Norwalk

3 Uriah and Hannah Reed lived at the upper end of Haynes' Ridge, Canaan Parish, and their home, writes one, was "quite the picture of the birth-place of Whittier." Here were born three children, two of whom, Sally and Clara, lived to become of age. Sally, born May 2, 1791, married Joseph Fitch (son of Joseph ist.?) who lived on the east side of Smith's Ridge, in the house now standing next south of the residence of Mrs. Stephen Keeler. Joseph and Sally Fitch had five children. This family eventually re- moved from New Canaan, and is to-day represented 200 NORWALK. well's army) whose son, Samuel C3d-, is to-day a resident of Stamford ; Elisha, who married first, Harriet, daughter of Capt. Stephen Betts of the Continental army, and second, Amelia Cooke of New Haven ; Annie who died young and John who married Catharine Lock-wood. Joseph F. Silliman of 1896, is a son of Joseph 2d- and Martha (Mitchell) Silliman. He married Carrie, daughter of Capt. Stephen Hoyt, the founder of Hoyt's New Canaan Nursery, and lives on the fine old Silliman place in that town, and while the willow1 that waved over his great-grandfather's (Rev. Justus Mitchell) grave is missed, still it is a gratify- by a daughter, Julia, Mrs. Dr. Gould of Lockport, N. V. Clara, daughter of Uriah and Hannah Reed, married Samuel Cooke Silliman, grandson of Rev. Robert Silliman of New Canaan, who had two child- ren, one of whom, Samuel Cooke 3^. survives to-day, and is a druggist in Stamford. In the township of Stamford was born "about break of ye day," Feb. 4, 1734, to David and Mercy Selleek, an infant to whom was given the name of Samuel, and between whose brothers, sisters and self a handsome patrimony for that period, was, before the lad quit his teens, apportioned. The infant had thrown up and married when the Revolutionary War broke out. His patriotic soul was stirred and he joined the army only to be captured in the vicinity of the present Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and taken on one of the last days of the summer of 1776, to the prison ship, in New York waters, where he died, leav- ing a buy who, baptized the day after his birth, had been named David; which son, being only fifteen at the date of his father's decease, yet resolved to avenge that parent's fate, and consequently joined the Conti- nentals who, the next spring, April 27, 1777, repulsed Try on at Ridgefield upon his retreat from Danbnry to Compo. The brave lad there fell, and his comrades, cutting the buttons from his coat, bore them to his widowed parent, than whom "never was the memory of a mother kept more sacred." This mother s next child to her heroic David was a daughter, Hannah, who married Uriah Reed (son of Timothy, who was son of Samuel, who was son of John zd-, son of John'-'t.) and who was a quiet, independent farmer of New Canaan. He was a man who kept things snugly and his day's work was done when the sun was yet an hour high. He was a cousin of Matthew Reed of Norwalk (the father of Mrs. Isaac Belden.) Mrs. Reed was remarkable through life for sweetness of disposition and beauty of person. Her nephew and niece (Ebenezer, Jr. and Miss Rebecca Selleek) the children of her only brother Ebenezer Selleek of Westchester County, were among the closest personal 'Documentary, but a numerical mistake, probably. I„ the multiplicity of ancient record-date, this could occur. -!-The grave of Rev. Justus Mitchell. On Jan. 26, 1773, William Bolt and Jonathan Ilu.ted sold to the proprietors'!;! Canaan parish one half acre in front of the meeting house « for public benefit of whole community." Thi- plot became in time neg- friends of the late General James A. Garfield, U. S. A. Before the future President Garfield entered col- lege and while he taught for a season at Poetenskill, a centre at that time in the fast growing territory east of Troy, N. Y., he made the intimate acquaintance of New England and Oblong contributors to the set- tlement of Renssalaer County. Samuel Selleek, the patriot, was an older brother of Jacob Selleek, born 1744, who became the well known land owner on Clapboard Hill, and he was a younger brother of the Gershom, "born ye 10th of July 1730 at 9 of ye clock," whose daughter Charlotte, baptized by Dr. Ebenezer Dibble, (tentatively of St. Paul's Church, Norwalk,) on May 2, 1763, and married on June 3, 1784, to Stephen, born April 12, 1767,* son of Bushnell Fitch, was the mother of Hon. Benjamin Fitch, founder of the Fitch Soldiers' home, Noroton. 