Norwalk After Two Hundred & Fifty Years

tended by the negro slaves. The house, surrounded by a fine orchard, its bountiful table furnished with plate and old Canton china, was the sort of home about which a novelist would delight in weaving tales. It was burned by Tryon in 1779 and the valuables which could be hastily gathered were hidden in the chimney or secreted in the well. Three of John Cannon's sons built Norwalk homes, the eldest, named after his father, built the house now occupied by C. O. C. Betts on the Green. It was first built in 1773 and destroyed by the fire six years later, but it was rebuilt almost immediately. Though somewhat changed in its outward appearance since then, the hall and front portion of the house are almost the same as they were originally. In the drawing-room the quaint painting of the New York Battery over the high colonial mantel imparts a distinctive touch of a by-gone day. The house on Mill Hill, known until recently as the home of Miss Julia Lockwood, was built by Samuel Cannon just after the Revolution. Col. Buckingham Lockwood purchased it for the family homestead about seventy years ago. Mr. Selleck's history contains a pic- ture of the house as it looked originally with a gabled roof. A realistic incident of Norwalk's day of terror, in connection v/ith the corner house, known as the Bis- sell house, is related in Hall's history. It was then the home of Thomas Belden, and his housekeeper in a fever of anxiety about the property in her care, ran hastily across the Green to consult with Mrs. William St. John, whose home stood where Morgan avenue joins East' avenue, when the alarm guns were fired. It was Satur- day night, July 11, 1779, and Mrs. St. John was prepar- ing her bread for baking in the brick oven, when Mr. Belden's housekeeper came running in: "Are you going to stay?" she asked Mrs. St. John. "No," was the answer, "I am going out of the way." "Well,'' responded the other woman, "I shall stay, I will go to Gov. Tryon and plead for the house. When he was Governor he stayed with us over night with his attendants and horses. I will tell him we are friends of the Government." Mrs. St. John responded with a spirit of true New England thrift, "If you are going to stay, take my dough"; and Mr. Belden's housekeeper went back across the Green with the burning oven wood and loaves of bread ready for baking, while Mrs. St. John made preparations to go to the woods with her family. Gen. Tryon, sitting in his 294 tent next morning on Grumman's Hill, which was "all red with the British," that day, listened to the house- keeper's plea and sent a file of soldiers to protect the Bel- den house and, though the flames had started, they put out the fire. In 1816 the house was bought by Clark Bissell, Esq., an eminent Connecticut lawyer, who was Governor of the State in 1846-49, and it remained in his family until the death of the Rev. S. B. S. Bissell, a few years ago. The present Congregational parsonage looks very modern, and yet a portion of it is very old. In ante- Revolutionary days it was an inn kept by John Betts. Here Franklin stopped on one occasion, and here lodged the elegant Madam Van Home and her two beautiful daughters in the summer of 1779. When the British soldiers set fire to St. Paul's Church, which was directly opposite the inn on the Green, Madam Van Home hur- riedly ordered her coach and she and her daughters went to Fairfield, from whence they embarked for their home in Flatbush, where they were protected by the British officers, notwithstanding their own allegiance to the American cause. Leaving the vicinity of the Green we will now go to Cannon street ; here we find a house near the sawmill which is a perfect picture of an old Norwalk home, in the Tosiah St. John house, built about 1770. Mrs. St. John was a New Canaan girl, and at her hospitable fireside many of her friends from New Canaan and Fairfield drank tea in the days when the tax made patriots use small teacups. Good Mr. Moses St. John, her father- in-law, used to remonstrate with Mrs. Tosiah about it, even it is said, trying to prevent the making of tea by emptying the boiling water from the kettle in his zeal, but that did not diminish her hospitality. The Camp place at East Rocks was built by James Cannon, the third son of Commodore Cannon. We glance at the Rocks as we go, remembering their part in Norwalk's history, silent witnesses still in existence of the battle in 1779 wnen Capt. Betts with fifty Continental regulars and a few militia resisted a superior force of the enemy for several hours. Tradition says that the wounded were carried to the Whitney house on upper Main street which stood on the present site of Avison's market, and was torn down in 1864. On France street is the old Betts homestead, the birthplace of Hezekiah Betts from whence he went out to fight in the Revolutionary War in 1780. The original 895 house was very old even then, having been built in 1660, by Thomas Betts, 1st. That structure was burned, but the present one is built around the old chimney. In Winnipauk, on the east side of Main street, not far from the Fair Grounds, is the Jonathan Betts house which was built just after the Revolution by Elijah Gregory who served a few months in the army. The old family burial plot once occupied the southwest corner of Main street and the New Canaan road, though its gravestone.