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CHAPTER ONE

Meeting Together

Instructions from a New London court offer the earliest indication of colonial religious practice in the coastal Connecticut settlement that would later be named Lyme.

This Court, apprehending a necessity of government on the east side of the river of Saybrook, do order … that the people at such times and seasons as they cannot go to the public ordinance in the town on the other side, that they agree to meet together at one place every Lord’s day at the house agreed upon by them for the sanctification of the Sabbath in a public way according to God.

Soon after Connecticut’s General Court granted permission in 1663 for the town of Saybrook to separate into two plantations, a lower court in New London issued instructions for governing the new colonial settlement on the east side of the Great River. It ordered inhabitants to designate a constable, provide religious instruction to children and servants, and “agree to meet together at one place every Lords day.”

The court acknowledged that during certain “times and seasons,” those living on the east side of the Connecticut River could not go to “the public ordinance in the town on the other side.” Releasing them from the obligation to attend meetings on the Lord’s day in Saybrook, it required the east side’s recent inhabitants to gather instead in “a house agreed upon by them for the sanctification of the Sabbath in a public way.” Surviving records do not reveal whether they mutually chose a dwelling house in which to worship, but other interactions led to controversy and required court intervention.

English colonists seeking a “more comfortable subsistence” had first crossed the river to clear and cultivate tribal land after a committee surveyed Saybrook’s “outlands” in 1648/9. Intent upon acquiring property and developing trade, settlers in the east quarter contested the ownership of horses, argued about the “miscarriage” of goods, disputed boundary lines, and charged neighbors with slander. In 1659 the General Court dispatched representatives to investigate “suspicions about witchery.”

Two years later the Particular Court in Hartford heard testimony that Nicholas Jennings (1612–1673), who had property in Saybrook’s east quarter, had, together with his wife Margaret, “entertained familiarity with Satan.” By then eight persons accused of witchcraft, a capital crime in the Connecticut colony since 1642, had already been executed. The first to be hanged was Alyse Youngs (1600–1647), executed at Hartford for a witch in the yard of the meetinghouse in 1647. Allegedly Mr. Jennings and his wife Margaret, with Satan’s help, had “done works above the course of nature … with other sorceries.” Because the sorceries were said to have caused at least two deaths, the indictment stated that “according to the law of God and the established laws of this Commonwealth,” Mr. Jennings “deservest to die.” A majority of jurors found the suspects guilty, but without a unanimous verdict the court acquitted the accused couple. It later questioned the evidence, refused to pay costs for those who had traveled to Hartford to testify, and declined to pay for “any other upon such accounts for the future.”

The Exact Map of New England and New York, which appeared as a fold-out insert in Cotton Mather’s multivolume ecclesiastical history Magnalia Christi Americana, focused attention on the spread of towns and churches across what colonists considered wilderness areas. The map, which shows churches scattered sparsely along the coastline of New London County in 1702, see inset, erases native presence.

In that contentious environment, the “committees chosen” to implement Saybrook’s division into two plantations sought an amicable separation. “Several propositions” had already been initiated when representatives from both sides of the river drafted Articles of Agreement in February 1665/6 to assure a “loving parting.” The articles specified financial obligations, clarified claims to tribal land, and required mutual concessions. One article required east side inhabitants to resign “all their rights, titles, & claim” to Hammonasset land. Another confirmed “that the Indians at the Niantic have the lands agreed upon by the covenants made betwixt the inhabitants of Saybrook and them.” A third article obligated the thirty families on the east side to continue supporting Saybrook’s minister for three months, until May 1, 1666, after which they would receive an eight-month exemption. If they failed to settle their own minister by the end of the following January, they would resume paying rates for the minister on the west side.

When Rev. Ezra Stiles sketched the mouth of the Connecticut River in 1768, he located the meetinghouses in Saybrook and Lyme and also marked the ferry crossing.

An etching made in 1878 when the Ely family held a festive reunion in Lyme shows the site of Richard Ely’s Six Mile Island Farm. Light streams through the clouds as visitors enjoy the view across the Connecticut River.

