Norwalk

Norwalk. BY Rev. Charles M. Selleck, A. M. NORWALK, CONN. : PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR. 1896. Entered according to Aet of Congress, in the year 1896, By Rev. Chari.es M. Selleck, A.M., In the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. INTRODUCTORY. IgjORWALK is a seat of accredited antiquity. Few places in the United States rank X (9 it in age. Liber "A," of English transcribed deeds, New York City Hall of Records, registers an execution in 1661, in favor of Nicholas Bayard, while the first book of Nor- walk transfers thus recorded antedates by one and twenty years that of the Bayard trans- action referred to, and by seven years the arrival of immigrants of this name in a country wherein it was to be their destiny to establish families of fame, the ancestor-headship of an off-shoot of one of which same households the ancient plantation of Norwalk has itself furnished, as witness the following : Benjamin Woolsey Rogers, oldest son of Moses and Sarah Woolsey Rogers of New York and a grandson of Nehemiah and Elizabeth Fitch Rogers of Norwalk, married Susan, daughter of William and Elizabeth Cornell Tiayard of New York. These had four children, one of whom, Sarah, wedded William Patterson Van Rensselaer, the oldest son by his second marriage, of Gen. Stephen Van Rensselaer of Albany, and ■ whilom resident at Belden Point, Norwalk. The fourth child was about one year old when the mother's health declined, and an ocean trip was determined upon. It was during the war troubles of 1814, when com- merce found its way to and from the sea through Long Island Sound. England at that ti me so controlled the Sound waters as that the ship in which Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin W. Rogers were passengers, was detained in the East River. Permission to proceed, however, was at length given, and in passing Shippan Point, the residence of Moses Rogers, a prayer for the vessel's party was offered on shore by Dr. Timothy Dwight, a brother-in-law of Moses Rogers, and the President of Yale College. Before the company reached South- ampton, the spirit of the sufferer had flown, and her remains were interred beneath the walls of a parish church in that city. Her husband married, for his second wife, Catherine Cecilia Elwvn, a grand-daughter >f Governor John Langdon of Portsmouth, N. H.. who was father of Judge Woodbury Langdon, who mar- ?d Sarah Sherburn, and had Walter Langdon of New York, who married Dorothea, daughter of John Jacob Astor, and had Woodbury Langdon, who married Helen Colford Jones and had Woodbury G. Langdon, owner of, and summer resident at, "Half-Mile Isle," Norwalk. The title of this book in one word indicates, and this note-intertexed introductory illustrates, its object. Norwalk is the book's thought and theme. The work is an attempt to bring this ancient town's recondite history more fully to light, and to preserve and per- petuate its mentions and memories. Many of these were gathered by the author while engaged in the necessarily hasty preparation of his 1886 St. Paul's Church centennary ad- dress, but the most of them have since been collected, and their public presentation upon the eve of the town's quarter-millenial birth anniversary will, it is hoped, prove a not un- welcome nor unimportant contribution to existing local annals. C. M. S. Norwalk, Connecticut, 1S95. • ^ c //' e /oyrr/fy (5 ef/f 'rer/hr/, ■ y/r >J /ft/da*. NORWALK. IGjOliWALK. with reference t" the matter off settlement, Appears first upon the page r~k of history in A. D.. 1640. In his passage through Long Island Sound in 1614, Adrian Block, a Dutch navigator, had sighted from his bark's deck, the Norwalk Uplands, Coast Lands and Islands, denominating the latter "The Archipelago" : and Kigginson" relates [hat in if..;S KJuar.1 Hopkins William Goodwin and himself, three important Con- necticut Colonists, hpld, in or near. '• Narwoke "■' a successful parley with its aboriginal 'Frnm n print formerly III thu |in«i^iun nf the well preserved. Queen Eli(*betft resided lure fur a laiuilv ul daliriel Win. Ludlow of New York. A tinu-. with Sir Philip in allrndnnce." private juiirmil speaks of the ruins of Ludlow CMlc a-"w.„Hleriuil> hcauiirul. covering nenw. Tl,e castle h" Ur'"" ' tr*n<m" is un an elevation overlooking the Hv#e * * • .iFor original rerord orthography— Noruaaki-— - J In tilt' tpiadraugle is 11 round iNurmau tower, see Trumbull 1630-166.