to the early settlement of northern Ohio probably than any other section of the country. Pilgrims from this portion of New England began early to find their way westward. Along the fertile valley of the Mohawk, on the edge of the great inland seas, these settlers planted their homes. You can easily trace the line of their march in the intelligence and dignity of character that their descendants possess to-day in these regions. New Milford contributed to this body of Pilgrims that followed the sun toward its setting. As they went out, they left that which has been so eloquently set forth in various public addresses during the progress of this Bi-Centennial of New Milford. The beautiful valleys and imposing mountains, the clear rivers and foaming brooks, the marvelous, picturesque beauty of New Milford and its environment, they left behind them. They did not find these, as they planted their tents in the great forests of northern Ohio. How often have I heard one of these Pilgrims from New Milford describe her homesickness as she looked out upon the almost flat country, which the local clearing had revealed, into the dense forests that shut down upon the edge of this clearing on every side! Turbid streams, muddy roads, wooden sidewalks, the plain and unattractive natural scenery, and the rough conditions of pioneer life were vastly different from the beautiful landscape and refined conditions of this home town from which they went out.
“But they did not leave all, nor the best, of that which they had gathered in the life in New Milford, as they left its borders and went overland by their own conveyance into Ohio. They took with them three fundamental conceptions of life. First, that of the Christian home; second, that of the public school; third, that of the Christian church. To these ideals, planted in the hearts of these early Pilgrims, may be traced the fruitage of the strong intellectual and moral life which has developed in the citizenship of northern Ohio.
“These Pilgrims from New England found chiefly an opportunity. The physical conditions were depressing and hard. The problem of life was serious and difficult, the hardships encountered were rigorous and persistent; but wherever these Pilgrims planted a colony in the Western Reserve, or New Connecticut, as it was called, they established the Christian home, the public school, and the Christian church.
“Philo Penfield Stewart, a Pilgrim from the neighboring town of Sherman, illustrates the character and purposes of these early settlers. He went into Ohio in 1832, and, even before his weary body could have rested from the long and tedious journey, he began at once, in connection with Rev. J. R. Shipherd of Elyria, plans for the establishment of a college and colony at Oberlin. It is possible, as history hints, that the first white pioneer into Ohio was Ferdinand De Soto, who possibly pushed his way into the region of this great central State as early as 1539. It is most fortunate, however, that not the descendants of De Soto, but the Pilgrims from New England and their descendants, gave the ideals and formative influences to this new commonwealth. That there should be the least percentage of illiteracy in the northern counties of Ohio, known still as the Western Reserve, of any part of the tabulated world, is not an accident. The schoolhouse was as much a part of their essential requirements as the barn or the shop. When in the height of his wide-reaching influence, Dr. Joseph Cook went once to Cleveland; he carefully studied the conditions of the public schools of the Forest City. He afterwards bore testimony that ‘in coming from Boston, Massachusetts, to Cleveland, Ohio, he came up in the character of the appointments and work in the public schools, and not down’; that ‘the educational system of Cleveland was better than the educational system of Boston.’ Your speaker having had somewhat intimate acquaintance with both systems, would speak an humble word of endorsement to this testimony of Dr. Cook. These Pilgrims from New Milford found mud, homeliness, forest, hardships, toil and privation. But they found opportunity. This opportunity they improved to the best of their ability or of any ability that human beings could command. They planted churches and worshiped within their sacred precincts with loving reverence; they built their schoolhouses and had no lack of teachers, for many of their wives and daughters had been teachers in Old Connecticut. They sent their children to school, sparing them from needed work on the farm or in the shop or store. They did this, because they were building life, character; were establishing a Christian civilization to outlast them and their immediate descendants. They did it, because they believed in God and man and in making the most of life. Better than all, they gathered in their homes around the clear-swept hearth of their open fireplaces, in love, peace, and confidence. Often the crackling fire on the open hearth was the only light that the home possessed for the evening. Sometimes, as we learn from their records, they put melted tallow in a tin basin and hung a bit of cotton wicking over the side to light their humble homes. ‘Two such lanterns,’ they tell us, ‘were sufficient to light up the church for evening service.’ It was almost reverting to the type of the lamp used in early Jewish history, and quite to the profound Hebrew reverence. But whatever artificial light these Pilgrims had, they saw clearly the great purposes of existence, and read with undimmed vision ‘their title clear’ to the best that devotion and energy and faith and courage could achieve.
“When the great agitation came in favor of freedom, as against chattel slavery, the descendants of the New Milford Pilgrims in northern Ohio did not flinch nor hesitate. Professor Hart, in his recent volume on ‘Slavery and Abolition,’ says:[17] ‘One reason for the force which abolition early acquired in Ohio was the fallow field waiting for it in the Western Reserve. This region, settled by Connecticut people between 1790 and 1820, was still a little New England, its churches, schools, and local government closely modeled on those of Connecticut.’ Nor did this ‘fallow field’ among the Pilgrims from New Milford prove unproductive. Rustic lads, whom Dr. James Harris Fairchild, President of Oberlin College for many potential years, represented, bearing his testimony to these hard, early conditions, waded through the snow barefooted in order to attend school. Such lads could not be kept away from the privileges of higher training. Colleges were immediately necessary. Such institutions were established, buildings erected, faculties gathered, lecture and class rooms crowded with eager pupils, as by the magic wand of some scholastic magician. Within a few months of its establishment, Oberlin College had hundreds of pupils. They had brought together a faculty perhaps unequaled, man for man, in the faculty of any institution ever founded. They were giants, intellectually and morally. Their names to-day are wrought not alone in the intellectual and educational history, but into the very warp and woof of our national life. Ohio, the great West, the South, and the nation could hardly have been the great, united nation that it is, had it not been for these Pilgrims from New Milford and their descendants, who stood with heroic courage for the highest ideals, and strove to attain them at tremendous sacrifice and suffering.
