Excerpt from Historic Sketch of the First Church of Christ in Wethersfield: Given From the Pulpit July 9, 1876

But if we are first we shall have to admit that it is because we were a little more willful and impatient of authority than our neighbors. People of Watertown, Dorchester, and Newtown, all petitioned the General Court of the Bay Colony for leave to emi grate. The Court refused, at first, the permission it afterwards granted; but we, the Watertown people, had made up our minds to come, and so came, regardless of the General Court, and were on the ground, a few of us, and built our huts in the fall of 1634. But this was only preparatory, and you must come to 1635 and 1636 to see the three settlements really established.

The journey of these little communities across the country, and the hardships which attended the first settlement, ought not to be soon forgotten by their children. Men, women, and chil dren making their way on foot through a hundred and twenty miles of pathless forests, over mountains, and through thickets, swamps, and streams. - a fortnight on the way, - the Windsor people not reaching their destination till November, and in that same month the river frozen over; the winter one of great severity, not as fatal, but attended with as great hardship and suffering, as the first at Plymouth; household supplies, sent around by water from Boston, greatly delayed, and much utterly lost; starvation threatened; some of the people making their way back through the forest to Massachusetts, others by way of the river and the sea; the remnant, with what supplies they have, and with what they obtain from the forest, just managing to live through. Reinforcements come with the summer of 1636, and the colony is fairly established.

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