Our intern, Ryan Bachman, has been spending the summer transferring our historic documents to archival folders and boxes, improving their storage and making them more accessible for research. This is the first in a series of blog posts he'll be writing about some of the interesting or surprising documents he finds in our vault.
The archives at the Cornwall Historical Society are full of obscure, interesting, and sometimes downright strange stories from the town’s past that are oftentimes forgotten or unknown. One of those tales that was recently discovered was a short biography written about one of the town’s earliest settlers, James Douglas. From Cornwall historians, such as Rev. Edward C. Starr, several facts about Douglas are known. Douglas and his family were some of the first settlers to live on Cream Hill, and he and his wife worked as schoolteachers in the community—one of Douglas’ students was a young Ethan Allen, who allegedly played an elaborate prank on his teacher that involved hoisting him into the rafters of a building as he slept. The biography found in the archives gives new details into Douglas’ early days in Cornwall, and into the history of the town’s settlement in general.
Unfortunately, the biography of James Douglas is undated and unsigned. However, due to references made by the author, it is possible to date the document to the first two decades of the 1800s. According to Douglas’ anonymous biographer, he and his young family arrived at Cream Hill during the early summer of 1739. The Douglas clan moved to Cornwall from Plainfield, but James had lived in that community only for a brief time after originally emigrating from Scotland. Once on their newly purchased home lot, James and his sons began to build a log house and clear farmland with a horse and team of oxen that they had brought along with them.
Douglas had originally planned to return his livestock to Plainfield in the fall, due to the fact that he had no hay stockpiled to feed the animals through the winter. However, Douglas soon found out that winters in Connecticut’s Northwest Corner are rarely predictable. An early snowfall dropped so much snow on the community that he was unable to safely drive any of his livestock through the narrow pathways that served as roads in Cornwall at that time. When the weather failed to warm back up, Douglas was faced with the harsh reality that his farm animals were snowed-in on Cream Hill for the winter with no food. Douglas contemplated his predicament and remembered that he had noticed a large amount of moss growing on the trees on the north side of Cream Hill. He took his farm tools and set about scraping and collecting the thick moss. To his relief, he found that the oxen loved eating the moss, but he was disappointed to find that his horse would have none of it.
Douglas had been hunting the plentiful deer in the area for months, and desperate to find something his horse would eat, he concocted another plan. As his biographer told it decades later, “he then manufactured a soup from the venison, this the horse took well.” While Douglas was excited that his horse ate the venison soup, he was still worried that it had no solid food to eat, so again in the words of his biographer, Douglas also fed his horse, “the hair taken from the hides of the deer.” As strange as it sounds that James Douglas fed his livestock a diet of moss, venison, and fur for an entire winter, all three of the animals survived the season in good health, “and it is said that Mr. Douglas was often heard to remark in after years that he never wintered stock that passed through in better conditions.”
Next week: James Douglas’ fort on Cream Hill
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