“Professor Hart is responsible for the following bit of history: ‘When Harriet Martineau attended an anti-slavery meeting, she found that she had given offense to the best society in Boston. Theodore Parker found his clerical brethren refusing to exchange pulpits with him; “My life seems to me a complete failure socially; here I am as much an outcast from society as though I were a convicted pirate.” The eastern colleges, almost without exception, were strongholds of pro-slavery feeling.... In 1848, Charles Sumner, a graduate of Harvard, spoke to the students of the college. Longfellow said: “The shouts and the hisses and the vulgar interruptions grated on our ears. I was glad to get away!”’
“But such a spirit of cowardice and weak surrender to the financial and social influence of the South as was manifested by many eastern colleges, was not that of the western colleges planted in the clearing of the great forests of the New Connecticut largely by the Pilgrims of New Milford. They spoke out steady and strong against the ‘twin relic of barbarism.’ Professor Seabert, in his history of the ‘underground railway,’ bears testimony that through the Western Reserve almost every line of secret escape for the slave running toward the north star passed. At Oberlin, where the Pilgrims in whom your speaker is most profoundly interested had their home, eleven underground railroads passed. They radiated as many as the ten fingers of the two hands, and one hand had an extra finger. It was the boast of these brave men and women, and the boast was proven by the fact, that no negro was ever taken back to slavery who reached the Western Reserve. How well I remember those early incidents in my boyhood home! The Oberlin-Wellington rescue case is written in the history of the nation. How the excitement and agitation of that New England village in Ohio come to me as I think of it! It was but a few months after the death of my father, Oliver Roberts Ryder, a Pilgrim from Danbury to this same Western Reserve. A negro boy, John Price by name, had escaped from slavery. He had been a resident for some time in Oberlin. Through the intrigue of a pro-slavery countryman near the village, he was waylaid, captured by a band of slave-holders, bound and gagged, thrown into a wagon, and hurried off to a railroad station on the railroad leading into the South. The descendants of our Connecticut Pilgrims of the town heard of it. Prayer was offered first, for faith in God was the very threshold over which they passed to the accomplishment of any brave purpose. Wagons were hastily gathered, firearms piled into them, and away the Oberlin rescuers went to win this black boy, rather worthless fellow in himself, to personal freedom. This was his constitutional right under the Declaration of Independence, for he surely was born to be ‘free and equal’ in privilege. He was rescued from the slave-holders, although they were armed to the teeth and displayed their guns, but did not dare to use them. The faculty, the Sunday school superintendent, the leading business men were in this band of rescuers, and were afterwards thrown into prison for the technical crime of their acts. Here again the splendid traditions which these Pilgrims brought from their eastern home came in play. Obey the law they must. They could do it by not breaking it, or by submitting to the penalty. They chose the latter, and no one made the slightest effort to escape, but submitted without a moment’s hesitation to the processes of the law, and stood before the jury. They were not subpæna jumpers, and in this showed that they were not criminal in intent, as those who seek to escape the processes of the law always are.
“No, be it said to the glorious memory of the Pilgrims of New Milford and Western New England, they did not follow in the wake of many of the larger institutions in the East, and cringe and whimper and grovel under the crack of the whip of the slave-holding aristocracy. Open and free and manly, they stood out for the defense of freedom, whether applied to the person of black man or white man. It was the highest type of educational training which any institution can furnish. It was not tamely to learn axioms or to demonstrate mathematical problems, but to know, to believe, to defend that which was best and truest. These worthy Pilgrims who went out in the early part of the nineteenth century into this western forest, stood for this with all the sturdy strength of these mighty trees that shadowed their homes. It is because they went, and others like them, that the Buckeye State has risen to and maintained her dominant influence in the nation’s life. It is due to these Pilgrims, more than to any other one force, that the whole Northwest was from the first saved the disgrace of slavery. Institutions of learning in which women as well as men had the right to the best education were planted. They maintained the school, the church, the home in every hamlet and city and village; and, to-day, this region they settled presents the finest, largest, and most comprehensive type of Christian civilization that the earth affords. All glory, then, to these Pilgrims from New Milford! They, like one of old, ‘went out not knowing whither they went.’ They dared and suffered and died, but always achieved. Well may this village, a beautiful gem set in the midst of these rolling hills, rejoice in its own noble development and progress and prosperity. Your life here is almost ideal. The conditions are as fine as the world affords. But, as you rejoice in this Bi-Centennial of your own founding, forget not, O brave and true men and women of this generation; forget not, O Christians of these churches; forget not, O patrons of this redeemed nation, that the Pilgrims that went out from your firesides and homes into the great West inaugurated the tremendous forces that have moved on in increasing power and breadth until the whole nation has been made the richer by their mighty power.”
Dr. Bennitt’s address at Saint John’s Church was as follows: