The First Years: from Missions to Revolution
By Neil C. Olsen, January 2012
The Beginning of the Episcopal Church in New Haven
New Haven was founded by Puritan settlers in 1758. New Haven, along with the rest of Connecticut, was established and ruled by Congregationalists for most of its early years. It was a sort of democratic theocracy. All citizens could vote, but all citizens were required to pay taxes to the Congregational meetinghouses, and no other churches were allowed to exist for decades. To the left is The First Sunday in New Haven, an 1881 engraving.
As early as 1669 the first petition to the General Court or assembly was made to establish an Episcopal Church, and it was ignored. Not until 1708 was the Episcopal Church recognized in Connecticut The Toleration Act of 1708 allowed the Episcopal Church to exist, but still required everyone to pay taxes to the Congregational meetinghouse. The Relief Act of 1727 finally allowed members of the Church of England (later to become the Episcopal Church) to be exempt from paying the church tax.
Much of the Episcopal Church’s roots in New Haven can be traced to the Yale University library. In 1719, Rev. Samuel Johnson minister of the West Haven Congregationalist church along with eight other Congregationalist men – including seven ministers, and the Rector and senior tutor at Yale – began to read the once forbidden Anglican authors in the Yale library, and discuss them at each other’s homes. They soon began to doubt the validity of their Presbyterian ordinations, and at the Yale Commencement in September of 1722 they declared for the episcopacy. While five recanted, four of these men were dismissed from Yale and left New Haven. Johnson was ordained the next year in London in the Episcopal Church.
After being ordained in England, the "American" Samuel Johnson returned to Connecticut in 1723. He worked as a missionary priest for The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) based in Stratford, Connecticut (see below).
There are records of parishes being formed this year in North Haven and West Haven, though no record of one being formed in New Haven has been found. But almost certainly, he would have founded a New Haven parish as his first order of business after settling in Stratford even before North Haven and West Haven; he was planning on using New Haven as a base to convert Yale students to the Episcopacy so they in turn could take orders and fill the newly founded parishes of his missionary territory in Connecticut. Rev. Johnson traveled to New Haven frequently between 1723 and 1740. During this time, services were conducted in private homes until a church could be built.
He founded or co-founded with his disciples parishes and churches in Norwalk, Fairfield, Ridgefield, Danbury, Fairfield, Redding, Bridgeport, Newtown, Stratford, Huntington, Milford, Derby, West Haven, New Haven, Woodbury, Wallingford, Guilford, Norwich, New London, Waterbury, Middletown, Litchfield, Simsbury (where the missionary Rev. Graves was thrown in jail for protesting paying taxes to Puritan churches), Middleton, Hebron and many other places in New England and New York that have escaped the records of history; in fact, any place where fifteen or even seven families professed for the Church of England in South and Western Connecticut, despite being severely taxed by the established order, probably merited a periodical visit by Johnson. He also preached often at Brookhaven across the sound in Long Island, and in New York City, as well as Rhode Island (at Weatherly and Providence).
In all this he met great opposition. The Connecticut Governor and state Assembly passed laws to prohibit the church beyond Stratford; when Johnson visited his parish in Fairfield in 1727 he found all the adult men of his parish there in jail for refusing to pay taxes. It did not work, and Johnson tirelessly strived for the emancipation of the Anglican people of New England. The Congregationalist authorities decided to send their best man, the Rev. Hezekiah Gold, to Stratford. Gold pronounced Johnson and his people "unconverted, and not only so but intruders and workers of all manner of mischief”. Gold was no more successful against Johnson than any other Puritan; when asked if his Church was increasing, in a quip worthy of his namesake in London, Rev. Johnson replied:
“Yes, it is increasing. I am a feeble instrument in the bands of God; but thanks be to Him, he has placed my left handed brother Gold here who makes six churchmen while I can make one.”
His disciples and converts took over parishes in New England, New York, and New Jersey, built churches, and they themselves as SPG missionaries spread out and founded new parishes. Johnson’s disciples eventually grew to about fifty clergymen, who occupied the highest Anglican pulpits in the land, in Boston, New Haven, Elizabeth New Jersey, and New York City, and dozens of other towns. For his incredible success in growing the Church in Connecticut, he was awarded the second honorary Doctor of Divinity degree given to an American by Oxford in 1743, and the first one that recognized accomplishment. He is regarded as “The Father of the Episcopacy in Connecticut.”
