established, for it would be several days before their belongings could be conveyed to their home. As the sun was sinking toward the cover of Green Pond and Candlewood Mountains, Caleb led his bride up the winding trail that mounts the southern face of the grand old cliffs of Falls Mountain to Waramaug’s Grave; and, from that sightly place, she had her first view of the beautiful Weantinaug Valley. Waramaug’s grave has ever been held an almost sacred spot by the descendants of Caleb and Abigail. In my early youth, on just such another September afternoon, I was taken by my father up this winding trail, and sitting on the grass by the side of those honored stones, was told the tale I have been relating, as each succeeding generation of the name had been told it before me.
The wedding journey ended in that rough little home on Second Hill. There, the pair lived for fifty-eight years in happy wedlock; there, they reared a family of fourteen children (eleven sons and three daughters) of whom all came to manhood and womanhood; and, thence, in 1796, at nearly four score years, Caleb went to his eternal rest. Abigail survived him more than twenty years, in the full possession of all her faculties, and, at the extreme age of ninety-seven years, seven months, and eleven days, was laid beside the husband of her youth and the loving companion of so many years.
A wonderful life was that of grandmother Abigail. She lived through four French and Indian wars, and two wars with England. She saw one son go to the last French war and return from the decisive battle on the Heights of Abraham. She saw six sons go to the Revolution, and, having faithfully performed their part in their country’s struggle—at the siege of Boston, in the battle of Long Island and White Plains, in the crossing of the Delaware and at Valley Forge with Washington, in the battles of Trenton, Saratoga, Princeton, Monmouth, and Germantown—return victorious and unscathed. She also saw Stephen and Isaac return from the successful and conclusive struggle at Yorktown. Finally she saw four of her grandsons return from the second contest with England.
It would be hard to find in American history two more remarkable women than the two Abigails of the Tyrrell family. The first, Abigail Ufford, leaving a happy English home in Essex, braving the trials and privations of the American voyage of 1632, lived through the horrors of the Pequot War, and went with her young husband to found a primitive home in Milford. She stood among that company, which, under the umbrageous trees of Peter Prudden’s home lot, listened to the stately Ansantawa, as, plucking a branch from a tree and gathering a grassy clod from the earth, sticking the branch in the clod and sprinkling it with water from the Milford River, he waved it in the air, declaring that he “gave to them forever, the earth with all thereon, the air, and the waters above and below.” In this home, thus acquired, she lived for fifty-five years, rearing eleven children; saw her sons go to King Philip’s War; and saw them when they had reached man’s estate, start off with their loving helpmates, as their father had done before them, to found other homes—in Southold, in Newark, in Stratford, and in Woodbury. Ninety-nine years after, comes into that Milford home the second Abigail, to venture forth in her turn, like the first Abigail, into the wilderness.
NEW MILFORD IN THE WARS
By General Henry Stuart Turrill
For the first fifty years from its settlement by John Noble, the town of New Milford had very little concern in the military affairs of the colonies. The Colony of Connecticut furnished soldiers in the war of 1711 and in 1713; and, in 1721, occurred a great outpouring of Connecticut colonists for foreign service. In 1745 a call came to Connecticut from the sister colonies for large numbers of troops for service outside her borders, and, again, in 1755. In response to these calls, New Milford seems not to have sent any men. The defense of their own town and of its outlying districts was about all the colonists of New Milford undertook in a military way, this being sufficiently strenuous to engage their entire attention.
We are inclined, in these later days, to smile at the train-band of the ancient times, but the train-band service of our Colonial fathers was one of exceeding severity.
The first company in New Milford was organized in 1715, and was commanded for twenty years by Captain Stephen Noble. The service for the guarding of the frontier towns in the colony of Connecticut was an exceedingly arduous one. Every male citizen, except the aged, the infirm, and the ministers, was obliged to do military duty. These militia-men had to provide their arms and equipment at their own expense, and, if any business required their absence from the town, they were obliged to provide a substitute and to pay, themselves, for his services. The arms which each soldier furnished consisted of a musket or rifle, a bullet pouch containing twenty bullets, a powder horn containing twenty charges of powder, and such an amount of cloth or buckskin as would make sufficient wadding for this number of charges. These requirements were constant, and frequent examinations were made to see that all of the men of the company complied with them.