'Said treelet indicating, topographically, " the homeward end of Haynes Ridge " also dropped grace- fully over the moundf beneath which lay one of the principal dwellers upon that salubrious height. Rev. Justus Mitchell of Woodbury, had married at about the age of twenty-five, Martha, daughter of Rev. Josiah Shermftrt, also of Woodbury. Mrs. Mitchell's brother, Hon. Roger Minot Sherman, resided with his wife and two children in Norwalk, living at one time in France Street, (Edward Merrill place) and at an- other upou the East Avenue (Stevens place) of 1896. Like her Norwalk brother, Mrs. Mitchell was an in- dividual of rare attainments, and ranked, among ladies, with Mrs. Stephen Buckingham of Norwalk. (See Chapman's Buckingham family, page 144.) Her husband, a man of calibre and character, had been called to New Canaan and attached to Haynes Ridge, bought, on Aug. 8, 1783, of Stephen Hanford, son of Samuel and Isabel Hanford, and grandson of William Haynes. a solid slice of twenty acres out of the fairest portion of the elegant patrimony, paying for the same the generous sum in that day, of 165 English pounds. This was the year in which Mr. Mitchell was ordained and commenced his active twenty-three lected and the citizens in later years resolved to reduce the uneven hillside to a grade-slope. The dust of the dead was undisturbed, but the grave stones were removed to the parade ground burial acre. The sites, in the Church Hill burial ground, of Rev. Mr. Mitchell's tomb and that of the patriotic Hannah Benedict (Carter) of Carter Street, are to-day marked, NOR WALK. ing antiquarian fact that two ancient Haynes Ridge homes have been so long and well pre- served. Modern taste has not so essentially changed the "Mitchell house" (now Bond) as that the foundation and framing plot-and-plan by the grandson-in-law of the Ridge's founder' have been entirely obliterated, while the layout of the surrounding grounds yet makes it possible to mind-follow through the "lane" and " orchard," down to the river's "path," her girlhood rambles, whom several foreign lords to-day remember as grand- mother2 ; and a clause in a last century testamentary injunction of the Silliman elder brother, whereby "Philiis" is remembered, suggests the scrupulous neatness, outdoors and indoors, of the Silliman "out kitchen," burnished by its rows of dairy-tin and all kept swept and shining by the family's old fashioned clever "colored help."3 The Norwalk-Canaan Cooke-Leete blood ceases with the Silliman and Mitchell de- scent. Rev. Samuel Cooke's first wife dying Aug. n, 1721, he married, second, Esther, daughter of Nathaniel Burr of Fairfield. The Burr homestead which Esther Burr at her marriage to Mr. Cooke left, was one of the choice home-spots of New England. It em- braced the level tract at the west end of Bridgeport to-day, near to the intersection by the Consolidated road of the Fairfield Street. She was separated from it, however, but a few months as she died, without issue, in less than a year after marriage. The good minister came to Norvvalk for his third wife, and found her in Elizabeth, daughter of Joseph Piatt, years ministry, a ministry spent entirely in New Canaan. The home was an intellectual home. The parents had been about four years married, and Eliza- beth and Sherman Mitchell were respectively three and one years old, when William Haynes' meadow property was Mitchell-possessed. These children's uncle, Roger M. Sherman, was only seven years older than his niece Elizabeth, and had not at that time, by six years, entered college. After graduation and marriage, and settling himself in Norwalk, he visited his Haynes Ridge sister and found, doubtless, in her family, now augmented by her two remaining sons, Minot and Chauncey, something of an antidote for the bereavement underwent in Norwalk when he lost his two only children, laid, first, in Town Hill Cemetery, and now sleeping beside their parents in Fairfield. 'The 1896 Bond house on Haynes' Ridge, is be- lieved to have been framed by Ebenezer Smith, who married Elizabeth, daughter of John Bartlett, and grand-daughter of William Haynes. Ebenezer Smith, son of Killiab and grandson of Lieut. Samuel Smith, of Hadley, Mass., was brother of Ephraim Smith who married another daughter (Isabel) of John Bartlett. These were the ancestors of Susanna Smith, who married Isaac Bell. See note, page 94. 2Lucy, daughter of Rev. William Bonney, in- cumbent of the New Canaan Congregational parish from 1808 to 1831. Mr. Bonney kept a boarding school on Haynes' Ridge, at which were educated a number of young men of future reputation. Mrs. Bonney was filled with the spirit of missions, and was wont to make house to house appeals in aid of the cause. Upon such occasions she carried with her a little heathen God, which object-lesson proved to be not without account. Lucy Bonney married a young man, Wm. B. Sherwood, who was a near relative of Rev. Wm. Bonney. These had a daughter, who mar- ried Lord Esslemont of Aberdeen, Scotland. Rev. Mr. Bonney had one only son, Samuel, (afterwards a missionary) whose village school companions were delightfully entertained by Mrs. Bonney upon their Saturday afternoon visits to her son, in later life, an intimate friend of Dr. Bayard Taylor.