The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
The bookplate depicts a missionary Church of England priest bringing the light of the Gospel to Native Americans who are rushing to greet him. The society’s mission was documented in the report of the Society in 1703 (published in London in 1704). It was “to provide for the conversion of the Indians and settling there of religion in Her Majesty's Foreign Dominions by supplying with able and good Ministers the natives as well as English, appointing Catechists and Schoolmasters for the slaves with other ignorant persons, and sending over select Libraries for the improvement of the Clergy as well as practical treatises for the edification of the laity.” The SPGFP image above is taken from a fairly intact bookplate on a book donated by Trinity Parish’s missionary minister the Rev. Dr. Samuel Johnson to King’s College (now Columbia University) – a school Johnson founded – from a work written by Samuel Parker, his mammoth Bibliotheca Biblica: Being a commentary upon all the books of the Old and New Testament (1720).
The bookplate depicts a ship under full sail with flags flying on a choppy sea heading towards a point of land, while on the ship a minister in wig and gown stands holding out an open book in his right hand with a second open book clutched at his chest with his left hand – a sailor would fear a lee shore at this point. On the point are natives in a “Posture of Expectation” with some running towards the cliff on the point to greet the incoming vessel: on the windblown banner between them and the ship is the phrase is Transiens Adiuva Nos [Come over and help us] from Acts 16:9. Overhead is a sun with a human face with rays emanating from it beaming solemnly down on the ship – a common image in the period for the “Solar Logos”, the divine work emanating from Christ, the “true light” of John 1.
The missionary ministers in the colonies reported back to the society twice a year, and their reports provide an excellent view of the Anglican community in the years before the Revolution that terminated their missionary funding, though not their activities.
The Early days of Trinity Parish
While it is likely some form of Anglican parish was created by the young and energetic Rev. Samuel Johnson in 1723, the first record of an Anglican community that gathered in New Haven is found his semi-annual reports to the SPG. The former Yale tutor, minister of West Haven’s Congregationalist Church, and now frequently traveling rector of the Anglican Christ Church, Stratford, continually visited his various parishes in south east Connecticut – from Norwalk to Guilford to New London along the coast, and inland to Newtown, Derby, and Waterbury. He was technically obliged to visit each parish once a month, which meant he must have spent a great deal of time in the saddle: it was 33 miles along the relatively easy post road – about 8 hours travel. He reported in a letter to the SPGFP in April, 1728, that:
“I have likewise since preached to a considerable number of people at New-London… At Norwalk, where I preached since I wrote last, there are several families who are reconciled to the Church… I have also (besides other neighboring parishes) lately preached at New Haven, a large town about fourteen miles eastward [from Stratford], where there is a College. Great pains were taken to hinder people from coming to Church, and many well-wishers to it were over-persuaded not to come; however, I had near a hundred hearers, and among them several of the College; after service about ten of the members of our Church there subscribed £100 towards building a Church in that town, and seem very zealously engaged to prosecute the design, and I hope in a few years there will be a large congregation there."
It must have been a most effective sermon indeed. Since he reported twice annually to the society, it is hard to pin down a date for the sermon that inspired ten listeners to pledge such a large amount, the price of a small home, and twice the yearly salary of a Yale tutor at the time. But as the Puritans did not celebrate Christmas, it is likely that he traveled around the towns on the holidays to minister to recent English immigrants who would have missed the holiday services, so Christmas 1727 is a likely founding date for Trinity Church – if you take the first pledge as the founding date of a church.
But first they had to spend 25 years trying to get permission from the Puritans.
The First “Church” in New Haven
It was not until 1752 that the Episcopalians in New Haven secured a site to build their house of worship. In a town of Congregationalists, one of the major obstacles they faced was finding someone willing to sell their land to Episcopalians. In July of 1752, Mr. Samuel Mix “did give, grant, bargain, and sell unto Enos Alling and Isaac Doolittle, for the building of a house of worship agreeable and according to the establishment of the Church of England,” a lot on the east side of Church Street, south of Chapel Street. This street was actually not named Church Street until Trinity was erected. Trinity was the first house of worship in New Haven to be called a “church” as opposed to a meetinghouse.
Our first church was built at the south-east corner of present day Church and Chapel Street between July 1752 and the summer of 1753. The first church was a small wooden structure measuring 58 feet by 38 feet and only sat 150 persons. The small wooden altar was flanked by two arch-shaped tablets which are presently in Trinity’s vestibule. There were 24 families and 87 "souls" at the time the first building was completed -- a somewhat unusually low proportion for the time, where a family might have 9 people in it. They may have been a young parish of recent immigrants.
