Museum Acquires Title Searches

Twenty-one years of painstaking research by retired town historian Jeanne Majdalany, has resulted in detailed title searches for nearly 200 properties in the town of Sharon.

The title searches are bound in two volumes, and include houses listed under the headings of North Main Street, Upper Main Street, Main Street, West Main Street/Hospital Hill, South Main Street, Calkinstown, The Oblong, Ellsworth, Sharon Valley and “Miscellaneous”.

Jeanne’s interest in researching house titles began in Stamford, Connecticut, where Jeanne was president of the Stamford Historical Society. One of her early projects was identifying houses in Stamford built prior to 1775.

When Jeanne moved to Sharon in 1982, she soon became involved with the Historic District Commission, acting as head of the Commission for fifteen years. In that capacity, and later as the archivist for the Sharon Historical Society and Sharon Town Historian, Jeanne continued delving into old deeds, only this time working in Sharon’s town vault.

The information contained in each title search comes from time consuming and painstaking wading through land transaction records, many of which are recorded in handwriting that is nearly undecipherable today. Jeanne notes that the comment most often repeated by people watching her work is, “How on earth can you read that?”

Typical information in each title search includes the address of the property, the grantee and grantor names, dates of property transfer, volume and page citations from the town records, and any descriptive notes that apply to the property. Many of the title searches have “conclusion” notes done by Jeanne to explain and clarify problems or puzzles in the records, or to substantiate her conclusions about records with incomplete information.

The museum is now discussing how best to make the information in the title searches available to town residents. Copies of the title searches will be made available at a cost to be determined in the near future.

If you wish to find out if the title search for your home is available, e-mail to the SHS at director @sharonhist.org or call 364-5688.

Member Spotlight

Jeanne Majdalany: Teacher, Archivist, Researcher & Volunteer

When Jeanne Majdalany moved to Sharon in 1982, she brought a wealth of experience, a love of detailed research, and a spirit dedicated to community service.

A retired English and history teacher, Jeanne traveled the world, teaching at institutions of learning ranging from Northfield Mount Hermon, Northfield, MA and The Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr, PA, to The American College and the American Community School in Beirut, to the Lowheywood School in Stamford, CT, where Jeanne was head of the English department.

As archivist for the SHS and town historian, Jeanne spent countless hours wrestling with primary source documents to trace the history of Sharon’s houses and families. Jeanne’s original research into long-ago Sharon family names forms the basis of the historical society’s genealogical collection.

Jeanne has always found the puzzles associated with house research intriguing. Her biggest problem, one that was never solved, was determining the oldest house in Sharon. “People have always considered it to be the Nathaniel Skinner house, but the house itself doesn’t appear on the earliest land records.” Another possibility is the Penoyer House on South Main Street. When pressed, Jeanne refuses to commit, “I’ll never be able to say which is truly the oldest.”

In spite of all the work Jeanne has done on the title search project, she freely admits and apologizes for errors which are bound to show from time to time. And although Jeanne now lives in Great Barrington with her well-known black Labrador, Bonnie, she is always willing to respond to frantic calls from staff and volunteers at the SHS.

Jeanne’s work on the title search project was done as a volunteer. The SHS has covered the cost of printing and binding the two volumes, and putting Jeanne’s hand written work onto computer disk. Her research, given to the SHS, represents thousands of hours of volunteer time, not to mention sore eyes!

Thank you Jeanne, we are all in your debt.

New & Noteworthy

Tea Sets Found!

Everyone at the Sharon Historical Society would like to express their heartfelt appreciation to Ginny Palmer, Shirley Perotti, and Lucinda and Darren Winston for their donations of tea services to the SHS in response to the “wish list” in the last issue of the Archives. Two lovely sets of china and a gold-leafed porcelain tea service were donated. For those of you who would like to know more about the charming sets, stop by and we’ll make you a cup of tea.   (Don’t forget to bring the cookies!)

Our New-Old Stepping Stone

Thanks to the foresight of Don Carley and daughter, Donna, one of Sharon’s original Stockbridge marble stepping stones has come to rest at the Sharon Historical Society. Thought to have been quarried from Sharon’s Perkin’s Quarry (South Main Street, west side,) the stone is believed to have belonged originally to the Dewitt Clinton Noyes family on Hilltop Road. When the Carley family purchased a horse barn from the Noyes’ in 1947, the mounting stone went along with the purchase.

The stone—all 700-800 pounds of it—was moved to the Historical Society the first week of June. The Society is very grateful to Don Hosier of UpCountry Services in Sharon who removed the stone from the Carley house, transported it to the Historical Society, and set it just outside our main entrance. Thanks also go to both Ed Kirby and William Trowbridge who were instrumental in responding with all haste to the call to move the stone in a timely manner.

