NEW HAVEN IN 1784.

BY FRANKLIN BOWDITCH DEXTER.

[Read January 21, 1884.]

On the evening of January 21, 1784, the President of Yale College wrote in his diary: "This afternoon the Bill or Charter of the City of New Haven passed the Governor and Council, and completes the incorporation of the Mayor, four Aldermen and twenty Common Council." It is fitting to recall on this anniversary some characteristics of the New Haven of 1784.

The town then covered the territory now occupied, not only by the present town, but also by West Haven, East Haven, North Haven, (the greater part of) Woodbridge, Hamden, and Bethany, in all an area of perhaps ten by thirteen miles, or from ten to twelve times as extensive as now.

The inhabitants were estimated at 7,960 souls; of whom 3,350, less than almost any one of our wards to-day, were in that part which was chartered as a city. There are now within the town-limits of 1784, by a more than tenfold increase, some 87,000 inhabitants, while the city proper has multiplied more than twentyfold.

In the settled part of the city (that is, the original nine squares, called "the town-plat," and the south-eastward extension to the water, afterwards known as "the new township ") there were some 400 dwellings, mostly of wood, but a good

number of brick, and one or two of stone. A nearly contemporaneous map (1775) on our walls shows that these dwellings. lay almost wholly in the area bounded by Meadow, George, York, Grove, Olive and Water streets-the northern part of this area being by far the least fully inhabited.

The streets were without regular lines of trees, without pavements, sidewalks, or names; but it was an awkward mode of designation by localities identified with personal names (as we still speak of Cutler Corner); and eight months after the charter was given, twenty-one of the principal streets (Broadway, Chapel, Cherry, Church, College, Court, Crown, Elm, Fair, Fleet, George, Grove, High, Meadow, Olive, Orange, State, Temple, Union, Water, and York) received at a city meeting their present names. A few may have been already known by these titles; I dare not affirm it of any but College and Chapel streets, in both which cases the names were applied only to the immediate vicinity of the two college buildings which occasioned them. A few more had been known by other names; thus, the lower part of Church street was called Market street, from the market-house at the open intersection of George and Church; State street is called on the map of 1775 Queen street, a designation which would seem to go back to distant Queen Anne; part of George street was long known as Leather lane; York street was sometimes called West street, and Grove street North street.

Of the new names Church street was suggested by the Episcopal Church which stood on the east side of that street, a little nearer to Chapel than to Center street; Temple street (which then extended only from Chapel to Elm), from the two churches on the Green, in front of which it ran; York street, from the name of the "Yorkshire quarter," given at the very beginning to that neighborhood where some leading immigrants from Yorkshire sat down; Elm street from the already patriarchal trees planted in 1686 in front of the Rev. Mr. Pierpont's dwelling and remaining almost to our day; and Court street, because it was intended that it should run across the Green past the Court House.

New Haven had already been described in print (Peters' History of Connecticut) as "the most beautiful town in New England;" and one special feature which contributed to this impression was the Green, originally called "the market-place,' because the southern border was used for that purpose. Dr. Jedidiah Morse, however, states in the first edition of his American Geography (1789) that "the beauty of the public square is greatly diminished by the burial ground and several of the public buildings which occupy a considerable part of it."

Chief among these buildings was an elegant and commodious brick State House or County Court House, built in 1761-64 by the State and County jointly, and standing a little to the north of, and much nearer Temple street than the present Trinity church; it had both east and west doors, furnished with stone steps; the first floor was devoted to court rooms and offices, and the second to the use of the two houses of the General Assembly at its October sessions, while the third floor was an open hall. The judge of the County Court was Col. James Wadsworth, a graduate of Yale in 1748, of whose college days an interesting reminiscence is preserved in the plan which he drew of New Haven in his senior year and which was engraved in 1806.

Next to this building stood what was still the "New Brick" meeting-house of the First Church, built in 1753-57, measuring about seventy-five by fifty feet, and holding an average congregation of not much over nine hundred persons; it was on the site of the present Center Church, and was arranged internally in a corresponding way, with the pulpit toward the west, but it was as if the church now standing were shifted around sidewise, the north and south length being the greatest, and the bell tower at the northern end. The minister was the Rev. Chauncey Whittelsey, now near the end of his life, having reached the age of sixty-six, and having been settled for thirtysix years. His residence was at the corner of State and

Whiting streets.

The earliest secession or separation from the common church of the whole town had been the society formed in consequence

of the Whitefieldian revival, and after a long struggle finally recognized by authority of the General Assembly in 1759, and dubbed with the unaccountable name of the White Haven Society* Their wooden meeting-house, built in 1744 and much enlarged in 1764, measuring about sixty feet square, and called from its color the Blue Meeting-house, stood on the southeast corner of Elm and Church streets. The congregation worshiping there had dwindled from a much larger number than that of the present society, to less than eight hundred hearers, under the dry preaching of that acute metaphysician, Jonathan Edwards, the younger, now aged thirty-nine, and for fifteen years their pastor.

The majority of those who had left Mr. Edwards's meeting, as much from dislike of his extreme "New Divinity" views as from his dull preaching, had formed a new congregation, called the Fair Haven society, now the largest in town, of about one thousand persons, who worshiped in a house the size of the "New Brick," built of wood, in 1770, on the site of the pres ent church of the United Society. Their minister was Mr. Allyn Mather, a young man of thirty-six, now in feeble health, and among the congregation was the Rev. Samuel Bird, Mr. Edwards's predecessor, and Mr. Mather's frequent substitute in the pulpit; both of them died within the year. It is one of the curious felicities of history that not only have these two divergent offshoots from the old First Church long ago come together in the United Society, but now they are preparing to absorb also another organization (the Third Church) which represented in its origin an opposite extreme of theological belief. The great majority of New Haven in 1784 was thus of one religious faith. But besides these societies of the Congregational order there was a small Episcopal society, not numbering much over two hundred members, which occupied what was distinctively known as "The Church," built in 1754-55, on Church street, with the Rev. Bela Hubbard as rector, now forty-four years of age, and having been here for fourteen

*May this name have been given with a covert reference to Whitefield?