Trinity would exist completely outside the theocratic Congregationalist structure of New Haven. Trinity parishioners challenged the structure of New Haven and also caused controversies at Yale. Trinity parishioners thought that Yale’s purpose was only to teach the arts and sciences and that Yale should not require its students to conform to any religious doctrine; students should be allowed to worship as he or his parents wished. It can be argued that Trinity introduced the whole concept of church and state separation to the colony.
Trinity and the American Revolution
Surprisingly little is recorded about Trinity and the role we played in the War for Independence. Prior to 1776, we know the Rev. Bela Hubbard was sent as a missionary to New Haven around the year 1767 to minister to Trinity Church. Hubbard, educated at Yale and a Guilford native, also had Christ Church in West Haven under his care. He held services throughout Connecticut, taking over the missionary role of the aged Rev. Dr. Samuel Johnson.
It is said that during the war about one-third of the citizens were for independence, about one-third were Loyalist or Tory, and the remaining third were neutral. Trinity Church members, because of their ties to the Church of England, were in large part Loyalist or neutral. The Rev. Bela Hubbard is on record prayihg for the English King -- who was, after all, the head of the Church. Not surprisingly, there were parishioners who disagreed with their clergy.
Isaac Doolittle could often be found in Westville with fellow Trinity parishioner Elijah Thomson and Jeremiah Atwater of the Congregational First Society. Since 1776, the three men had been operating a powder mill that supplied gunpowder to the patriot army.
Even as the British landed in New Haven, Hubbard decided to remain in his home. He is rumored to have shouted to his wife, “What shall I do?” His wife instructed him, “Silly, put on your robes.” The Rev. Bela Hubbard did just that and stood in the doorway in full vestments with prayer book in hand. As a result, the British troops spared his house and his property.
Trinity suffered little damage during the war. The only items plundered were some damask hangings and the Rev. Hubbard’s surplice (church vestment). British Redcoats were not to blame for the missing items. Some militia from Farmington stole the items, but only the surplice was recovered.
[2] Hawks, Francis K, and Perry, William Stevens, Documentary History of the Protestant Episcopal Church, James Pott, New York, 1863 p. 129
↩
The First Years: from Missions to Revolution
By Neil C. Olsen, January 2012
The Beginning of the Episcopal Church in New Haven
New Haven was founded by Puritan settlers in 1758. New Haven, along with the rest of Connecticut, was established and ruled by Congregationalists for most of its early years. It was a sort of democratic theocracy. All citizens could vote, but all citizens were required to pay taxes to the Congregational meetinghouses, and no other churches were allowed to exist for decades. To the left is The First Sunday in New Haven, an 1881 engraving.
As early as 1669 the first petition to the General Court or assembly was made to establish an Episcopal Church, and it was ignored. Not until 1708 was the Episcopal Church recognized in Connecticut The Toleration Act of 1708 allowed the Episcopal Church to exist, but still required everyone to pay taxes to the Congregational meetinghouse. The Relief Act of 1727 finally allowed members of the Church of England (later to become the Episcopal Church) to be exempt from paying the church tax.
Much of the Episcopal Church’s roots in New Haven can be traced to the Yale University library. In 1719, Rev. Samuel Johnson minister of the West Haven Congregationalist church along with eight other Congregationalist men – including seven ministers, and the Rector and senior tutor at Yale – began to read the once forbidden Anglican authors in the Yale library, and discuss them at each other’s homes. They soon began to doubt the validity of their Presbyterian ordinations, and at the Yale Commencement in September of 1722 they declared for the episcopacy. While five recanted, four of these men were dismissed from Yale and left New Haven. Johnson was ordained the next year in London in the Episcopal Church.
After being ordained in England, the "American" Samuel Johnson returned to Connecticut in 1723. He worked as a missionary priest for The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) based in Stratford, Connecticut (see below).
There are records of parishes being formed this year in North Haven and West Haven, though no record of one being formed in New Haven has been found. But almost certainly, he would have founded a New Haven parish as his first order of business after settling in Stratford even before North Haven and West Haven; he was planning on using New Haven as a base to convert Yale students to the Episcopacy so they in turn could take orders and fill the newly founded parishes of his missionary territory in Connecticut. Rev. Johnson traveled to New Haven frequently between 1723 and 1740. During this time, services were conducted in private homes until a church could be built.