Town of Sharon:  Archaeological & Historical Resources                                                

The following brief history of the town of Sharon was written as part of the recently completed Natural Resources Inventory Report for the Town of Sharon, 2005. Because there is no contemporary history of the town (is there anyone who is interested in tackling that project?) Liz Shapiro and Ed Kirby of the SHS took on the project of culling resources both old, and less old, to put together a readable and pithy history of Sharon. The version below is slightly longer than the one that appears in the published NRI Report, however it does not include the portion of the paper dedicated to the architectural resources of the town. The full and uncut version of this brief history may be viewed on the Historical Society website at www.sharonhist.org.

Pre-Settlement Inhabitants/Native American Presence

The first people to traverse the area to become Sharon were the nomadic Paleo-Indians and the Archaic Period Indians, who came into the area following the retreat of the glaciers.  Well before the arrival of Dutch or English settlers, a substantial community of Native Americans occupied portions of modern Sharon.  Their principal village stood on the eastern edge of Indian Pond, where they had cleared considerable acreage.  Others resided in the valley of Ten Mile River (Webatuck Creek) and on a hillside overlooking Mudge Pond (now Silver Lake Shores).  An age-old Indian trail connected Wechquadnach (Indian Pond) with Scaticook (Kent).  Workmen constructing the Hotchkiss Brothers factory in Sharon Valley in the mid-nineteenth century uncovered an Indian burial site there.

Early Native American inhabitants belonged to the loose Algonquin confederacy and called themselves Matabesecs (part of the Mohegan tribe).  As early as 1740 Moravian missionaries, including Joseph Powell and David Bruce, worked to convert these people to Christianity and achieved significant success.  During the tense days of the mid-1740s when warfare raged along the northern frontier, New York’s governor moved to break up such activities.  Bruce stayed on, however, to minister to his charges (d.1749). Powell moved to the west side of Indian Pond where he preached to a group of white settlers until 1774.

Sharon Indians transferred land to arriving immigrants, beginning in the 1730s, though disputes over these transactions persisted into the mid-1750s.  In 1755 they relinquished any surviving property rights.  A century later a great memorial service was held on the eastern shore of Indian Pond to dedicate a monument to the area’s early missionaries.

Original Home Lots – Early Settlement – the Sharon Green

The towns of Sharon and Salisbury were the colony’s last undeveloped area, referred to as the “far northwestern highlands.”  In May, 1732, the General Court of the colony sent a committee to inspect the land lying west of the Housatonic River to lay out a northern town (Salisbury) and to determine whether there was enough good land for a southern town (Sharon).  Their inspection, completed in October, determined that sufficient good land existed for two towns, and in May, 1738, the General Court ordered that the southern portion of the Housatonic lands be auctioned at New Haven.

Prior to the sale of the southern lands, a few settlers had already made their way to the site.  The first inhabitant was likely Richard Sackett who resided at Wassaic (New York) and had acquired title to thousands of acres along the border.  Capt. Garret Winegar and Daniel Jackson were other early settlers. 

Of the original fifty proprietors who purchased shares in the new town of Sharon, 28 eventually settled on their lands, men like Stephen Calkin, Ebenezer Mudge, Jonathan Peck, and Nathaniel Skinner.  The 22 remaining shareholders re-sold their rights to others, such as Jonathan Dunham, Caleb Jewett, and John Williams.  As a group the 50 owners of the town became the “Proprietors of the Common and Undivided Lands in the Township of Sharon.”  Early residents were drawn from throughout the colony, with the largest number from Colchester (10) and Lebanon (8).  Others hailed from Hebron, Norwalk, Lyme, Litchfield, Bolton, Stamford, and Middletown.

The proprietors quickly set to work establishing their new domain.  Immediately after the sale (actually completed in January 1739) several purchasers visited the area to explore and determine where settlement should occur.  Rather than occupy the geographic center, they chose the region along the town’s western border.

The first 40-acre home lots were soon laid out along the present road which runs from Amenia Union to Sharon village and thence northward to the Salisbury town line, current Gay Street.  A few lots were also established on Sharon Mountain. Land in modern Sharon village was set aside for the first meetinghouse, pounds, and some grazing area, a site that evolved into the town Green, a focal point for shopping and services in the nineteenth century.   

Once begun, the settlement process moved ahead quickly, and within three years much of the town had been laid out and occupied.  The first 40-acre land distribution of October 1739 was followed by a second in February 1740.  Additional parcels of 100 acres were made in succeeding years until virtually all the town land had been distributed, eventually totaling approximately 700 acres for each shareholder.  The proprietors themselves (and their descendants) survived as a corporate body until 1889.

In early October 1739, with settlement fully underway, Sharon residents petitioned the General Court for town privileges, which were duly granted.  The first official town meeting gathered in December 1739.  Those in attendance selected town officers, created a committee to choose a minister and another to lay out a burying place.  Settlement now raced ahead, with immigrants pouring into town, and in less than a single generation (1756) the population had reached 1,205.  By 1782 more than 2,230 inhabitants were spread across the town, mostly attracted by the growing iron industry.

