The Early American and His Church

In the early years of what later became the United States, Christian religious groups played an influential role in each of the British colonies, and most attempted to enforce strict religious observance through both colony governments and local town rules.

Although the church records before 1776 are missing, it appears that the Saybrook Platform of 1708 influenced the Turkey Hills church members as they organized their church government. The platform, which had been adopted by a convention of church leaders, had moved the Connecticut church away from the traditional Congregational practice of having autonomous congregations under strong ministers, toward the Presbyterian practice of interaction among parishes in districts.

Under the Saybrook Platform, a Congregational church belonged to an "association" of pastors. These Consociations examined and licensed ministers before their ordination into the ministry. They also arbitrated disputes between pastors and their congregations, aided parishes without pastor to find candidates to fill the positions, and participated in the ordination, installations, and dismissal of pastors.

In Turkey Hills, the church members and all the other inhabitants of the ecclesiastical society participated in defining church doctrine and choosing and dismissing ministers. Church members were responsible for each parishioner's moral conduct, or "the sniffing out of sin". They also kept records of births, deaths, marriages, baptisms, and church covenants. Each Sunday and fast day church services began by mid-morning and ended at dusk. They included sermons and prayers, often an hour or more in duration, readings from scripture, and psalms chanted in an unmelodic drone.

Despite the obvious rigors of church attendance and the fact that some of the non-members might have preferred to spend their day of rest elsewhere, most Turkey Hills parishioners probably looked forward to Sunday. During the week the people, especially the women, were rather isolated on their farms. On Sunday they gathered together with their relatives and friends.

The midday intermission between services was a pleasant social hour. Groups gathered in homes near the meetinghouse to eat the noon meal they had brought with them. Some of the homes were inns with taprooms like Samuel Clark’s next to the meetinghouse. In the pre-Revolutionary era before temperance movement appeared, tavernkeepers served their Sunday customers cider, beer, brandy, rum, flip (a drink made by sweetening hard cider and mixing it with spirits), and the metheglin (made of honey and water fermented with yeast). What to do about the minister must have been a frequent topic of conversation at the convivial gatherings in the taverns.

The Turkey Hills Ecclesiastically Society dismissed its ministers with remarkable regularity.  During the 108 years between 1742 and 1850 most of the parishes north of Hartford had about half-a-dozen ministers while Turkey Hills had fourteen. Five of these were temporary ministers who only stayed a few months. The parish was without a minister a total of thirty-nine years during this period. By contrast, the Suffield Congregational church enjoyed the un-interrupted ministry of the Reverend Ebenezer Gay and his son, Ebenezer, Jr. for ninety five years.

Since ministers were better educated, owned larger libraries, and had a larger circle of associates than most of their parishioners, they were the intellectual leaders in their communities. In their sermons, addresses, classes, and daily contract with the people they influenced and educated them. A community left without an established minister, as Turkey Hills was so often, was deprived of both spiritual and cultural leadership.

The Reverend Ebenezer Mills of Windsor was Turkey Hills’ first settled minister. Mr. Mills, a Yale graduate, came to Turkey Hills in 1742 when he was just twenty-two years old. He married a Simsbury girl, Mary Drake, and built a house at 100 South Main Street called “the parsonage” in old records. Unlike better established and funded parishes, Turkey Hills did not provide a residence for its minister at that time. Mr. Mills had negotiated a fixed salary, but after years of inflation, the value of his salary had depreciated. After years of trying to negotiate a higher salary, and Mills unwillingness to settle, he was dismissed in 1755.

The society invited several ministers to settle and in 1760 finally secured the Reverend Nehemiah Strong. At first it seemed that he too would go the way of Reverend Mills as arguments over his salary resumed. At one point the society resorted to the common practice of paying half Mr. Strong’s salary in provisions including wheat, rye, corn, pork, and beef.

But by May of 1766, a scandal surfaced which had nothing to do with financial difficulties. The settlers of Turkey Hills went before the regional consociation of Hartford with seven charges against Mr. Strong. The most serious was their contention that Mr. Strong had deceived the society by marrying a divorced woman shortly before his ordination. This issue, its seems, caused such distress with many church members that they left the Congregational Church and joined the Church of England at St. Andrew’s Parish in North Bloomfield.

As it happened, just before he left his post at Yale to come to Turkey Hills, Mr. Strong married Mrs. Lydia Smith Burr. Her first husband, Captain Andrew Burr, Jr., of New Haven, had gone to the West Indies. When he failed to return in four years, she divorced him on the grounds of desertion and married Strong. Burr returned and wanted her back. Mr. Strong resisted, so Burr petitioned the Connecticut General Assembly, which annulled the divorce. Mrs. Strong went back to Burr and Strong was dismissed.

Struggles with their pastors continued throughout the 18th century. In 1794 they ordained , another Yale graduate with a Master of Arts degree. The salary of these learned men continued to be insufficient to meet their daily needs and so, like many other pastors of his day, Cowles turned to private investments to support himself and his family. As was their history, the people of Turkey Hills became upset with their pastor’s secular interests. Finally in 1808, with the assistance of the Consociation, he was put on trial and subsequently released from his duties.

It wasn’t until 1814 when a religious revival returned to Connecticut and to Turkey Hills with the ordination of evangelist Asahel Nettleton. In a July 1815 article on recent religious revivals, the Connecticut Evangelical Magazine and Religious Intellegencer lists Turkey Hills as one of the societies that "had been favored with special showers of grace". A biographer in the day subsequently described Mr. Nettleton's ministry in the following way:

In the autumn of 1814, Mr. Nettleton commenced his labors in East Granby. This was a waste place. The moral condition of the people was exceedingly deplorable. But God saw fit to turn again the captivity of Zion. Under Mr. Nettleton’s preaching, there was a very interesting revival of religion.

It seems that today, the Town of East Granby may be more of a "Peaceable Kingdom" than it was during the days of it's early settlement.

Thanks again for the work of Mary Jane Springman and Betty Finnell Guinan for the content in today's story.