He founded or co-founded with his disciples parishes and churches in Norwalk, Fairfield, Ridgefield, Danbury, Fairfield, Redding, Bridgeport, Newtown, Stratford, Huntington, Milford, Derby, West Haven, New Haven, Woodbury, Wallingford, Guilford, Norwich, New London, Waterbury, Middletown, Litchfield, Simsbury (where the missionary Rev. Graves was thrown in jail for protesting paying taxes to Puritan churches), Middleton, Hebron and many other places in New England and New York that have escaped the records of history; in fact, any place where fifteen or even seven families professed for the Church of England in South and Western Connecticut, despite being severely taxed by the established order, probably merited a periodical visit by Johnson. He also preached often at Brookhaven across the sound in Long Island, and in New York City, as well as Rhode Island (at Weatherly and Providence).
In all this he met great opposition. The Connecticut Governor and state Assembly passed laws to prohibit the church beyond Stratford; when Johnson visited his parish in Fairfield in 1727 he found all the adult men of his parish there in jail for refusing to pay taxes. It did not work, and Johnson tirelessly strived for the emancipation of the Anglican people of New England. The Congregationalist authorities decided to send their best man, the Rev. Hezekiah Gold, to Stratford. Gold pronounced Johnson and his people "unconverted, and not only so but intruders and workers of all manner of mischief”. Gold was no more successful against Johnson than any other Puritan; when asked if his Church was increasing, in a quip worthy of his namesake in London, Rev. Johnson replied:
“Yes, it is increasing. I am a feeble instrument in the bands of God; but thanks be to Him, he has placed my left handed brother Gold here who makes six churchmen while I can make one.”
His disciples and converts took over parishes in New England, New York, and New Jersey, built churches, and they themselves as SPG missionaries spread out and founded new parishes. Johnson’s disciples eventually grew to about fifty clergymen, who occupied the highest Anglican pulpits in the land, in Boston, New Haven, Elizabeth New Jersey, and New York City, and dozens of other towns. For his incredible success in growing the Church in Connecticut, he was awarded the second honorary Doctor of Divinity degree given to an American by Oxford in 1743, and the first one that recognized accomplishment. He is regarded as “The Father of the Episcopacy in Connecticut.”
The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
The bookplate depicts a missionary Church of England priest bringing the light of the Gospel to Native Americans who are rushing to greet him. The society’s mission was documented in the report of the Society in 1703 (published in London in 1704). It was “to provide for the conversion of the Indians and settling there of religion in Her Majesty's Foreign Dominions by supplying with able and good Ministers the natives as well as English, appointing Catechists and Schoolmasters for the slaves with other ignorant persons, and sending over select Libraries for the improvement of the Clergy as well as practical treatises for the edification of the laity.” The SPGFP image above is taken from a fairly intact bookplate on a book donated by Trinity Parish’s missionary minister the Rev. Dr. Samuel Johnson to King’s College (now Columbia University) – a school Johnson founded – from a work written by Samuel Parker, his mammoth Bibliotheca Biblica: Being a commentary upon all the books of the Old and New Testament (1720).
The bookplate depicts a ship under full sail with flags flying on a choppy sea heading towards a point of land, while on the ship a minister in wig and gown stands holding out an open book in his right hand with a second open book clutched at his chest with his left hand – a sailor would fear a lee shore at this point. On the point are natives in a “Posture of Expectation” with some running towards the cliff on the point to greet the incoming vessel: on the windblown banner between them and the ship is the phrase is Transiens Adiuva Nos [Come over and help us] from Acts 16:9. Overhead is a sun with a human face with rays emanating from it beaming solemnly down on the ship – a common image in the period for the “Solar Logos”, the divine work emanating from Christ, the “true light” of John 1.
The missionary ministers in the colonies reported back to the society twice a year, and their reports provide an excellent view of the Anglican community in the years before the Revolution that terminated their missionary funding, though not their activities.
