Litchfield enquirer., 1870-10-06
WHOLE NO saee

built good wharves, and hoped to thrive Dy commerce rather than by husbandry; but their first undertakings were unsuccessful, and they suffered many losses, "the Lord" in the words of the elder historian., Hub bard, "being against them, so that in i've or six years their stock was much wasted, and they near the bottom" They, as last venture, built great ship and freight ed her with corn and furs and plate and much property, and cut the ice in the har- bor so that she could go to sea, and she was never heard of afterwards. The loss was not only of their goods,,. but of ten precious Christians, who, as old Cotton said, "went to Heaven in 8 chariot ot water rather than of fire as Elijah did" These misfortunes so demoralized the elder brethren that they thought seriously of giving up the Colony and removing else- where, but the young men were ready to bend their backs to the labors of agricul- ture, and from that time the colony con- tinued to thrive. The rich valley of the Connecticut early attracted settlers from
 the Plymouth Colony, and Dutchmen from
 the isle of Manhattan, but the latter, as Irving pleasingly tells us. did not like the smell of onions, SO the Yankees planted
 their rows little further west every year,
 and the Dutchmen retired with tears in
 their eyes, and SO the New England men
 got the most land! That sometimes vera
 cious chronicler and tory minister, whom Trumbull in his poem of McFingal dubs
 "our fag-end man, Parson Peters, in his
 History of Connecticut first published
 anonymously in London in 17S1, says,
 that the State in proportion to its extent
 exceeded every other colony of English America, as we'll in the abundance of the people as in cultivation of the soil, and he
 praises the latter for it's richness and depth,
 and describes it as then yielding twenty to
 thirty bushels of wheat to the acre, forty
 to sixty bushels of Indian corn, and the
 grass as thick and much longer than in
 England. and the face of the country as
 resembling Devonshire, Worcestershire,
 Surry and Kent in England. The pompi-
 on or pumpkin was held to be one of the
 greatest blessings in the eyes of communi-
 ty, beer, bread, custards, sauce, molasSes
 and vinegar, and above all, pies-as sub-
 stitute for high-church music-pies being
 made from it's contents, and it's skin or
 shell serving for caps to cut the hair by,
 and very useful lantern! Of IitChfield
 he remarks, that in 1766, it get an example
 worthy of imitation. The provincs had
 been pestered by generation of men
 called Quacks, who, with few Indian nos
 trums, lancet, &c., attacked levers, ner-
 vous disorders, and broken bones, and by
 the force of perseverance ssubdued nature,
 and helped their patients to e passage to the
 land of spirits, 6efore Mey sOere ready. The
 surgeons and physicians who were not
 quacks, formed themselves into a society
 for the encouragement of regular and
 wholesome practice, and petitioned the General Assembly for charter, which that
 body refused to grant, on the ground that
 "no medicine can be serYiceabIe without the blessing of God. The quacks never administer any physic before the minister has prayed for blessing-whereas, the learned doctors say that the blessing is in
 their physic, without the prayers of the ministers. One doctor proposed the tri- al of dose of arsenic; whether it would not kill any one who would take it, though twenty ministers should pray against 1t. He was called profane man, and ''quack- cry for time remained triumphant" 1 trust that the General Assembly which has recently abolished your State Board of Agriculture, can assuage the grief of all in. telligent agriculturists by as good consci- entious reasoning as our more pious an- cestors applied to the endorsement of quackery! But Connecticut. to her honor be it said, never indulged in the religious prosecutions which stain the history of nearly every other State of that day. She early established and sustained schools and colleges. ~ The people early learned to pro- duce as much as any others, and to- waste less. The first settlers who came from the south and southwestern counties of Eng. land. where the Devon cattle abounded. brought that favorite herd with them, and there are now more pure Devons m Con. necticut than elsewhere in the United States; and those exhibited at the late New England Fair in New Hampshire, as well as those on the grounds here yester. day, attest that there has been no falling off in their quality. At the New England Fair referred to, held at Manchester, New on the 9th, 7th, Sth. and 9th of the present month, where the entries of thorough-b bred stock were made by the best breeders in New England, and the show of them was the finest ever exhibited in the Eastern States, Connecticut swept the field; the Ssort-H Horns of Mir. Sumner of Woodstock, the DeUons of Gov. Hyde of Stafford, the Jerseys of MT. Colt of Hartford and thn 1,n.obS~ao of Rr. Wo1I.