s Great Britain tried to tighten its economic hold on their colonies by imposing taxes—one of the offenses that led to the American Revolution.
(In 1700 Barbados had 15,000 free Whites and 50,000 African Slaves.
—wikipedia.org.)
The Booke of Psalmes
The Puritan immigrants brought over several versions of the Psalms, including the 1562 edition of the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter.
In 1640 the Bay Psalm Book (The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre), a new translation from Hebrew to English, was printed at Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was the first book to be printed in what became the United States, but it did not have musical notes.
Connecticut congregations favored Sternehold and Hopkins, The Whole Booke of Psalmes: Collected into English Meeter, printed in London, in 1640.
Several pieces of Old English Church Music were included. The melody was shown in square-headed notes, with no bar lines.
The Psalms were usually bound up with the family Bible which was too heavy and costly for use in the churches. So antiphonal reading became common practice.
1667 Farmington Meeting
One Sabbath morning in 1667 the Farmington Meeting, likely attended by Joseph Hickok, started with a fifteen-minute prayer. Then Rev. Samuel Hooker read and
explained a chapter of the Bible and announced the morning Psalm to be sung from the Psalter.
A deacon chose the beginning note (Psalm 100 or Old 100th used as an example) and sang out: “All people that on earth do dwell.” The congregation repeated the phrase.
“Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice,” recited the deacon, and the congregation echoed. The Psalm continued with the deacon and the congregation alternating until the end of the Psalm.
Continue reading
In October 1582 the Roman Catholic world adopted the Gregorian Calendar introduced by Pope Gregory XIII. But the English (and their future colonies) kept the Julian Calendar until 1752. March 24 was the last day of the year in the Julian Calendar. The new year started on March 25.
As an example: the ship Planter sailed for New England on March 22, 1634, four days before the Peter Bonaventure which left for “ye Barbadoes & Christophers” on March 26, 1635.
The switch to the Gregorian Calendar in 1752 was done in steps and completed by September 14 of that year.
The above print is a 1607 calendar illustration for the month of March. It shows a bird’s-eye view of a palace on the right and a lagoon in the middle distance. There is a bustle of activity preparing for Spring planting and building a small wooden structure, and men carrying large baskets on their backs.
Hemp and flax were two major crops in early New England. The age old lengthy, labor-intensive procedure of processing the flaxen or blond-colored fibers of flax plants into linen thread, was still used in the 1770s by David Hickok, a descendant of William and Elizabeth Hitchcock.
Rippling, Retting, Dressing
• Flax is harvested about a hundred days after it is planted. The three- to four-foot tall plant is pulled up from the roots to get the longest fibers. The stalks are drawn through the teeth of a rippling comb or threshed with a flax flail to remove the seeds.
• The stems are retted (or rotted) in water or in a field (using the dew) to release the soft fibers. When dry, the three-step process: breaking, scutching, and heckling, separates the fiber from the straw-like stalks.
• A wooden brake breaks the woody core into short sections, loosening the flax fibers. A wooden scutching knife or paddle is used to scrape the remaining fibers from the outer stalk.
• The separated fibers are drawn a number of times through different size heckles or heckling combs. The rows of different size iron tines on the “combs” remove the remaining pulp and the shorter coarser strands of fiber, called tow.
• The fibers are sorted according to fineness. The longer fibers (up to three feet) can be spun into linen thread, used to bind books, make shoes, or for twine. The tow can be used for rougher linen yarns or rope.
Linen Thread
To make linen thread, the longer, fine flax fibers were wrapped around the distaff—a long vertical pole attached to a spinning wheel. The spinner then spun “a long, even thread from the mass of fiber” and wound it onto bobbins or spools.
“When the bobbins were full,” the spinner wound “the thread off on a reel into knots and skeins…” It was a good day’s work to spin two skeins of twenty knots each, every knot having forty threads.”—Buel, The Tale of the Spinning Wheel, 35–37.
