Accompanying images make distant lives and times visible. The mark of an enslaved woman consenting to her deed of sale, a hand-drawn map of the town’s parishes, a wooden box that transported tea from Canton, the pocket Bible carried by a Civil War recruit, a nostalgic cover illustration for the Ladies’ Home Journal, all pull a forgotten past into present focus. The surviving documents, objects, photographs, and paintings also prompt reflection on what remnants and representations of the past survive and what is missing from the visual record.
Silences spoke loudly as I searched for meetinghouse voices. Ministers, judges, and merchants, the dominant landowners whose public influence defined the town’s religious and secular affairs, spoke clearly and authoritatively in sermons, church records, town meeting reports, and court decisions. Women’s reflections, while publicly muted, filled family letters and lingered in journals, albums, and scrapbooks. The voices of those marginalized and enslaved echoed faintly from birth records, baptismal lists, property transactions, runaway notices, and grave markers in the town where three branches of my family had settled in the 1660s.
I remembered a fourth-grade class trip to Meetinghouse Hill, where no trace of the town’s first gathering place remained and a country club offered scenic views of the Connecticut River. We children peered through the underbrush at a mile marker left by Benjamin Franklin’s postal route surveyors measuring the distance to New London. We examined lichen-crusted inscriptions on crumbling gravestones in an early cemetery. We learned that the hilltop location had provided protection from Indian attack. We did not learn about the systematic elimination of Native American presence or that the town’s ministers and prominent families owned enslaved servants for a century and a half. We had no idea that in the third meetinghouse on that site, seats for “the black people” in the corners of the rear gallery had been raised only in 1814 so they “could see the minister.” Even today, when scholars articulate the consequences of settler colonialism and document the persistence of chattel slavery in Connecticut, it’s local impact has largely disappeared from public memory.
As my search for the meetinghouse past brought startling discoveries about privilege and power, about the intersection of private lives and public actions, about habits of memory and forgetting, its history continued to evolve. When a Pakistani couple in New Britain, the taxpaying owners of a successful pizza restaurant, received notice of impending deportation for an alleged visa violation, the town’s fifth meetinghouse became literally a sanctuary. Church members in 2018 invited Sahida Altaf and Malik bin Rehman to set up housekeeping in a former Sunday school classroom. Their five-year-old daughter Roniya, an American citizen, joined them on weekends while the immigration appeals process worked its way through the courts. For seven months, until the deportation order was temporarily lifted, the threatened South Asian immigrant family remained sequestered. An ankle bracelet assured that Malik would not step outside. When award-winning author and journalist Dave Eggers reported the story in the New Yorker in August 2018, national attention focused again on Old Lyme’s meetinghouse, where new voices spoke from inside its walls.
Author’s Note
The sections that follow focus closely on local events and personalities between 1664 and 1910, and detailed endnotes provide historical and scholarly context. To make distant voices more accessible, I modernize spelling, capitalization, and punctuation in early texts. As a reminder of the calendar change in 1752, when Britain and its colonies adopted the Gregorian calendar that shifted the start of the new year from March 25 to January 1, I retain the use of a slash for dates between those months. Because early births and deaths were inconsistently recorded, life dates provided are sometimes approximate. Also, I refer to the town as Lyme until 1857, when the original first parish became the separate town of Old Lyme. Portions of this book appeared earlier in articles posted online for the Florence Griswold Museum’s history blog From the Archives.
Forgotten Voices is being published at a time when churches, communities, colleges, and families are recovering long-buried histories, probing past actions, engaging in truth and reconciliation projects, and acknowledging their roles in slavery and the subjugation of Indigenous peoples. My own reconstruction of the history of a Connecticut meetinghouse reflects that wider effort. This book recovering lost segments of the New England past may serve as a resource for others who seek to cast new light on old stories.
Acknowledgments
Many friends and colleagues helped make this book possible. I am most grateful for generous support from Rev. Steven Jungkeit and the First Congregational Church at Old Lyme; from Rebekah Beaulieu and the Florence Griswold Museum; and from the Old Lyme Ladies Benevolent Society. I especially thank Amy Kurtz Lansing, Mell Scalzi, and my expert assistant Amber Pero for their multiple contributions. My thanks also to Linda Alexander, Carolyn Bacdayan, Richard Buel, Emily Fisher, Elizabeth Kuchta, Jim Lampos, Jane Ludington, Townsend Ludington, Marilyn Nelson, Elizabeth Normen, Michaella Pearson, John Pfeiffer, Bruce P. Stark, Leslie Starr, Celine Sullivan, Nadine Tang, Nicholas Westbrook, Douglas Winiarski, Linda Winzer, Rodi York, and Caroline Zinsser for advice and assistance at various stages of this project.
For reading and commenting, more than once, on the manuscript, I thank my wise colleagues John E. Noyes and George Willauer. For caring guidance and encouragement from the outset, I thank my friend and fellow church historian Elizabeth Webster. I am especially grateful to Suzanna Tamminen, editor-in-chief at Wesleyan University Press, for essential recommendations and for guiding this project to fruition. I also thank Glenn E. Novak for his skilled copyediting, David Wolfram for his elegant design, and Ann Brash, Stephanie Elliott Prieto, and Jaclyn Wilson at Wesleyan University Press for their patient and expert assistance. My deepest gratitude goes to my cousin Janet York Littlefield, my children Frederic Wakeman, Matthew Wakeman, and Sarah Wakeman, and my husband Robert B. Tierney, who shared the journey.
CHAPTER ONE
Meeting Together
Instructions from a New London court offer the earliest indication of colonial religious practice in the coastal Connecticut settlement that would later be named Lyme.
This Court, apprehending a necessity of government on the east side of the river of Saybrook, do order … that the people at such times and seasons as they cannot go to the public ordinance in the town on the other side, that they agree to meet together at one place every Lord’s day at the house agreed upon by them for the sanctification of the Sabbath in a public way according to God.
Soon after Connecticut’s General Court granted permission in 1663 for the town of Saybrook to separate into two plantations, a lower court in New London issued instructions for governing the new colonial settlement on the east side of the Great River. It ordered inhabitants to designate a constable, provide religious instruction to children and servants, and “agree to meet together at one place every Lords day.”
The court acknowledged that during certain “times and seasons,” those living on the east side of the Connecticut River could not go to “the public ordinance in the town on the other side.” Releasing them from the obligation to attend meetings on the Lord’s day in Saybrook, it required the east side’s recent inhabitants to gather instead in “a house agreed upon by them for the sanctification of the Sabbath in a public way.” Surviving records do not reveal whether