* have long since disappeared. At the corner of Main street and Union avenue is a house which dates from 1760, when it was built by Uriah Selleck, grandfather of Mrs. W. K. James, at about the time of his marriage to Hannah Smith, of Stamford. The house is now the home of Mrs. Kate P. Hunter. Its once sloping roof has been cut off at the rear and an extension added, and its shingled sides covered with clapboards ; but otherwise this Revolutionary home is little changed. We notice another Revolutionary home on the cor- ner of Main and West Main streets, in the Benedict house now owned by Mr. Charles Seymour, though we must use a discerning eye to discover its age under its modern- ized exterior. There is an interesting tale concerning the Hezekiah Rogers house on the corner of Cross street. In 1789, Jesse Lee, the early apostle of Methodism in New Eng- land, came to Norwalk one June day to preach his first sermon in Connecticut. He had some reason to expect that the Rogers house would be opened for the meeting, and word had been sent around among those interested to assemble there. At four o'clock Mr. Lee arrived on horseback, only to find that Mr. Rogers was away from home, and in his absence his wife hesitated to open the house to a public gathering. An old lady living in the next house was asked if she would allow the meeting in her orchard, but she objected that the people would trample down the grass. At last, Jesse Lee assembled his audience under an apple tree by the roadside and preached his sermon from the text "Ye must be born again." Such was the beginning of Methodism in Nor- walk. The next house is distinguished as the home of Charles Robert Sherman, father of the Hon. John Sher- man and Gen. W. T. Sherman, prior to the removal of the family to Lancaster, O., in 1810, where the two famous sons were born some years later. The Shermans 296 Thomas Betts House, France Street. yy^-s Josiah St. John Mouse, Cannon Street ?r " H K? M ^ Isaacs House. Flax Hill Memorial. were popular among their townsmen, and when they set forth in a prairie schooner on their journey to Ohio, so far away in those days, a throng of people assembled to bid them farewell. Samuel Jarvis Camp had a singing class in the early eighteen hundreds at his home on the corner of North avenue and Camp street, which was a popular social affair. Among his pupils were Charles R. Sherman and Senator Thaddeus Betts. The Charles St. John house with its admirable architectural style of the period of 1820, was built by Ebenezer Dimon Hoyt. When first built it commanded a pretty river view before the erection of the Main street business blocks. The Jacob Jennings house, like the Fitch place on East avenue, is marked by the trunk of a great elm tree. In their day these trees were associated in the names given them for their beauty, the Fitch tree being called the "King Elm" and the Jennings tree the "Queen Elm" of Norwalk. We are interested in the place as the homestead of the ancestors of all the Jennings families in town. Jacob Jennings came to Norwalk from Fairfield in 1762, and built the house for his bride, Grace Parke, of Boston. The roads were narrower then, and there was an ample lawn about the house with a garden and orchard in the rear. The interior of the house was well finished in hard wood and the tiles of the fireplace were of the Yonkers manor-house pattern. One of the most interesting Revolutionary houses in Norwalk is the Hoyt house on the opposite side of the street. This part of Main street was called Mill Plain in the days when Gould Hoyt bought this lot for his house in 1764. His wife was a Fairfield lady and it was through her acquaintance with Gen. Tryon in days of peace that her house was saved from destruction in the war time. Gen. Tryon frequently visited friends of Mrs. Hoyt in Fair- field, at whose home they had often met, therefore her personal plea probably saved her home from destruction. The exterior of the house is almost the same as it was originally and its interior is noteworthy for the ar- rangement of its rooms, and for the Dutch tiles in the parlor fireplace with quaint Scriptural designs. It is said that the first ice cream made in Norwalk was served at the Hoyt table, consisting of pure cream simply flavored and frozen. On North avenue and Knight street, the Eliphalet Lockwood house and the homestead of Mr. George B. St. John claim our attention. The latter was 897