The settlers for many years crushed their grain by hand in mortars or carried it to mill at Danbury, Woodbury, or Derby, and brought back the flour and meal. In 1717, John Griswold, under an arrangement with the town, built a grist and sawmill on Still River, at what is now Lanesville.
It is said that in 1713, there was but one clothier in the colony. The most that he could do was to full the cloth which was made in the homes. A great proportion of it was worn without shearing or pressing. He lived at Woodbury, and thither the early inhabitants of this town resorted to have their cloth fulled. People, to a very large extent, wore clothing made from the skins of animals. They also wore wooden shoes and moccasins, or went barefoot, although leather boots and shoes were sometimes used.
The implements which they used in subduing the wilderness, their axes, saws, plows, hoes and scythes were of the rudest description. Their horses, cattle, sheep and swine we should now regard as of very inferior quality. The same was true of the few vegetables they cultivated, and of their fruits, especially their apples. Turnips, squashes and beans were the principal vegetables. Potatoes were not as yet cultivated in New England, onions were not generally, and tomatoes were looked upon as poisonous. Some of them owned negro slaves but worked the harder themselves to make them work.
They had little or no currency, taxes and debts being paid in produce. What they ate, what they wore, what they coaxed from the reluctant soil of these hillsides, cost them infinite labor. As was to be expected, a stingy avarice was their besetting sin, which manifested itself in all the relations of life. They were without newspapers, none being published in the Colony until 1755. They had few books, the first printing press in the Colony not having been set up in New London until 1709. They suffered greatly from malaria and other forms of sickness, as did all the early settlers in the State. Medical treatment was poor and difficult to obtain. The women went to the limit in childbearing, and the burden of rearing their large families was awful. The art of cooking was little understood. They had no stoves or table forks. The food was served in a very unsavory fashion, and was very indigestible. The people therefore had frightful dreams, and dyspepsia was very prevalent. No carpet was seen here for a hundred years after the settlement. Communication with the outer world was slow, difficult and rare. On several occasions, owing to the failure of their crops and the difficulty in getting relief from distant places little better off, they nearly starved to death.
Truly the task which they had undertaken to subdue this wilderness, to plant here the civil, religious and educational institutions of Connecticut, and to prepare this beautiful heritage for their children and children's children, was no holiday pastime, no gainful speculation, no romantic adventure. It was grim, persistent, weary toil and danger, continued through many years, with the wolf at the door and the savage in the neighboring thicket.
Beside the physical evils with which they were beset, they had spiritual troubles also. They fully believed in witchcraft as did all their contemporaries, in a personal devil who was busily plotting the ruin of their souls, in an everlasting hell of literal fire and brimstone, and in a Divine election, by which most of them had been irrevocably doomed from before the creation of the world to eternal perdition, from which nothing which they could do, or were willing to do, could help to rescue them. The great object of life to them, therefore, was to try to find out what their future state would be. Said one of their preachers, "It is tough work and a wonderful hard matter to be saved. 'Tis a thousand to one, if ever thou be one of that small number whom God hath picked out to escape this wrath to come." That we may get a touch of reality from those far off days, let me quote you a few lines from the saintly Thomas Hooker, the founder of Connecticut, and long the model for her preachers. "Suppose any soul here present were to behold the damned in hell, and if the Lord should give thee a peephole into hell, that thou didst see the horror of those damned souls, and thy heart begins to shake in consideration thereof; then propound this to thy own heart, what pains the damned in hell do endure for sin, and thy heart will shake and quake at it. The least sin that thou didst ever commit, though thou makest a light matter of it, is a greater evil than the pains of the damned in hell, setting aside their sins. All the torments in hell are not so great an evil as the least sin is; men begin to shrink at this, and loathe to go down to hell and be in endless torment."
The only test they were taught to apply to ascertain whether they were predestined to suffer or escape this fearful doom, was in their ability and willingness to conform their wills to the will of God as revealed in the Bible. Accordingly as they had succeeded in this, they had a reasonable assurance as to their fate, although no wile of the devil was more frequent than to falsely persuade men that their prospects were favorable. To study the scriptures day and night to ascertain the will of God, and to struggle without ceasing to conform their wills to his as therein revealed, was therefore the great object of existence for them, not that they could thereby alter in the least their future state, but that they might, if possible, find out what it was likely to be.
Should this recital of their beliefs provoke a smile, our amusement will soon be checked by the thought of the little progress which has been made in the last two hundred years, towards solving the same problem. The origin of evil, the ineradicable tendency of the human heart to sin and do evil, the mournful spectacle of ruin and desolation in the moral world, and the future life are the same inscrutable mysteries to us as to them. If we have constructed or adopted a more comfortable theology, it is probably because we are less logical than they. It is perhaps because we have forgotten or refused to look at some things at which they did not blink.
Then, too, the Lord was abroad in those days. Their thoughts were deeply tinged by the semi-pagan views with which the authors of both the Old and New Testaments were imbued. When the thunder crashed, it was the voice of an angry God that spoke. When the lightning flashed, it was the gleam of His angry eye. Benjamin Franklin was then but a year old, and electricity had not become the packhorse of the world. The smiles and frowns of nature in all her varying moods through all the days and seasons, which we ascribe to the operations of law, were to them the visible tokens of the wrath or favor of the Almighty. On December 11th, 1719, for the first time in the history of the Colony, the northern lights were seen here. They shone with the greatest brilliancy. The consternation they caused was fearful. The people had never heard of such a phenomenon. They considered it the opening scene of the day of judgment. All amusements were given up, all business was forsaken, and sleep itself was interrupted for days. Again, on the 29th of October, 1727, a mighty earthquake occurred, which shook with tremendous violence the whole Atlantic seaboard. The people here believed that the Lord was about to swallow them up in His fierce anger. The women throughout New England immediately discontinued the wearing of hoop skirts then recently come into fashion, believing that the earthquake was the sign of the Lord's displeasure at the sinful innovation.
Hardly had the first settlers here begun to build permanent homes for the living, when they were called upon to provide resting places for the dead. The first person to be buried in yonder burying ground was a child, a girl, Mary, the daughter of Benjamin Bostwick. The next was John Noble, the first settler, and the first Town Clerk. He died August 17th, 1714. The town formally laid out the burying ground in 1716. Within fifty years three hundred had gone to rest there.