First Congregational Church and Cotton Mather Smith

Sharon’s first religious services were held in the houses of Capt. Dunham and Mr. Pardee, as well as in Pardee’s barn.  The first meetinghouse, a log structure measuring 36’ x 20’ was erected in 1741, followed a few years later by a larger structure, 45’ x 35’ with 20’ posts.  A third meetinghouse was begun in the 1760s on the upper Green.  At Sharon’s first town meeting, a committee was selected to choose a minister for the community.  Peter Pratt, a recent Yale graduate was selected, and was ordained in April 1740.  Five years later townsmen dismissed him for intemperance.  John Searle from Simsbury next occupied the pulpit, but was dismissed in 1754 for feeble health.  On August 23, 1755, Cotton Mather Smith of Suffield was ordained pastor of the Sharon church.  He was a 1751 Yale graduate and a descendent of Cotton Mather, Massachusetts’ famed Puritan divine.  Reverend Smith served as Sharon’s pastor until his death in 1806 and exerted considerable influence over the town, especially during the Revolution. 

Sharon played its part in The Great Awakening, a spiritual upheaval of awesome proportions that drew on a history of revivals dating back to the 1720s.  Exhortations of ministers Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and others fanned the excitement, attacking orthodoxy and calling on listeners to repent.  Supporters of the revival, who desired a more personal and intimate relationship with God, earned the name “New Lights,” while opponents, upholders of tradition, became known as “Old Lights.”  In many cases parishioners left their congregations in large numbers and established rival churches.  Whitefield visited the area repeatedly, the last time in 1770 when he spoke in Sharon, Canaan, and elsewhere.   

When Whitefield revisited Sharon in July 1770 many opposed his being admitted to the town meetinghouse, but the Rev. Smith invited him in, even though opposed to Whitefields’ message.  Smith had been a student of Jonathan Edwards and possessed evangelical tendencies himself, and thus allowed Whitefield to speak when most ministers in Litchfield refused.

To accommodate the expected crowds the windows were taken out of the church and bleachers installed.  Whitefield’s sermons drew an immense congregation from Sharon and surrounding towns.  He discoursed on the doctrine of the new birth “with astonishing power and eloquence.”  Many inhabitants followed him on his journey even after he left Sharon so that they might hear his words.

In 1775, word of the fighting at Lexington and Concord set in motion a vast grassroots military response.  The news from Massachusetts reached Sharon on Sunday morning.  After the early service Rev. Smith dismissed his congregation and 100 men gathered on the green prepared to march to Boston.  They were encouraged by Parson Smith, an ardent Whig, whose public ministry had been filled with allusions to the tyrannical edicts of King George and the degraded and suffering conditions of the colonies.  His patriotism extended to prayers and hymns.  One song defied the “iron rod” of tyrants and the “galling chains” of slavery, placing trust in “New England’s God” instead.  Smith led his congregation out to that first wartime training session and later served as a chaplain during the Canada campaign.

Main Street – Village Hub

As early as 1815 Sharon was termed “a considerable village,” “comprising 50-60 dwelling houses, several of which are neat and handsome,” along with two churches, a post office, and several mercantile stores.  Maps from the 1850s identify the Congregational, Methodist, and Episcopal churches, a blacksmith, wagon shop, three stores, attorney and physicians offices, jewelry shop, harness shop, school, and other services, mostly located in the one-mile stretch along Sharon’s Green.

In the 1870s George Gager spurred a plan to plant four rows of elms on Gay Street and the Green, giving it a park like appearance.  Isaac Bartram erected a new town hall in 1875, with a mansarded tower added in 1884.  At the south end of the Green the Wheeler sisters underwrote construction of a prominent stone clock tower, while in 1893 a gift from Maria Bissell Hotchkiss led to the building of the impressive Hotchkiss Library. 

Building lots surrounding the green began filling in, with several new homes constructed by contractor William Mow.  The village evolved into a fashionable shopping district as well, with numerous stores and artisans, apothecaries and professional offices.  Jeanne Johnson and Redwill St. John bought the old Abner Burnham house and established a prosperous millinery shop employing six to eight young ladies and attracting customers from as far away as Poughkeepsie.

Throughout the era municipal improvements came thick and fast.  The Sharon Water Company was organized in 1884 to provide a municipal water supply.  Sharon Electric Light Company began operations in 1895.  Sharon Telephone Company strung its first lines in 1902.  Street paving began just after World War I.  In the 1920s an A & P grocery store opened in town and the volunteer fire department acquired Fire Engine #1 in 1924.

