| EGBERT MARSH Founder of the Memorial Library | HONORABLE DANIEL DAVENPORT of Bridgeport, Conn. |
Gouverneur Morris, Roger Sherman, James Wilson, and Albert Gallatin.’
“John Marshall seems to me not so much a founder as a re-founder of the Constitution, and I should be unwilling to agree with Mr. Bryce in giving him a place which appears with greater right to belong to the successor of Washington in the presidential chair. So, in arranging the statesmen of the second order, it may be doubted if Gallatin does not more properly belong to a later generation. But that in that class is Roger Sherman, rather than Trumbull, rather than Ellsworth, rather than Johnson, rather than any other son of Connecticut, or, after John Adams, of New England, few will question who have closely studied the Journals of the Continental Congress, and the debates in the Convention of 1787, out of which our Constitution sprang.”
The last speaker, Hon. Daniel Davenport of Bridgeport, was introduced as a descendant of John Davenport, the leader of the first group of colonists to settle the New Haven Colony, and the first pastor of the first church in New Haven. Mr. Davenport spoke as follows:
“The settlement of New Milford began in 1707, exactly a century after that of Jamestown, Va. At that time, although Milford and Stratford at the mouth of the Housatonic had been settled almost seventy years, and the river afforded a convenient highway into the interior, for much of the distance, this place, only thirty miles from the north shore of Long Island Sound, was still beyond the extreme northwestern frontier of New England, and indeed of English North America.
“The inhabitants of Connecticut then numbered about fifteen thousand, settled in thirty towns, mostly along the shore of Long Island Sound, and upon the banks of the Connecticut and Thames rivers. During the thirty years next before, a few families from Norwalk had settled at Danbury, from Stratford at Woodbury, from Milford at Derby, and from Farmington at Waterbury. With these exceptions, hardly more than pin points upon the map, and a few settlements about Albany, N. Y., the whole of western and northwestern Connecticut and of western Massachusetts and northern New York was a savage wilderness, covered with dense forests, and affording almost perfect concealment for the operations of savage warfare.
“Though the northwestern portion of Connecticut was then a most formidable and inhospitable wilderness, strenuous efforts were already being put forth by the Colony to encourage its settlement. For, strange as it seems to us now, at that time, owing to imperfect modes of cultivation and the difficulty of subduing the wilderness, the settled portions of the Commonwealth had begun to feel overpopulated. Twenty-five years before, the Secretary of the Colony had reported to the Home Government, that ‘in this mountainous, rocky, and swampy province’ most of the arable land was taken up, and the remainder was hardly worth tillage.
“This need of more land, and the protection from invasion which the settlement of this section would afford the communities near the coast, and the innate love of adventure and desire to subdue the wilderness, which have characterized the American people from the beginning, were the impelling causes which led to the planting of New Milford.
“So pressing did this movement become that, though what is now Litchfield County was then as remote and inaccessible to the rest of the Colony as were Indiana and Illinois to our fathers in the middle of the last century, within forty-five years after the first settler had built his log cabin and lighted his fire here twelve towns had been settled and the county organized with a population of more than ten thousand.
“In order that we may appreciate, somewhat, the broader political conditions under which the first settlers took up their abode here, which largely engrossed their thoughts and vitally affected them and their children for two generations, it is necessary, before taking up the narrative of their actual settlement here, to advert briefly to the state of affairs at that time in England, and on the continent of Europe, and in the English, French, and Spanish Colonies of North America.