Well within that interval, the General Court in October 1666 established a committee “for entertaining and approving such as are received inhabitants on the east side of the river at Saybrook.” The next day a town meeting approved the “intendment” of Moses Noyes (1643–1729), a twenty-two-year-old Harvard graduate from Newbury, Massachusetts, to take up a parcel of salt meadow on the east side’s Great Island. His older brother James Noyes (1640–1719) already served as minister in nearby Stonington, twenty-five miles to the east along the Long Island Sound shoreline. By then coastal Connecticut, with its available land, navigable rivers, and opportunities for trade with West Indies planters, had attracted a flow of Massachusetts migrants. Among them was Nicholas Noyes (1647–1717), age twenty-one and also a Harvard graduate, who followed his cousins from Newbury and settled in 1668 as minister across Lyme’s northern boundary in East Haddam.

Witchcraft rumors circulated again on the east side soon after Moses Noyes’s arrival when the Particular Court heard a complaint from the settlement’s most influential inhabitant. Matthew Griswold (1620–1698) had acquired a large tract of land along the shoreline called Black Hall and had served multiple times after 1647 as a deputy to the General Court. In May 1667 he alleged that his neighbor John Tillerson (1618–1685) had used expressions “tending to lay the said Matthew Griswold’s wife under suspicion of witchcraft or words to such effect.” Tillerson the previous year had purchased a forty-acre parcel of upland and meadow at Bride Brook bounded on two sides “by the lands of Matthew Griswold.” The court judged that Tillerson had greatly sinned to be jealous of Mrs. [Anna] Griswold (1621–1704), who had been “a loving helpful neighbor to him in affording him what help she could.” The court did not see “how the said Tillerson [could] sufficiently recompense the said Mrs. Griswold by reason of his poverty” and imposed only a small fine, but it also ordered the constables on both sides of the river to announce the decision at public meetings to clear Mrs. Griswold’s name.

At age twenty-two Moses Noyes left his comfortable family home in Newbury, Massachusetts, shown here in a photograph taken in 1891, to pursue land and opportunity in a new settlement along the Connecticut coastline.

That same month the General Court formally established the east side plantation as a separate town that would “for the future be named Lyme.” Moses Noyes likely began regular preaching two months later, in August, when a town meeting appointed two inhabitants to compile a list of property owners “to meet the minister’s rate for the year ensuing.” Support for Mr. Noyes increased in 1669 when the town approved for his use a parsonage lot with one hundred acres of upland stretching east along the shoreline and inland along Mile Creek. The General Court approved his status as a freeman the next year, allowing him to vote in colonial elections, and in 1672 he received an additional allocation of sixty acres adjoining the parsonage farm. Two years later the minister’s younger brothers Thomas Noyes (1648–1730) and William Noyes (1653–1743) had also acquired land in Lyme.

Henry Ward Ranger’s Meetinghouse Hill, ca. 1902, offers a sundrenched view of the rock-strewn landscape that surrounded Lyme’s first meetinghouse.

To assure Sabbath observance in the Connecticut colony, the General Court required in 1668 that constables in every town “make search after all offenders.” The ruling specified that anyone who “shall keep out of the meeting house during the public worship unnecessarily, there being convenient room in the house,” would pay five shillings for each offense or sit in the stocks one hour. Not everyone in Lyme complied. Two years later the county court in New London heard “the complaint of the constable of Lyme concerning Mr. and Mrs. Ely, their profanation of the Sabbath and also contempt of authority.” The clerk summoned Richard Ely (1610–1684) together with his wife and “ye Negro servant Moses” to appear at the next court session in June 1670 to answer the charges.

Richard Ely was Lyme’s wealthiest inhabitant. After prospering in Boston as a merchant in the West Indies trade, he had acquired a vast tract of land on the east side of the Connecticut River through his marriage in 1664 to Elizabeth Cullick (1624–1683), sister of the former Saybrook Colony’s governor George Fenwick (1603–1657). Mr. Ely served as Lyme’s townsman, or selectman, in 1668, and his extensive property, called Six Mile Island Farm, included “housing, fencing, cattle, horses, household goods, and two negroes.” A meetinghouse almost certainly stood on the brow of a hill between two small rivers when Richard Ely failed to observe the Sabbath in 1670, but surviving records do not date its construction. The first town meeting reference appears in 1673/4 when inhabitants voted to “remake the highway from the meeting house to John Comstock’s [1624–1689] as it shall be most for the town’s good and the neighbors there a better connection.” At the same town meeting they decided to offer Moses Noyes “the sum of 60 pounds upon the consideration of settlement.”