Weatherstone 

One of the region’s most impressive Georgian homes stands on the South Green in Sharon, begun in 1765 by Dr. Simeon Smith (1735-1804).  A native of Suffield, Connecticut, Smith studied in Edinburgh, migrated to Sharon in 1759, and operated a prosperous drugstore which dispensed medicines imported from London and Amsterdam.  During the Revolutionary War, Simeon Smith was captain of a company of Sharon men who fought in the Long Island campaign, while his brother, the Reverend Cotton Mather Smith (1731-1806), Congregational minister of Sharon for more than fifty years, served as chaplain at Ticonderoga.  Simeon Smith’s house was on the route followed through Sharon when Burgoyne’s army, as prisoners of war, was marched into Connecticut.  On that occasion, while the army was encamped for the night in the meadow across the street, the American officers dined at Weatherstone.  In peacetime (1779 and 1780) a group of physicians from Massachusetts, New York and Connecticut met at the house as the “First Medical Society” in the new United States.  John Cotton Smith, governor of Connecticut during the War of 1812, lived here when he led, and lost, the post-war fight against the adoption of the constitution of 1818 that brought about the belated separation of church and state in Connecticut. 

The house, which became known as “Weatherstone” after 1938, is a monumental three-story five-bay granite Georgian manor house, (National Register) incorporating a double hipped roof, dormers, Chinese Chippendale balustrade, Palladian window in the west elevation, broken pediment over a former entry, and peaked gable with wheel window above the entry.  The house was devastated by fire on January 22, 1999 and has been subsequently restored to its former grandeur.

  Sharon Valley & Industry

Between 1780 and 1890, Sharon Valley supported a wide range of industrial activity. In 1829, Asahel Hotchkiss began production of home, farm, and utilitarian items from local iron – rakes, ox bow pins, harness buckles and snaps, mowing machine fingers, monkey wrenches, wagon shaft couplings, and currycombs. By 1850 the Hotchkiss factory employed nine hands and produced $25,000 of saleable goods.  In addition to the Sharon Valley Furnace and the Hotchkiss factory, Sharon Valley was also home to the Jewett Manufacturing Company, which had been formed initially to produce the mousetrap invented in the early nineteenth century by Joseph Bostwick.  Sharon Valley soon earned the nickname “Mousetrap Capital of the World.”  The Jewett firm was succeeded on the same site by the Noyes Malleable Ironworks.  Several other small machine and fabrication shops specializing in small metal goods operated here as well.

Calkinstown

The Calkinstown road runs in an easterly direction from Gay Street (Route 41) to the junction of White Hollow Road (the Lime Rock Road.) The earliest reference to the road now named Calkinstown Road appears in the town record of land transfers in 1780 when Stephen Calkin, Sr., the original owner of home lots #31 (and #35) when Sharon was founded in 1739, granted “forty acres including the house and barn where I now live” to Amos Calkin. In the description he refers to a “boundary line running west by the highway that goes by my house.” The term Calkinstown describes the area of about a mile along that highway where Lt. Stephen Calkin’s home was built, and about 1/5 of a mile around the bend of the road toward West Cornwall where Amos Calkin built what seems to be the last of the Calkins’ houses in 1808.

By the nineteenth century, Calkinstown was a manufacturing center, with factories making stoves and tools operating at several locations on the north side of the road along Beardsley Pond Brook (then called Sprague Pond Brook).  Calkinstown became an iron-making center between 1845 and 1856 when Captain Hiram Weed operated one of two blast furnaces in town using water from Beardsley Pond to power the blast.  Captain Weed’s home on the north side of Calkinstown Road later became the first Sharon Hospital.

Oblong Valley (Amenia Union)

Another important manufacturing hub developed in the southwestern portion of Sharon along Mill Brook and Little Falls known as Hitchcock Corners (later Amenia Union).  Straddling the Connecticut-New York line, Hitchcock Corners supported the activities of many firms at 15 industrial sites, powered by the rushing Webatuck Creek (Ten Mile River).  These included two foundries; manufacturers of the Buckley plow, milking stools and pails; John Burnham’s cigar factory; blacksmith shops, a wagon shop, grist and saw mills, and others.  There was also a satinet factory on Beebe Brook, a tributary of Mill Brook, which produced cotton material from which stockings and other items were made.  Hitchcock Corners/Amenia Union buzzed with activity in the mid-nineteenth century, especially following the arrival of the Harlem Railroad in neighboring Dover Plains and Amenia. 

Ellsworth and the Ellsworth Society

Very early in the history of Sharon the area known as Ellsworth developed an identity separate from that of the larger town, culminating in the establishment of a second ecclesiastical society in 1800.  Ellsworth also supported Reverend Daniel Parker’s large boarding school (1805) where within three years 200 young men came to study from as far away as Ohio, Maine and Virginia.  Construction of the Sharon-Goshen Turnpike (1803) increased traffic through the settlement, which by mid-century supported two churches, two district schools, two sawmills, gristmill, blacksmith shop, cemetery, doctor’s office, and two stores.  The Methodist Church building, an excellent example of Greek Revival architecture, was erected shortly after 1839 when worshippers acquired land from Erastus Lord and Lewis Peck.  In the late nineteenth century (1894) the Morey brothers acquired the property and operated a store here for a time.  In 1928 the Taghhannuck Grange #100 purchased the property and retains ownership to this day.

