The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1912-03-19
PLYMOUTH RICH MAN
 STILL REMEMBERED
His Estate of $73,702.50 Showed His Remark
 able Industry

Years ago it was the fashion when one wanted to make comparison of a mans financial success in life, to refer to old 'fUncle Vic" Tomlinson, whose farm of nearly a thousand acres on and around Mount ToEey in Ply mouth used to be the wonder of ev- erybody. When a boy started out in life and showed signs of tagging in his industrial department his father would invariably suggest to the youngster a more careful considera-
 tion of the career of Square" Joel Truesdell of Bristol, or old Uncle Vic" Tomlinson just over the line In Plymouth, each of whom had made
 the biggest kind of a financial suc- cess. Tomlinson's7 career from a ma
 terial standpoint had everything else in that section beaten, and even to- day, seventy-two years after he was
 laid away in the old Plymouth ceme-
 tery, the old men on Plymouth Hill and Thomaston have not stopped talk estate inventoried only $17,000, while
 Tomlinson's was over s73,o0O, but the former made a large success in life and when one sees tn. farm near Ce-
 dar Swamp, where the old man tol1leo
 and saved, it is a wonder to present day beholders how he ever made i! enough out of the struggle to pay his taxes.
 ! When Victory Tomlinson died during a bitter cold spell on January 15, 1840
 he was far and away the richest man
 in all the county, with one exception l Seth Thomas of Plymouth Hollow
 now Thomaston. Tomlinson was
 richer in his way than Thomas, ano his wealth was literally dug out o1 the ground, while Thomas was 9
 clockmaker of whom Chauncey Jer-
 ome once said that he never got uI
 anything new for himself, but prQht- 1 ed by appropriating other mems labol , and inventions.
 Uncle Vic's great farm was on what l is known as Mount Tobey, about three s7iles directly south Of Plymouth
 cemetery When he died his property 1 inventoried at s73,7o2.o, pretty size. l able estate for those days, and one
 which would easily be worth s1o00 00( | if he were living and doing business l today He lived to be 73 years old and for the last four or five years he ] was mentally unbalanced, so that the
 last few years of his life were value
 less, so far as money getting was con.
 cerned. The inventory of his estate l gives one an excellent idea of what i rich mans property consisted of near.
 ly three-quarters of a century ago, ane | also of the very careful and minute
 manner in which inventories were taken in those days.
 Tomlinson was born in. the section which was then Watertown, Plymouth | being incorporated as a separate towr in 1795 One of the principal stories left behind him is that the old man
 had so many dishonest servants on his
 perpetual aantipathy against banks anc bankers, that he buried large sums o1 currency in the ground around Mount
 Tobey, in order to keep it in safe
 place. He is also said to have been in the same predicament as the great
 buried his wealth in his back yard and then had a hard time finding il again. It is still said today that somewhere around the old mans big farm there is much wealth buried awaiting some explorer. Uncle Vic'7 farm was small affair at first. but
 his unusual business management and strict frugality soon made him the
 wonder of his acquaintance. In his palmy days his farm house was quite a pretentious affair. Tn it he lived al his active life; from it his funeral was held on the bleakest kind of a day in January, 1SA0; but all that is seen of it today is the old cellar. The barns are gone also. and one has to use a good deal of imagination to realize that anybody out of those sur roundings could have accumulated such an amount of money.
 The old gentleman did not have anS
 great regard for his personal appear ance, and on one occasio when he took a load of provisions to New Ha- ven in person, he stopped on one of the city streets to eat his dinner. While the oxen were nibbling grass beside the roadway, Tomlinson dressed in his Mount Tobey' togs', sat a short distance away gnawing at a sandwich His appearance was ap- parently not inviting, so when an of- ficer happened along he immediately formed the conclusion that the old man was a vagrant who needed at tention Placing Tomlinson, the rich man under arrest, he was marched off to the jail, where amid many expla- nations the officer locked him up. The story goes that the big man from Plymouth got word to one of the Trowbridges, a member of one of New Ravens richest families, to whom he told the story of his plight and asked for assistance. Trowbridge told the authorities he was the rich est man in Litchf1eld county, and he