Below is Allan Appel’s second entry in a yearlong series looking at the past 388 years of New Haven history, as America celebrates the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Let’s have a hooray, or, better yet, a huzzah and then a cannon shot because it’s a be autiful spring day in April 1738 and New Haven is marking its 100th birthday, our first centennial. The father of our country-to-be is just six years old and likely learning to ride his pony down in that large southern colony, Virginia. We last left the grassroots history of our burg at its jubilee, 1688, 50 years ago. Back then New Haven was recovering from loss of its charter, and a forced marriage to Hartford as part of the Connecticut Colony. That was the new king’s way of punishing us for harboring those regicides — Whalley, Dixwell, and Goffe — but now enough time has passed for New Haven to recover and she is truly flexing her maritime and trading muscle enough to be anointed a co-capital of the colony. Things are looking up. Everyone likely is gathering ‘round the upper Green, that is, the marketplace, and perhaps near the three or four buildings of this relatively new place they’re calling “the collegiate school,” Yale College, quite recently built in the early years of the 18th century. Everyone’s out on that April day in 1738, maybe even the full populace, numbering roughly 1,000 souls, along with their animals, on hand to celebrate the centennial with orations and prayers. As the ancestors are still by and large serious “old light” Puritans, the commemorative event is most likely a religious affair in the Puritan style of soul-searching. (Your reporter could find no first-person documentation about this first centennial so benefit of the doubt requested.) It could have featured a secular oration that would have praised the founding leaders John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton. Perhaps they went down to where Water Street is today and marked the spot with a tree-planting or a stone so the coming generations might know the site of the landing of the Hector, the ship that brought the original settler party. But in the New Haven world of 1738, where there was yet little distinction between the civil and the religious, religious remarks would have predominated including prayers, each one more heartfelt than the other, and perhaps going on for two or three hours. Even though church membership was considerably more open now than it was 50 years ago and available to all citizens — whether or not you could ‘prove’ your faith — still the centennial would have been of the old school Congregational variety, severe and restrained, in order to make a point.  And everyone would have been acquainted with the most popular book of the century — next to the Bible, of course — John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, that traced the Christian journey that so many serious Christians saw themselves on in the wilderness of New England. There was likely no fiery emotion, no detailing your sinfulness, your worthlessness, your deep yearning, like a lover for the embrace of divine grace, and an elucidation of the stations you have crossed in the journey to your ‘conversion.’ No sirree. None of that new style, that “new light” emotional faith that is characterizing an upstart generation of young whipper-snapper preachers like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and Gilbert Tennant who are leading the Great Awakening. This is America’s first widespread revival movement and, in 1738 New Haven, we are just about at the height of it. What you believe and how you pray are front-page news, although there are still no papers as we know them. Just broadsides and printed official documents. “News” also comes in letters carried by travelers from the other colonies and carried by ships’ captains from Europe, and they are passed eagerly from hand to hand over at the ordinary, the tavern, where the Taft Hotel is today. Whitefield has recently disembarked at the harbor, not far from the Long Wharf that is some 469 feet long by now. His intention is to plant the flag of the new light in the Biblical heart of Puritanism in the colonies, our town. And he has a specific target too: those Yale students, mostly future clergyman, are going to need so much of the new preaching, they will not be left alone until they became, as was reported, “full of God.” That’s where people like Hannah Heaton were likely headed that morning. Here’s an excerpt from around that time from the remarkable diary of Heaton, a farm woman (the original diary is in the vault of the New Haven Museum). She was a true spiritual seeker, who walked the six miles down to the Green from her farm in North Haven: “Now after a while I went over to New Haven . . . just before that great work began . . . There I heard Mr. Tennant and Mr. Whitefield preach which awakened me much. Mr. Whitefield laid down the marks of an unconverted person. O strange it was such preaching as I never heard before. If one day’s serving God is so wearisome to you, he preached, how could you endure to be in heaven with him forever where nothing but praises are? He said if you was carried to heaven in this condition