In the 1880s French immigrants coming to work as colliers in the iron industry, often took up farming in Ellsworth-Sharon Mountain area.  Later Ellsworth became home to Sharon’s newest group of Jewish immigrant farmers who began arriving after 1905.

Sharon Along the Housatonic

Sharon’s Main Street lies in the southwest portion of town, and that geographically speaking, the greatest portion of Sharon lies to the east of Main Street and runs to the town line – in the middle of the Housatonic River!  All the bridges, current and former, are half in Sharon, half in Cornwall; while a fact not often thought about is that the villages of West Cornwall and Cornwall are actually located in both towns (although the Post Office for each is in Cornwall.)   Housatonic Meadows State Park is located in Sharon, and across Route 7 from the park campgrounds was once the CCC camp.

Sharon’s Northeast corner and the Clay Beds

The northeast corner of Sharon was the site of four important activities: charcoal making for fuel for the local blast furnaces, including the Lime Rock Iron Co., Barnum and Richardson, Weeds Furnace and the Sharon Valley Iron Co.; farming; the quarrying of quartzite for the production of hearthstone for blast furnaces; and the mining of kaolin (clay produced by the weathering of quartzite.)   Kaolin from the "Clay Beds" was used primarily to make porcelain (“China”), pottery and paper.  Large portions of Mine Mountain and Mount Easter became part of the Housatonic State Forest following the cessation of local iron production in 1925.

Turnpikes & Transportation

Sharon, like all wilderness communities, required the creation of a basic infrastructure of roads and bridges.  Early roads, no more than rough trails and paths, often followed older Indian routes.  As surveyors mapped new towns, they made allowance for roads between proprietary allotments, often in a rectilinear grid pattern (inevitably disrupted by geographic realities.) The town highway committee established in 1739 proposed that in addition to Sharon’s principal north-south road (Amenia Union Road-Gay Street), side roads about one-half mile apart and running in an east-west direction be laid out.  Additional north-south highways, also one-half mile apart, would complete a grid system.  A small number of through routes included roads from Litchfield to Poughkeepsie and Hartford to Albany; the latter passed across the upper end of Sharon Green, while the road to Poughkeepsie crossed Sharon Mountain.  Present-day Route 41 also existed in vestigial form.

In the 1790s, Connecticut’s modern roadway system of turnpikes, improved toll roads owned by private investors, came to Sharon in the guise of the Goshen and Sharon Turnpike (chartered in 1803) and the Sharon and Cornwall Turnpike (begun in 1809.)  The roads had a marked impact on the town.  In 1807 Kellogg Berry built a home on the corner of Main Street and Route 4 (Goshen-Cornwall Turnpike).  In 1817 he sold the house and property to Major David Gould who recognized the site’s business prospects and over the years established a store, lumberyard, and other shops.  Construction of railroads through the region in the late 1830s and 1840s accelerated the push to turn private turnpikes into public roads. 

The modern regional road network, which includes Routes 4, 41, 44, and 63, wasn’t finalized until 1909.  In 1924 the General Assembly allocated receipts from gasoline taxes to road construction, including road-paving projects.  Both Sharon village streets and several through routes were paved in the 1920s.  Many of the small concrete bridges still in use were constructed as part of this initial road-paving campaign.  By 1917, 150 automobiles traveled local roads, this number increasing within one year by 30!  School buses appeared in town circa 1920, replacing the horse-drawn wagons that had transported schoolchildren previously.  The road network in Sharon remains much the same as it has been since the 1920s, a system composed of two-lane rural roads and small bridges that exert relatively minimal impact on the environment.  Periodic improvements have been largely confined to upgrading safety features, straightening dangerous curves, installing occasional passing lanes, and replacing deteriorated bridges.  In addition, Sharon maintains many miles of unpaved roads.

Initially, settlers traversed the region’s many streams by utilizing fording places where they and their animals could wade across. One of these was located about one mile south of the current Salisbury town line.  Primitive bridges followed.  Upper, or Hart’s Bridge, was first erected c.1760-1762.  Middle, or Youngs, Bridge followed c.1770, as did Cornwall Bridge, or Lower Bridge, which replaced the Chidester river ferry of 1741.  Still farther south, Swifts Bridge was the last major Housatonic crossing to be completed.

Bridge building accelerated in the early decades of the 19^th century.  Connecticut’s first long-span covered bridge crossed the Housatonic at Sharon-Cornwall Bridge in 1806 and went out with the ice breakup in 1936. The 242-foot Hart’s Bridge which utilizes both Town lattice trusses and queen-post trusses survives today in West Cornwall. The Kaolin Company exporting clay from Sharon Mountain built a footbridge across the Housatonic referred to as North Bridge, and used to transport clay to the Railroad cars.