The Early days of Trinity Parish
While it is likely some form of Anglican parish was created by the young and energetic Rev. Samuel Johnson in 1723, the first record of an Anglican community that gathered in New Haven is found his semi-annual reports to the SPG. The former Yale tutor, minister of West Haven’s Congregationalist Church, and now frequently traveling rector of the Anglican Christ Church, Stratford, continually visited his various parishes in south east Connecticut – from Norwalk to Guilford to New London along the coast, and inland to Newtown, Derby, and Waterbury. He was technically obliged to visit each parish once a month, which meant he must have spent a great deal of time in the saddle: it was 33 miles along the relatively easy post road – about 8 hours travel. He reported in a letter to the SPGFP in April, 1728, that:
“I have likewise since preached to a considerable number of people at New-London… At Norwalk, where I preached since I wrote last, there are several families who are reconciled to the Church… I have also (besides other neighboring parishes) lately preached at New Haven, a large town about fourteen miles eastward [from Stratford], where there is a College. Great pains were taken to hinder people from coming to Church, and many well-wishers to it were over-persuaded not to come; however, I had near a hundred hearers, and among them several of the College; after service about ten of the members of our Church there subscribed £100 towards building a Church in that town, and seem very zealously engaged to prosecute the design, and I hope in a few years there will be a large congregation there."
It must have been a most effective sermon indeed. Since he reported twice annually to the society, it is hard to pin down a date for the sermon that inspired ten listeners to pledge such a large amount, the price of a small home, and twice the yearly salary of a Yale tutor at the time. But as the Puritans did not celebrate Christmas, it is likely that he traveled around the towns on the holidays to minister to recent English immigrants who would have missed the holiday services, so Christmas 1727 is a likely founding date for Trinity Church – if you take the first pledge as the founding date of a church.
But first they had to spend 25 years trying to get permission from the Puritans.
The First “Church” in New Haven
It was not until 1752 that the Episcopalians in New Haven secured a site to build their house of worship. In a town of Congregationalists, one of the major obstacles they faced was finding someone willing to sell their land to Episcopalians. In July of 1752, Mr. Samuel Mix “did give, grant, bargain, and sell unto Enos Alling and Isaac Doolittle, for the building of a house of worship agreeable and according to the establishment of the Church of England,” a lot on the east side of Church Street, south of Chapel Street. This street was actually not named Church Street until Trinity was erected. Trinity was the first house of worship in New Haven to be called a “church” as opposed to a meetinghouse.
Our first church was built at the south-east corner of present day Church and Chapel Street between July 1752 and the summer of 1753. The first church was a small wooden structure measuring 58 feet by 38 feet and only sat 150 persons. The small wooden altar was flanked by two arch-shaped tablets which are presently in Trinity’s vestibule. There were 24 families and 87 "souls" at the time the first building was completed -- a somewhat unusually low proportion for the time, where a family might have 9 people in it. They may have been a young parish of recent immigrants.
Trinity would exist completely outside the theocratic Congregationalist structure of New Haven. Trinity parishioners challenged the structure of New Haven and also caused controversies at Yale. Trinity parishioners thought that Yale’s purpose was only to teach the arts and sciences and that Yale should not require its students to conform to any religious doctrine; students should be allowed to worship as he or his parents wished. It can be argued that Trinity introduced the whole concept of church and state separation to the colony.
Trinity and the American Revolution
Surprisingly little is recorded about Trinity and the role we played in the War for Independence. Prior to 1776, we know the Rev. Bela Hubbard was sent as a missionary to New Haven around the year 1767 to minister to Trinity Church. Hubbard, educated at Yale and a Guilford native, also had Christ Church in West Haven under his care. He held services throughout Connecticut, taking over the missionary role of the aged Rev. Dr. Samuel Johnson.
It is said that during the war about one-third of the citizens were for independence, about one-third were Loyalist or Tory, and the remaining third were neutral. Trinity Church members, because of their ties to the Church of England, were in large part Loyalist or neutral. The Rev. Bela Hubbard is on record prayihg for the English King -- who was, after all, the head of the Church. Not surprisingly, there were parishioners who disagreed with their clergy.
Isaac Doolittle could often be found in Westville with fellow Trinity parishioner Elijah Thomson and Jeremiah Atwater of the Congregational First Society. Since 1776, the three men had been operating a powder mill that supplied gunpowder to the patriot army.
Even as the British landed in New Haven, Hubbard decided to remain in his home. He is rumored to have shouted to his wife, “What shall I do?” His wife instructed him, “Silly, put on your robes.” The Rev. Bela Hubbard did just that and stood in the doorway in full vestments with prayer book in hand. As a result, the British troops spared his house and his property.
Trinity suffered little damage during the war. The only items plundered were some damask hangings and the Rev. Hubbard’s surplice (church vestment). British Redcoats were not to blame for the missing items. Some militia from Farmington stole the items, but only the surplice was recovered.
[2] Hawks, Francis K, and Perry, William Stevens, Documentary History of the Protestant Episcopal Church, James Pott, New York, 1863 p. 129
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