Forgotten Voices. Carolyn Wakeman
Lyme’s ministers reported the Niantics’ protest in 1734 that “the English, their neighbors, had encroached on their property,” they advised that if the chiefs “could have the bounds of their land settled, they would willingly hear a sermon.” Their only requirement was to be “settled in the quiet and peaceful enjoyment of their land.”
A detailed map of the Lyme shoreline drawn by Rev. Ezra Stiles located the meetinghouses in the west and east parishes, the houses of Matthew Griswold and George Griswald, and the wigwams and burying ground of the Niantics at Black Point.
The Court once again appointed a committee to “inquire into the wrongs complained of by said Indians,” then specified boundaries and affirmed that “these shall always be and remain to be the bounds of the said Indian lands.” Assured two years later in 1736 that “the said Niantic Indians desire their children may be instructed,” the Court committed £15 from the public treasury to hire “some suitable person to instruct the said children to read, and also in the principles of the Christian religion.” The next year Governor Joseph Talcott (1669–1741) confirmed that “our school of Indians at Niantic prospers.”
In a letter published in the journal Christian History describing the Great Awakening’s impact in Lyme’s east parish, George Griswold reported in 1744 that religious concern among the Niantics had “increased for a considerable time.” He described them as a “poor, ignorant people” who for ages past had lived “without God in the world” and “did not seem to have any thing of religion among them” but to be “generally given to Sabbath-breaking.” But two rousing sermons delivered by the itinerant evangelist James Davenport (1716–1767) in 1741 had served as a catalyst for conversion. That year Parsons added the names of Nehemiah, Penelope, Hannah Jeffrey, and Sarah Jeffrey to the baptismal list of Lyme’s first church, and the following winter in the east parish “twenty or upward of this tribe of Indians,” Griswold wrote, had been “hopefully converted.” Some had reformed their “excessive drinking and Sabbath breaking,” and there had been only “two or three instances of excess,” which were followed by manifestations of “deep repentance.”
Ezra Stiles sketched the dome-shaped frame of Eliza and Phoebe Moheage’s wigwam when he visited the Niantic reserve in 1761, and he described its earthen floor, central fire pit hearth, and raised platform for bedding and furnishings.
To facilitate conversion, church members in the east parish made special accommodation for native customs in January 1744/5. After considering “the case of Ann Chesno, an Indian Woman,” they voted “to admit her into the church without requiring a confession for putting away her Indian husband,” agreeing that she had acted “according to the Indian law.” That same year, when “Hannah Jeffrey, (Indian)” offered “a confession for the sin of drunkenness and laxity” in Parsons’s west parish, it “was read and accepted” by Lyme’s first church members. But by then, Griswold reported, “the great sense of divine things seem[ed] to be in a great measure abated among those Indians,” and the school for native youth “had so little good effect, that it was given over.”
When Scottish-born physician Dr. Alexander Hamilton (1712–1756) visited the Niantic reserve in 1744 while traveling on horseback through New England from Maryland to Maine, he noted in his diary seeing “thirteen or fourteen huts or wigwams made of bark” in “the Indian town of Niantique.” The memorial from Lyme’s ministers had reported thirty families of Indians in Niantic a decade earlier, but that number steadily declined. When Newport minister Rev. Ezra Stiles (1727–1795) visited the reserve in 1761, after the death of seven Niantic men serving with colonial troops in the French and Indian War, he counted “10 families besides 9 widows.”
Mercy Ann Nonsuch Matthews, shown here approaching age ninety, married in 1846 Henry Matthews, an accomplished Mohegan stonemason and basket maker who served as a deacon in the Mohegan church.
The population decline continued in the nineteenth century, and overseer Moses Warren (1762–1836) reported “less than thirty” Niantics left in 1825. The state passed a law “to protect the wood and lands of the Niantic Indians” in 1836, but thirty years later the population on the reserve had shrunk to nine. In 1870 the state declared the Niantics extinct and sold the three-hundred-acre tract on the Black Point peninsula. By then Mercy Ann Nonsuch (1822–1913), born on the reserve and “bound out” at age seven to the widowed Mrs. Ethelinda Caulkins Griswold (1778–1864), whose husband Thomas Griswold (1779–1817) was Rev. George Griswold’s grandson, had married and lived elsewhere in a comfortable home surrounded by houseplants, a parlor organ, and two Bibles. “They may declare me extinct, that does not make me extinct,” she said in 1871. “I am not extinct, I am not buried.”
In 1858 Hartford artist Charles de Wolfe Brownell depicted the legendary rock ledge along the Connecticut River known as Joshua’s Seat, part of an expanse of tribal land acquired by Richard Ely after the death of Attawanhood, called Joshua, in 1676.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Great Danger
Inspired by the fervent message of a British evangelist who attracted rapt crowds on a tour of New England in 1740, Rev. Jonathan Parsons led a religious revival in Lyme that left his parish bitterly divided.
The parish is small, consisting of about 120 families, yet many days the past summer, I have had 20, 30, 40, 50, and sometimes 60 persons under deep concern with me in one day, inquiring the way to Zion. I hope since the 14th of May last, more than 140 souls have been savingly converted in this place. The same happy work has been carried on in the neighboring parishes of the town, especially one under the care of the Rev. Mr. Griswold, in a most wonderful manner.
Parsons’s prayer and reflection during a period of mental struggle in his early ministry brought a sudden moment of revelation and, according to his grandson, an “undoubted alteration both in his doctrines and mode of preaching.” After agonizing over his errors, the minister turned away from his Arminian beliefs and burned the sermons he had written in Lyme over the course of five years. An opportunity to hear British evangelist George Whitefield (1714–1770) preach in New Haven in 1740 accelerated his spiritual awakening. “The news of Mr. Whitefield’s rising up with great zeal for holiness and souls, had great influence upon my mind,” Parsons wrote.
George Whitefield, age twenty-six, enthralled crowds at each stop on his first New England tour, and news of his itinerary spread widely. When Nathan Cole (1711–1783), a farmer living near Hartford, learned that Mr. Whitefield would preach in Middletown, he dropped his farm tools in his field and rushed with his wife on horseback. “The land and banks over the [Connecticut] river looked black with people and horses all along the 12 miles,” Cole wrote in his journal. “When I saw Mr. Whitefield come upon the scaffold he looked almost angelical; a young, slim, slender, youth before some thousands of people with a bold undaunted countenance.” Although the charismatic evangelist “came not by the way of Lyme,” Parsons noted, his own parish members still became “more generally rous’d up to bethink themselves, and converse about religion.”
Most of the portraits of George Whitefield in an album of engravings given to Charles Ludington in Old Lyme depict the celebrated evangelist in middle age with white wig and portly build, but one shows a