The creation of railroads in the second quarter of the nineteenth century greatly accelerated the processes of economic and social change.  The Housatonic Railroad began construction in the summer of 1837, and was projected to run from Bridgeport to Sheffield, Massachusetts.  Though the financial panic of 1837 temporarily delayed construction, the rails reached Canaan in 1842.  Just to the west the Harlem Railroad (later New York Central) reached Millerton in the following decade.  Both provided Sharon with access to rapid transportation options.  Service along the routes continued for passengers and freight until the late 1920s.  After 1930, passenger service on the Connecticut Western and Housatonic Railroads ceased and freight service declined significantly.  In New York service on the Harlem line was discontinued beyond Dover Plains (now reestablished to Wassaic.)

Religious Life

With an unbroken Puritan-Congregational heritage stretching back to origins of the colony, religious beliefs, activities, and institutions played a central role in the lives of early Sharon residents.  No new town could obtain independent legal status without establishing a church.  Inhabitants were required to set aside land for support of a church and minister, pay taxes for their annual upkeep, attend weekly meetings, and submit to church discipline. 

Erecting a meetinghouse to accommodate church services and other public gatherings constituted the largest and often most contentious construction effort undertaken in many towns.  Sharon’s first meeting house of 1743, built of logs, stood somewhere near the present clock tower.  It was replaced in 1766 by a larger, more finished structure located in the middle of the upper Green.

The great geographic extent of the town, coupled with the difficulty associated with traversing Sharon Mountain in the winter, created a need for two churches.  Early in his ministry Reverend Smith began holding worship meetings in the Ellsworth area, a practice that continued for nearly 50 years.  The home of Timothy St. John on Cornwall Bridge Road was the site of many of these gatherings, drawing parishioners from the Ellsworth and Sharon Mountain neighborhoods.  In May 1800 a new ecclesiastical society was incorporated, and a new church organized in 1802.  Daniel Parker served as the first minister.

From the first days of settlement, Sharon had been home to several Anglican families.  In 1754 they formed the town’s first Episcopal Society and soon built a small stuccoed church on the upper Green.  They were led by Rev. Ebenezer Dibble, who was succeeded by Thomas Davies and Solomon Palmer.  Dibble was a missionary of the London-based Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.  Leading Sharon churchmen included Joel Harvey, Job Gould, Elnathan Goodrich, John Pennoyer, Simeon Rowley, Samuel Hitchcock, and Solomon Goodrich.  The congregation consisted of perhaps 19 communicants and 20 families.  After the Revolutionary War the Anglican church (which had suffered financial loss and loss of congregants in the wartime period) experienced rebirth.  The enthusiasm was evident in Sharon when in 1809 Sharon’s Episcopalians, about 20 families in all, reorganized and began planning to erect a new sanctuary.  Work on the present church began in 1812.  The interior work was completed in 1819, and the church was dedicated in November of that year by Bishop Brownell.

Just across the border in New York the Reverend Ebenezer Knibloe led the Round Top Chapel where several strands of Protestant believers gathered for services.  Knibloe, who lived on the Connecticut side of the border, preached for 25 years, was known as a “sound, sensible, sincere man.”  The first Methodist meeting house was erected on Calkinstown Road circa 1808, and an imposing red brick church arose at the north end of the green in 1835.  The custom of summer camp meeting began in Sharon in 1805.  Methodists in Ellsworth originally gathered in the home of Joshua Millard, a native of nearby Cornwall.

Irish Catholic immigrants came to Sharon to work in the iron industry in the 1840s.  Catholic mass was celebrated in Sharon as early as 1845-50 at the home of James and Bridget Dunning on Cornwall Bridge Road.  Services were held in other houses, too, as well as a paint store, school, tannery, and town hall.  The first permanent sanctuary, the Little Church in the Valley, was erected in 1884, followed by the present structure (St. Bernard’s) in 1915.

Sharon’s Iron Heritage

In 1740 Joseph Skinner began producing iron at a newly completed forge located near a dam standing just south of Mudge Pond (later the site of Benedict’s Mill).  Three years later he sold the forge, tools, and stock or ore to Jonathan and Samuel Dunham of Sharon, Thomas North of Wethersfield, and Jonathan Fairbanks of Middletown.  Jonathan Pratt was also an early partner.  Two decades later the Hutchinson brothers constructed a forge on the east slope of Sharon Mountain, near present Smith Hill Road.  Samuel Hutchinson was from Lebanon and served as a magistrate in Sharon.  John Gray from Scotland, Connecticut, operated yet another forge off Tanner Road. Ore was mined on Silver Mountain and Buck Mountain in Ellsworth and Skiff Mountain on the Sharon/Kent border.

From these humble beginnings the area prospered as one of America’s most important early mining and refining centers.  Blessed with the critical resources of waterpower, iron ore, limestone for flux, and lumber to provide the necessary charcoal, the industry flourished.  Sharon’s iron industry, already many decades old, received a great boost in 1822 when Leman Bradley of Falls Village obtained land and waterpower rights in Sharon valley along Webatuck Creek for the purpose of constructing a blast furnace, the first in town.  Beginning with an initial purchase of $7,000, he later acquired additional land containing ore (just east of Indian Mountain), timber, and lime.  By 1825 Bradley’s workers had built a large dam, creating a ten-acre pond, along with a 1,500-foot race with overshot wheel and pumping station to power the blast.  The furnace was built of Stockbridge marble and fueled with charcoal. 

