Intern Update: Town Support of the Poor in the Early 1800s

By intern Ryan Bachman.

On April 8, 1799, the Cornwall Board of Selectmen voted to pay John Peck $11.49 for boarding Ann Olcott, “a poor child.” Olcott is one of the hundreds of people listed in a selectmen’s’ account book found in the Cornwall Historical Society vault. Within the book’s pages are individuals who otherwise left no record of their lives in Cornwall. Per state law, Cornwall, like other Connecticut towns, was required to take care of its less fortunate residents. While other towns had poorhouses or “poor farms” where these people could live communally, Cornwall’s poor residents were cared for by individual families for set periods of time. The families were then compensated by the town government for boarding, clothing, and feeding their neighbors who had fallen on hard times.

Town Records, April 1799.
(Collection of Cornwall Historical Society)

At the time of the April 1799 town meeting where John Peck was paid by the selectmen, Ann Olcott was about two years old. Ann was the child of John and Hannah Olcott, and soon after her birth, the Olcott family members became wards of the town. It is unknown why exactly Ann’s parents fell on hard times. Her father, a subsistence farmer, may have experienced a series of bad harvests, or could have been injured and unable to provide for his growing family. At the same time that Ann was living with the Pecks, her mother and newborn brother were living with the Judson family, who were compensated at the same town meeting as John Peck for providing a midwife for Hannah. Only months after the birth of Ann’s baby brother, town selectmen found a resident willing to care for Hannah and her infant for the following year—but with the caveat that the volunteer could explore opportunities to “put the child out.”

The “putting out” of children dated to colonial times, and was a common way for impoverished families to have their children cared for. Within the system, young children would be placed with foster families and work as an apprentice for their foster parents during a set amount of time. At only one year of age, Hannah Olcott’s son was bound out to East Cornwall farmer Caleb Andrews, while Hannah moved in with a family on Cream Hill. Ann, her siblings, and her parents, were all similarly shuttled back and forth between local families, until their names gradually disappear from the selectmen’s account book in the 1830s. The Cornwall Selectmen’s book provides an interesting window into the lives of a class of people often overlooked by traditional histories of the community.

Intern Update: James Douglas

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