Two
Curious Ministers
by: Doris Sherrow
This month,
I’m going to give you a lack of history.
Two locally famous ministers came to Portland,
Rev. Moses Bartlett in 1732, and Rev. William Jarvis in
1829, and each one chose, in my opinion, a somewhat bizarre place to make
his home. I don’t know why they did this! So let me tell it to you--perhaps
one of you will have insight, or historical information, or séance
material to offer…
In 1731, Rev. Daniel Newell, the
first minister of the twenty-year-old Congregational Church, died. The
subsequent search for a new minister yielded Moses Bartlett, who turned
24 in 1732, the year he was hired. The church stood in what we know as
the intersection of William and High streets — traffic was too rare
and gentle back then to make it a hazard to place a building in an intersection!
Not surprisingly, a piece of land was purchased
for Bartlett to make his home. Forty acres of Wangunk Indian land!
This lot stretched from Bartlett Street on the north, to William Street
on the south, with High Street forming its western border.
So logical it would have been for him to
set his house on the corner of that lot, in the spot that is now the entrance
to the Swedish Cemetery. His church would have been directly in front
of him!
No, he set his house on the diagonally opposite
corner, the northeasternmost edge, opposite the south end of Prospect
Street! Thus his nearest neighbor was the Wangunk Indian tribe--about
forty families of Wangunk dwelt predominantly in the Penny Corner Road
area.
Most of the houses of his church members
were located along Main Street; only two other houses stood on Bartlett
Street. Why did he choose to settle near the several dozen Wangunk?
One possible answer is that he hoped to
"Christianize" them as various other ministers had attempted.
The two most famous are John Eliot in the later 1600s, and Eleazar
Wheelock in the later 1700s. Many people saw this proselytizing as
a blessed chance to create more Christians while simultaneously "raising"
the Indians from their "lowly" culture to the "exalted"
Christian one. (Few of these people were Indians.)
David Brainerd from Haddam was another
young minister to the Indians. Even though he only lived to the age of
29, his activities were so outstanding that the more famous Rev. Jonathan
Edwards published a book from his journal in 1749. Brainerd had grown
up in Haddam, and taken his ministerial training from Rev. Phineas
Fiske.
Moses Bartlett had also taken his ministerial
training from Rev. Fiske, albeit several years earlier. Was there something
about Fiske’s teachings that led a young religious man to think about
the Indian community? I don’t know.
So I don’t know why Bartlett would
settle virtually amidst the Wangunk.
Now the other minister, Rev. William Jarvis.
A bold few citizens formed the Episcopal
Church in 1789. They built a colonial-house type of building on the corner
of Bartlett and High streets, and worshipped there until 1832, when they
built a small, simple brownstone church on the site of the current Episcopal
Church. William Jarvis was called to lead them in 1829, while they were
still in the Bartlett Street building, i.e., the more northerly area of
town.
Jarvis had married Elizabeth Miller Hart
from Saybrook. Her wealthy father built them a house on Marlborough Street.
It was a beautiful Federal style with a fanlight in the gable and elegant
carved wooden trim both inside and out. Its gable end is barely visible
through the trees of what we know as Elmcrest, which is now Saint Francis
Care Behavioral Health.
This location is not too odd, in that it
was just around the corner from Main Street, though it would have been
equally logical for Jarvis to locate on Main Street, near where the new
Episcopalian church was built a few years later. The downstreet area was
coming into power as the brownstone industry became more profitable, and
its residents made up the larger portion of his communicants.
More curiously, the house built for the
Jarvises was decidedly far back from the road, which had been a toll road
since 1808. Until recently I worked in this building, running the library
for Elmcrest, and I noticed, to my surprise, that I could not really hear
the intense 1990s traffic along Marlborough Street! The 1851 Clark map,
which shows downtown Portland, shows that Jarvis’s house was three
times further back from the road than other Portland houses built by that
date.
Back from the road is one thing – even
more curiously, the Jarvises’ new house was ROTATED AWAY FROM
THE ROAD! In effect, the 1829 house had been built considerably south
of, and turned away from, the church and the congregation. Jarvis was
fondly remembered by his congregation, as evidenced by Julia Norton
McLean’s History of Trinity Episcopal Church, Portland, Conn.,
1788-1938. Why would he want to retreat so far away from his congregation?
Perhaps the non-Portland roots of this couple,
indeed the Saybrook origins of Mrs. Jarvis, made them less likely to cluster
in the middle of Main Street with their congregation. Maybe the beautiful
house away from the turnpike, gazing out onto the Connecticut River, was
a lovely form of solace to them. We currently strive to find work in corporate
mob scenes only to retreat to woodsy suburban homelots. Who knew this
mindset was around in the 1820s? (Curiously, one surviving letter from
the Jarvis family complains of the noise drifting into the house---from
the docks down at the river front!)
So
why did Jarvis set himself down away from his community, with his architectural
back to them? And why did Bartlett plunk himself down in the midst of
the Wangunk? Let me know if your crystal ball offers an answer!