Bradley operated the site for only a few years, however, and by the late 1820s began selling off his holdings.  The furnace later passed to Salisbury’s Horace Landon who maintained production until 1872.  In 1863, the furnace was enlarged and converted to hot blast, a more efficient process.  In the early 1870s, the Sharon Valley Iron Company (owned by the Barnum and Richardson Company) acquired the furnace.  Hiram Weed opened a second furnace in Sharon in 1845, located .4 miles from the west terminus of Calkinstown Road.  It was not long in blast after 1856.

Ultimately, the iron industry faced severe and finally insurmountable obstacles.  The close of the Civil War brought an end to government orders, however the Sharon Valley Iron Company continued to produce iron for railroad car wheels.  Iron for wheels alone was not enough and furnaces began to close, including the ironworks in Sharon Valley in 1898.  Introduction of the Bessemer process, expansion of the Midwestern iron and steel industry, and the high cost of ore and fuel all made Connecticut iron increasingly uncompetitive in national markets.  The Barnum and Richardson Company/Salisbury Iron Company, which consolidated almost complete control over the region’s furnaces and mines during this period, struggled against the odds finally declaring bankruptcy in 1925. 

Sharon as a Travel Destination – Rise of the “Second Home” Community

After the Civil War and through the 1930s, recreational pursuits attained ever-greater importance, until they ranked among the region’s most significant characteristics.  Such activities included both amenities serving local residents and those that attracted enormous crowds of visitors, summer vacationers, and estate owners.

Sharon attracted a substantial vacation community, and between 1880 and 1920 wealthy visitors refurbished several older homes or erected a series of Colonial Revival-style mansions on the South Green.  New residents included diplomat Paul Bonner, editor and architectural critic Montgomery Schuyler, financier C. Stanley Mitchell, and Dr. Charles Tiffany, Episcopal Archdeacon of New York, famed surgeon William Coley, and electrical inventor Frank Sprague.  At the same time Romulus Riggs Colgate engaged architect J. William Cromwell to design “Filston,” an enormous Italianate palazzo set on nearly 300 acres.  Nearby in New York State arose “Hiddenhurst,” a great Georgian mansion, with huge stables accommodating 35 horses. 

The very factors inspiring affluent families to create substantial vacation homes also underlay establishment of a thriving resort hotel trade.  The large frame Sharon Inn stood at the south end of the town Green across from the clock tower and did a brisk business.  Visitors here included General William T. Sherman, Jennie Jerome, and the Delmonicos of New York City.  In 1907 Thomas Edison and a party of 14 visited here.  It remained a popular train and auto destination through the 1920s, but was demolished in 1954.  On Upper Main Street stood the Bartram Inn and Mrs. Wylie’s Tea Room.  In some cases local residents built small cottages at the rear of their village properties so that they could rent their homes to summer visitors.  Many local people worked as staff for the vacationers.

Miles Sanctuary

Miles' Sanctuary, on the Sharon/West Cornwall Road, was formerly the estate of Emily Winthrop Miles.  In the latter nineteenth century the property was owned by Moses Handlin, a collier, who operated three mills on Miles' Pond.  Upon the death of Mrs. Miles, the estate became the property of the National Audubon Society that operates it as the Miles' Sanctuary, a nature research center.

The Civilian Conservation Corps

One of the most interesting New Deal programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), played a major role in developing and improving Connecticut’s parks and forests.  Between 1933 and 1942, more than 30,000 young men stationed at 20 camps planted millions of new trees, constructed roads and trails, carried out disease and insect control efforts, and built dams to create swimming areas.  In Sharon, the Corps focused efforts on road construction and maintenance and forestry, also constructing fire ponds throughout the wooded areas.  Their administration buildings in Sharon were located across Route 7 from the Housatonic Meadows State Park campgrounds.

The Book Corner….by Janet Nickson

THE DOLL’S HOUSE

By Rumer Godden; Illustrated by Tasha Tudor

In a year when I stood “short” next to a dining room table my parents presented me with a walking doll. She was beautiful! We became good friends and I made sure she had lovely clothes to wear and a good place to sit each day in order to “see” what was happening around her. The lovely clothes were items I scavenged here and there enhanced by their colors and some ribbons and lace. We thought they were beautiful.

All went well for many years even after I left my parents’ home, attended college, and settled in to my own home. My doll always tagged along (well, not to college). One day in the 1970’s a shy little girl, who stood short to my dining room table, discovered my special friend. Something magical happened and I let her take my childhood treasure from my home to reside in a new one shared by several siblings. I could tell from the looks on their faces that they would make each other happy.

Alas! In 2000 I began to really regret having my special “walking doll” absent from my life for so very long . . .

