Intern Update: James Douglas "Panic Room"

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 third in a series of blog posts he is writing about some of the interesting or surprising documents he finds in our vault. 

The second part of the anonymously written biography of James Douglas dealt with life on the early Cornwall frontier. After the Douglas family, and their livestock, safely made it through the winter of 1739-1740, they began to farm their property on Cream Hill. However, according to Douglas’ biographer, fear of Native peoples played a large role in the lives of the early Cornwall settlers. For example, while Douglas and his sons worked in their fields, his daughters would be, to quote the biographer, “placed on some commanding position to act as sentinels and give the alarm should the Indians attempt to surprise them.”

A fort was constructed near the center of the settlement, and according to the Douglas biography, it was town policy in the early days for townspeople to meet at the fort nightly and sleep within the safety of the palisade walls. Unfortunately, this meant that every evening many residents had to trek, “on foot paths through the woods a distance, in some instances, of several miles.” Living on Cream Hill, Douglas became wary of his family having to constantly travel through the forest to the safety of the town fort. During his first winter in Cornwall, Douglas had proven himself to be an expert problem-solver, and he soon set to work figuring out a way to save his family the danger of having to journey away from their farm every night.

What the Scottish schoolteacher came up with was an eighteenth century version of a panic room. Douglas constructed a building that was just big enough to fit his family into, and then built a haystack on top of it. Every night, the Douglas family would file out of their home and climb through a secret door into their sleeping quarters in the haystack. In this way, Douglas saved his family the trouble of walking back and forth to the fort, and provided them with a safe place to spend the night; although it’s important to note that there was never any recorded violence between settlers and Native people in Cornwall. In the image below, the Douglas farm is shown on a map near Cream Hill Lake sketched in 1763 by future-Yale President Ezra Stiles.