Forgotten Voices. Carolyn Wakeman
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CHAPTER TEN
Confessions
Continuing records of Lyme’s first church start in 1731 when Rev. Jonathan Parsons began documenting meetings and keeping detailed lists of baptisms, admissions, and dismissals. The record book opens with a sequence of confessions.
April 4th James Beckwith, son; made a confession for his sin of drunkenness, whereupon he was received into the charity of said church and to all the privileges of it.
Tho. Huddson made confession for his sin of drunkenness … and unbridled feelings, which satisfied the church.
April 11th Jn Alger made confession for his sin of fornication which put him into charity.
June 6th Widow Deborah Mather confessed her sin, in declaring herself guilty of the sin of fornication, which established her in the charity of the church.
An almost indecipherable notebook stitched with string lists two baptisms, a marriage, and an “owning of the covenant” in Lyme in 1724, but no other records from Moses Noyes’s ministry survive. The sturdily bound ledger that today preserves an account of church meetings, said to be “a true copy of the old record,” begins in April 1731 and opens with a list of confessions. Acknowledgments of drunkenness, “rash speaking,” and fornication all found acceptance by “the first assembly of Christians, in Lyme.” Even the confession of blacksmith Zechariah Sill (1717–1783) for “giving way to passion, evil speaking, and intemperate drinking” was duly accepted by church brethren. The conduct of David Deming, a Harvard-educated minister who moved to Lyme in retirement, required fuller consideration.
The town had employed Mr. Deming, age fifty-four, as a schoolmaster, and in 1734 the Ecclesiastical Society’s treasury paid him “twenty shillings and two pence for his assistance in preaching for time past.” Later that year he faced criminal charges in the New London County Court following reports of his “lascivious carriage” with Elizabeth Greenfield (1723–1814), age ten, which included “exposing her most private parts.” Accusations surfaced after a neighbor, alerted that Mr. Deming’s conduct with schoolchildren was “unsuitable,” observed him dismiss other students and call Elizabeth back inside. Susannah Loveland (1715–1752) testified that the schoolmaster stood the child on a desk, raised her clothes, and placed his hand on her “privates.” As word spread and parents withdrew their children from school, Deming claimed he thought Elizabeth was afflicted with worms and had stroked her belly so the worms would fall out.
The parsonage of Rev. Jonathan Parsons, much altered after his son Marshfield Parsons added a rear ell for a coaching inn and Deacon Daniel Noyes later built a two-story front addition, stood a mile west of the hillside meetinghouse on the road to the ferry.
The former minister pleaded not guilty at a court hearing in January 1735/6 when bond for a trial appearance was set at £50. Later that month the church suspended him from communion and appointed a committee to “wait upon and address Mr. David Deming of said Lyme, in the name of said Church, and persuade and urge him to offer some reflections upon himself for his conduct respecting Elisabeth Greenfield, daughter of Archibald Greenfield (1692–1769), about whom there has been much discourse.”
The letter of confession was entered in church records. “My conduct has been very grievous to my good brethren, of this and some other churches,” the confession stated. “I do solemnly reflect upon myself with sorrow … and heartily ask their charity and the charity of you all, as well as of all other churches, and also I ask your prayers that I might in whatever state or employment I engage—be more careful to allow the doctrine of God my Saviour, by a good and unspotted life and conversation.” The case finally resolved two years later after Elizabeth reversed her prior statement that Deming had three times touched her private parts and claimed instead that Susannah Loveland’s testimony was false. The court, citing conflicting evidence, found Deming not guilty, and church members in 1737 “restored [him] to the communion.”
Before a verdict had been reached in the case against David Deming, Rev. Jonathan Parsons likely delivered, in the hilltop meetinghouse, the unsigned sermon “God governs by his providence,” dated February 22, 1736.
Two years earlier the General Court had resolved debate about the location for a larger meetinghouse. An urgent memorial in 1735 protested the inconvenience of the meetinghouse for those who lived on the east side of the parish, but the Court affirmed that its committee “could not find any place in said society that on all accounts would so well accommodate the greatest part of the inhabitants of said society as the hill on which the old meeting house now stands.” It “proposed that a new house be erected about four rods northwards of the old meeting house,” and in April 1738 the Ecclesiastical Society approved the collection of a tax, exempting only Baptists, “towards building the meeting house in this Society.”
Construction began six months later when the Society hired two builders “to frame the meeting house on reasonable terms.” It also appointed a committee to provide £100 worth “of good white pine and white wood boards,” along with “window frames and nails and fittings for said house … done at the cost of the Society.” After a vote to “pull down the old meeting house and improve what timber and body that will be proper towards building the new meeting house,” Uriah Roland (1710–1760) offered the use of his dwelling for interim Sabbath worship. Four months later the theft of building materials halted construction.
When Old Lyme celebrated America’s centennial in 1876, church treasurer William Coult drew from memory at age seventy-nine the floor plan of the town’s third meetinghouse, where he had attended services as a youth. His pencil notes locate the steeple and belfry above the west-facing entrance and the pulpit with sounding board on the building’s north side.
Pews and galleries had not yet been installed or a steeple erected when the building committee decided in January 1739/40 to “proceed not further than to finish what they have agreed with.” It tasked Benjamin DeWolfe (1695–1742), the Society’s clerk and an experienced carpenter, “to take care that no boards and timber shall be carried away from the meetinghouse” and to “find out all such as he can that have carried timber and boards away already.” The loss of materials coincided with complaints about the minister.
Criticism of Parsons brought an admission by William Borden (1674–1747), age fifty-five, in December 1739 that he had “at sundry times and places with an apparent heat and vehemence of Spirit” denounced “greedy ministers” who “accepted a certain sum to preach the gospel.”
He had also criticized the choice of “young men of a college education” to preach at the neglect of “the age[d] and experienced brethren of the church among them.” Claims about the minister’s “ill conduct toward said Society in general” and allegations that he had defamed the Ecclesiastical Society “publicly in the meetinghouse” prompted an effort in 1739 “to proceed against the Rev. Mr. Jonathan Parsons.” But church members followed “the desire of the pastor” and voted instead to suspend Mr. Borden from communion and admonish him “for his obstinate continuances in the scandalous sin of defamation.”
As confessions continued in the unfinished meetinghouse, David Lord (1715–1785) in 1738 acknowledged abusing and violently striking a man. The next year, John Peck (1716–1785) and his wife Catherine Lay Peck (1715–1810) confessed together to fornication. After Deacon Marvin confessed to intemperance in January 1741, six church members in rapid succession, including Lucy, the