Rumer Godden’s Dolls make me think of my well traveled friend and I enjoyed reading of their adventures so delicately illustrated by Tasha Tudor who has always made her drawings exude feelings and poetry. Emily and Charlotte Dane are sisters living in post war (WW II) London. They have inherited dolls and a dollhouse from their great aunt Laura and great grandmother. Godden gives the dolls life in a quiet subtle way. Their ability to concentrate in unison intensifies strong feelings, wishes, and yearnings; subsequently, Charlotte and Emily move their charges around in the house quite innocently in accordance with the dolls’ desires to be in specific places performing special tasks. 

Tottie, a farthing doll, made of good strong wood, is the little heroine who keeps all the other dolls in tow. She knows that though she is small and inexpensive, she comes from the same material that builds the strong masts of sailing vessels. Her stolid “wooden” expressions and perseverance carry the rest of the kid, porcelain, and celluloid crew through all kinds of trials and mishaps.

Both Godden’s descriptions and Tudor’s illustrations wonderfully present the dollhouse scenes. As the Dane sisters scrub and repair the house, furniture, and tiny decorative items the reader cannot help but feel part of the ritual.

Godden’s Dollhouse is back on its shelf at the Hotchkiss Library of Sharon waiting for another pair of hands to pull it out and bring the dolls to life once again. My doll is back home too after more than two decades of travel. With a bit of TLC she’ll look as good as new.  I am glad, too, that my grandson prefers a soccer ball!

Collections Connection by Marge McAvoy

The summer of 2005 has been a hot one! On average, Connecticut gets 19 days of over 90-degree heat per summer. We’ve already passed that mark, as of August 10^th. But most of us are barely aware of it, simply retreating into the air-conditioned sanctuaries that are so omni present these days.

Remember the summers before AC? How did we survive, we ladies at least? We had dainty little fans that we kept ever ready to wave delicately about our persons. The men apparently just had to tough it out, although if one were a king, one had servants standing at a respectful distance with a long handled fan, which it was their duty to endlessly wield.

The Sharon Historical Society is currently exhibiting part of an extensive collection of ladies’ fans. From feathers to silk, from bone to plastic, our fans are samples of one of a well-equipped lady’s necessary accessories. Some of them are quite elaborate, with detailed paintings surrounded by sequins and gold. Others are plain, simple and obviously well used. One shows the entire layout of the Great Chicago Exposition!

The history of fans is just as complex and fascinating as our collections. As old as heat waves, they are mentioned in the Bible and were found in the tomb of King Tut. To learn more, please stop by our air-conditioned sanctuary for a peek at these works of art. 

2005 Calendar of Events – all events will take place at the Sharon Historical Society unless otherwise noted.

September 

It’s back to school month! Parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, come visit the SHS Gift Shop from Tuesday through Friday, 1 – 4 PM. You will find a creative collection of gifts for the favorite children in your lives as well as items for your discerning taste. With gasoline prices soaring and schedules so hectic, stay close to home and drop by the SHS. We will be happy to greet you and help you find a gift for that special someone.

October

Sunday, October 16, 4 PM: Fiddlin’ Around: Come see and hear the fiddles and violins of Myrtle Hayden. A musician since childhood as well as a restorer of violins, Myrtle will have plenty to tell of her experiences. Her collection is a tribute to her talents as well as to the preservation of fine instruments. Refreshments will be served. Suggested donation $5 per person. Pre-registration strongly encouraged. 

Friday, October 28^th, 4 –6 PM: Hillside Cemetery Walk: In keeping with tradition we will be holding our annual fall cemetery walk at dusk. Be prepared to meet some very interesting ladies from Sharon’s past. Wear comfortable outdoor clothing. Snacks will be served. Donations accepted. We will meet at the Civil War Monument at the north end of the Green. Tours are from 4 to 5:30 PM. Allow one hour.

November

Saturday, November 5^th, 4 PM, Location to be announced. The Cartoon History of the New Yorker Magazine: For decades the New Yorker Magazine has presented memorable and thought-provoking cartoons. Come and visit with four of the artists (two live right here in Sharon) and enjoy the jibes and jabs offered by some of the magazine’s most notable pundits. Peter Steiner, Jack Ziegler, Michael Maslin, and Liza Donnelly. An exhibit at the SHS will accompany the talk.  

Sunday, November 13^th, 1 to 4 PM: Scherenschnitte (German Paper Cutting): In time for the holidays or any occasion, join Joy Gaiser, teacher, artist, and musician, in creating lovely silhouette paper cuts for decoupage or framing. Each participant will cut a silhouette, and faux-finish a frame for a complete holiday gift. The German art dates back to the 1600’s. Course and materials fee $20. Pre-registration is required and limited. 

Saturday, November 26^th: Museum and Gift Shop open, 1-4 PM. Holiday cards and gifts available for purchase.  

December 

Saturday, December 3^rd: Open House and Sharon Tree Lighting. Open House 2-4:30 PM at SHS (includes the Gift Shop); Tree Lighting 4:45 on the Green.