the first prayer you would make would be that you might go into hell . . .” Heaton was unusual, an obsessive reader of religious books such that her husband, so goes another entry in the diary, hid her spectacles. And then another time when he threw them in the mud she called her husband a “faraoh” and rued her life of choosing a mate who was, well, unconverted. And so it went, a religious revival or Great Awakening and soon enough a countering of the revival locally in what was called the “Saybrook Platform,” a list of beliefs and behaviors and decorums that would separate new lights from old lights. In a sense this was good, an atmosphere of more religious toleration — although a non-Congregational church, that is, Episcopal, was tolerated only a dozen years later in 1752. Yet the Great Awakening resulted in at least a hundred new (Congregational) churches separating. That in turn powered new towns forming up as families followed their preachers. These were called “separations.” Land was wealth and the borders of the newly formed places had to be surveyed, recognized, and maintained. That’s why you read, for example, in the minutes of the New Haven town meeting of Dec. 25, 1738, the appointment of not only captains and lieutenants for the militias, which were called “train bands ” — that is, trained bands of citizen soldiers — but also grand jurors, and surveyors, and also the equally official position of “fence viewers and haywards.” Fence viewers inspected fences (often stone walls) to ensure they were “legal and sufficient” to prevent disputes. Haywards monitored hedges, fences, and common lands, securing stray cattle and protecting crops. Capt. Andrew Tuttle and Ensign Gideon Andrews were chosen the general fence viewers for New Haven that year “as accation shall call for.” But the town also voted to appoint James Dunbar and Joseph Beecher the official fence viewers “for Clubb field this year.” But where was one to go when the boundarie (sic) disputes were not within a town and therefore could not be solved by local fence-viewers and haywards because the disputes were among the growing number of the towns themselves? Answer: the General Assembly that met, in 1738, representing “His Majestie’s Colony of Connecticut in New England.” Meeting between May 11 and May 31, representatives of some 44 towns were there, among them “Captn. Isaac Dickerman and Captn. Jonathan Allen for New Haven.” You think absentee landlord-ship is something new? They enacted a law in this session such that “a non-resident proprietor of a field appoint a locale agent for maintenance, such that if a fence viewer report an insufficiency in the fence and it’s repaired, an accounting of the cost will be available,” and so forth. In addition to property boundaries between the towns that were settled, finally, at the General Assembly, the participants also established parish boundaries. In one instance there was considerable debate because the church in a new town was not placed precisely in the center of the parish. There were laws passed in the assembly of 1738 limiting fees that could be charged on the ferry at Rocky Hill over the Connecticut River, another law regulating fees that could be charged statewide for the branding of horses, and also “An Act for Enlarging Goalers Fees.” Goalers not as in sports but as in jails. The resolution was: “The goalers or keepers of the several goals within this colony shall be allowed seven shillings per week for dieting each prisoner.” Ah, words. To eat, if you were in jail at least, in the early years of the century was “to diet.” As more people wanted to be saved, they had to, at least as a beginning, go to church, and travel’s difficulties were very much a factor also in the creation of the new towns. In the run-up to one of the 1738 town meetings in New Haven it was noted, for example, the inhabitants of a place in the colonial burbs called Chestnut Hill were remitted a portion of their taxes “in consideration that in winter they were unable to attend church.” Shortly afterwards, the town of Amity was formed, with its own minister because everyone agreed that traveling ten or twelve miles each way in a 1738 winter to church was a serious hindrance to the development of true faith and achieving divine grace. Amity became Woodbridge. Next time we meet, 50 years hence, both Woodbridge and New Haven will have been incorporated — both in 1784 — into the new state of Connecticut, in the new country of the United States that had recently won its Revolutionary War. New Haven was among the first cities to incorporate, in no small part to a establish a city government to advance and regulate trade, and under the guidance of its founding mayor, Roger Sherman. Having signed all the country’s founding documents — the Articles of Association, the Articles of Confederation, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution — one wonders if he thought becoming mayor was a step down, or up? See you then, in 1788. See below for previous articles in this series. America At 250 … And New Haven At 388 The post On Preachers “Fence Viewers”: New Haven’s First Centennial Year appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less