=;. page Mo, NORWALK owners. In the plantation-particular, however, Norwalk has historical place in 1640, which year, just after its birth, witnessed the settlement's projector, Deputy-Gov. Roger Ludlow,1 working his wintry way from Fairfield to Hartford, there to present for consideration by the General Council which convened on January 16, (see Conn. Colonial Records) certain ■ The town of Ludlow, in Salop County, England, was the home of the ancient Ludlows. Here, in the middle of the fourteenth century, lived William Lud- low, M. P., of High Deverill, who belonged officially to the households of Kings Henry IV, V and VI. William Ludlow was instrumental in the e rection of St. Thomas' Church, Salisbury, England, beneath which edifice he is buried, lie married Margaret, daughter of William Rymer, by whom he had one son, John, who married Leonora, daughter of Thomas Ringwood. John Ludlow succeeded to his father's possession of High Deverill, and married Phillipa, daughter and heiress of William Bulstrode of Lon- don, by whom he had two sons, William and Edward. The tomb of William Ludlow , oldest son of John, is shown to-day in the parish church of High Deverill. Its occupant had married Jane, daughter of Nicholas Moon- of Willford, County of Southampton, Eng- land, and had one on 1 y son, George, who married Edith, the third daughter of Andrew, Lord Windsor, of Middlesex County. 'These had two sons, Sir Ed- mund and Thomas, '*t. Thomas, 'st. married Jane I'yle, sister of Sir Gabriel Pyle, Knight, and had : George, born Sept. 7, 1583, died young. Gabriel, bap. Feb. 10, 15N7. Roger, bap. March 7, 1590, founder of Norwalk. Annie, bap. July 5, 1591. Thomas, 2nd. bap. March 3, 1593, ancestor of the New York Ludlows. George, bap. Sept. 15, 1596, of Virginia. Roger Ludlow, of lineage as above, matriculated at twenty years of age at Balliol College, Oxford, and studied for the bar in London. He came to America at about the age of 40, and was one of the mo*t eminent of the New England Colonists. He here married, for his second wife, a sister of Gov. John Endicott of Mass. In 1639 Mr. Ludlow removed from Windsor to Fairfield. In 1640 he purchased Norwalk, and in 1654 left Fairfield County for, it is supposed, Virginia, where, at that date, resided his junior brother George. This brother, who died the I next year, had willed the bulk of his property to ! Roger's children. Two of these, Thomas and Jona- | than, are named in the Norwalk records, and accom- | panied their father hence in 1654. Their sister Sarah remained, and married Nathaniel Brewster. The Brewster descendants reside on Long Island. Roger Ludlow was elected deputy-Gov. of Mass. before he came to America. He held said office four years, and was subsequently several times chosen to fill the same position in Conn. Ik* was not a resident of Norwalk, but was "for nineteen years one of the most useful and distinguished men " in the Connect- icut commonwealth, living during the major portion of that time about nine miles east of Norwalk, on what is to-day known as Ludlow Square, in the town of Fairfield. He was probably (see Hollister's Con- necticut, Vol. I, page 179) the first lawver who ever came into the colony, and one of the most gifted who have ever lived in it. "I have compared this paper ( the Connecticut Constitution, 1639, the work of Ludlow s head and hand) with those written by Mil- ton, expressive of his views of government and lib- erty. * * * But I find there no well-digested sys- tem of republicanism. He deals alone with the abso- lute. But Ludlow views the concrete and the abstract both at once." Such an exceptional genius, vide Hollister, was Roger Ludlow, the frame r ot" the first Constitution of Conn, and the Founder of Norwalk. After leaving America, it is believed that Ludlow lived and practiced in Ireland and died in Wales. Thomas Ludlow, next younger brother of Roger, married Feb. 15th, 1624, Jane Bennett, and had a son Gabriel, who married Martha, daughter of Thomas Carey, of Castle Carey. These had a son Gabriel, bap. at the age of one month, at Castle Carey, Som- erset, Dec. 1, 1663. This son Gabriel came, at thirty- one years of age (1694) to New York, where he mar- ried, April 15, 1697, Sarah, daughter of Rev. Joseph Hanmer, Chaplain to the King's New York army. These had a son William, who married, August 10, 1731, Mary Duncan, which two had a son Gabriel William, who married, August 28, 1764, Cornelia, daughter of Charles, son of John Crooke of New York. Gabriel W and Cornelia Ludlow had a son Charles, who married Elizabeth, daughter of David and Elizabeth (French) Van Home. Charles and Elizabeth Ludlow's children were Cornelia Ann, born June 13, 17SS, and Elizabeth. Cornelia Ann married, May 2, 1S16, John Abraham Willink, an Amsterdam banker, of recorded service to the U. S. government. Elizabeth, the sister of Mrs. Willink, erected the Lud- low and Willink Hall of St. Stephen's College, in the State of New York. The memory of these noble sis- ters is fragrant in Norwalk, and the town is honored in that it treasures many of their personal effects. In recognition of their kinship to the father of Norwalk, one of their surviving Norwalk friends (Mrs. W. K. James,) has memorially commemorated the Ludlow territory-besiowment act on the part of the town's pioneers, by the Ludlow Stone, which was planted in East Norwalk, Thursday, Dec. 19, 1895, on a parcel of ground given for the purpose by Messrs. Josiah R. and William E. Marvin. NoR W A L K