Tag:

Timothy Dwight

New Haven, ‘the Wickedest City’ – The Devil and Man At Yale in 1895

In 1895, hundreds of ministers and church leaders came to New Haven for a conference of the Christian Worker’s Association. Little did the city know the conference would give the city the title ‘wickedest city in the world.’

Image of Yale -- Creator of the Wickedest City

“A View of the Buildings of Yale College at New Haven,” lithograph, published by A. Doolittle & Son, New Haven. Courtesy of the Yale University Manuscripts & Archives Digital Images Database.

Some of the most high-profile young pastors and religious leaders of the age gathered at the conference to recharge and re-arm themselves in the battle for the souls of America’s young people. And New Haven welcomed them, though the city soon had second thoughts.

The group started a fiery debate around the country about whether New Haven had let Yale college turn the city into the wickedest city in the world.

Wickedest City

Rev. Reuben Archer Torrey of Chicago started the kerfuffle at a reception opening the conference.

Rev. R.A. Torrey

Torrey, himself a Yale Divinity School alumnus, took firm aim at his alma mater when discussing immorality. The sons of the American privileged class were running amok, with devastating impact on the working class people of New Haven. The Christian Worker’s association focused much of its work on reaching out to poor young people and diverting them from lives of sin. But the streets weren’t the only places where Satan did his work.

New Haven, Torrey suggested, must have filled a potter’s field with the corpses of young girls, their downfall and demise brought about by their association with the heathen offspring of the American elite who filled Yale’s dormitories. Many of those despicable youth – now in adulthood – could be found serving in Congress.

Yale, and as a result New Haven itself, were awash with debauchery, earning it the” wickedest city” moniker.

Torrey’s speech found a welcome audience among the assembled Christian missionaries. Also in the crowd, however, was a writer from the New Haven Palladium newspaper. And he dutifully recorded Torrey’s sentiments and published them.

Rapid Outrage

The news coverage incensed New Haven’s business community. Defenders of Yale reacted immediately.

Rev. David Burrill Pastor of Marble Collegiate Church in New York City eventually publicly attacked Torrey for his past behavior. He told colleagues that a week-and-a-half after Torrey arrived at Yale, classmates had to drag him to his room in a helplessly drunken state. For the next year-and-a-half, Torrey lead a “dissipated” life until rescued by Christian students at Yale. Torrey denied this.

Timothy Dwight

Timothy Dwight had only recently taken on the role of Yale president. A religious man who lead Connecticut’s Congregational Church, Dwight had inherited an institution in financial distress. Dwight had taken the unusual step a few months earlier of mailing out a letter declaring that Yale was, in fact, a trustworthy institution of Christian values, a suitable institution for young men to attend.

With no time for distractions, Dwight announced he would offer no opinion on the discussion about morality at Yale. Nor would he take any part in the discussion over the wickedest city. He wanted to do nothing to fan the flames. But the flames hardly needed any fanning.

The Controversy Unfolds

As one newspaper put it: “People in New Haven are recalling and rehashing old stories of the hair-brained escapades of the sons of wealthy parents who come to Yale with more spending money than brains, and squander it in dissipation, to the lasting injury of their associates.”

And people didn’t have to cast far back in their memory for examples. The latest scandal had taken place in February of that year when Yale had to expel Elliott Shepard, great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Police had responded to Shepard’s dormitory and found him loudly partying with three women. After questioning, it turned out Shepard had imported a half-dozen prostitutes from New York for him and his friends.

Nevertheless, the pressure mounted on the association to tamp down the controversy. Torrey relented, and agreed to speak out on the matter because he felt it unfair that his words were damaging the city’s reputation.

Backtracking and Fueling The Fire

Rev. John Collins

On the final day of the conference, some 800 to 1,500 in attendance, Torrey and a local minister, Rev. John Collins, secretary of the association, teamed up to try to squelch the furor.

They made a mild rebuke of the Palladium, challenging the accuracy of its reporting and criticizing the newspaper for not checking its facts with Torrey before printing its articles.

“Did you hear me yesterday say that New Haven was the wickedest city in the world?” Rev. Torrey asked Rev. Collins. Collins replied that he had not and assured him that the report must have been an error.

The Resolution

The two ministers then offered a resolution to the conference that attempted to set things right.

“Resolved. That from our own observations and the statements of our president and secretary, the latter of whom has long lived in New Haven and as a city mission worker, had an unusual means of investigation, we believe New Haven to be, in nearly every way, a more than usually clean and moral city.”

Rev. Torrey had questioned the wisdom of the resolution but agreed to go along with it. Turns out he was right to worry. The resolution sparked fierce debate. Many in the crowd said that Torrey had only spoken what many ministers in the city had said about Yale and New Haven privately – often in more vivid terms than Torrey chose. Others questioned why the group should “whitewash” the city.

A stream of speakers rose, some to tell that they believed Yale was an upright institution. Any college had its share of young men who chose to live sinfully.

Mrs. Poteat Speaks on the Wickedest City

Rev. Edwin Poteat

Tucked in the audience were Rev. Edwin Poteat, of New Haven’s Calvary Baptist Church, and his wife Harriet Gordon Poteat.

Harriet Poteat was no minor figure. Her father, Adoniram Judson Gordon, was a well-known minister and missionary who founded Gordon College and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. When she spoke, people listened. And she was in the mood to speak.

“When I heard Monday that Rev. Mr. Torrey had made these statements about Yale and New Haven, I said, ‘thank the Lord that he has the courage and Christian conviction to stand up and say so,’ she told the assembled crowd.

After seven years in New Haven, Poteat said she and her husband had witnessed a parade of students arriving at Yale. As a courtesy to their parents, the Poteats would ask the young men to dinner. The first year, they showed up and were polite. The second year, they showed up and had taken up smoking. The third year, they didn’t show up at all.

“They go down, down, down and I believe more boys are ruined in Yale University than any other place I know of,” she said. “I would as soon send my sons to Hell as to send them to Yale College.”

Fuel for the Fire

Poteat’s remarks fired up the assembly and members again began queuing up to tell of the tales of barroom wickedness they had observed in New Haven. Torrey and Collins quickly pushed their resolution to a vote.

The resolution passed, but Poteat’s speech had stolen the moment as newspapers across the country carried the news that Hell had been compared favorably to Yale.

Speculation began to grow about fallout from the conference. Reverend Poteat issued a statement that his wife was not inclined to retract her statement, though there was talk he would lose his pulpit. But before any effort at recrimination could build steam, the students of Yale stepped up.

Yale and the Wickedest City

As if on cue, one week after the Christian Worker’s conference, two Yale students, Henry Sage and Henry Bond, decided to have a night of debauchery with two local women, May Wilson and Annie True. Their escapades wound up splashed across the pages of newspapers.

Sage, a relative of millionaire New York financier Russell Sage, and the rest of the party, had spent an evening traveling the back roads drinking. Returning in the early morning hours, they had to summon a doctor when May Wilson collapsed. The doctor revived the young woman at the hospital and determined she had been under the influence of alcohol and some sort of drug.

Sage and other Yale students passed a hat and tried to bribe newspapers into suppressing the story. When that failed, they reached out to family who successfully had some newspapers pull the story. But it was too late. Other, independent newspapers published.

The Aftermath

As quick as it started, the story of the Devil and Yale died out. Rev. Edwin Poteat went on to have a long career, eventually serving as president at Furman University for 15 years. Rev. Collins would continue his work, with his efforts eventually laying the foundation for what is today the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Rev. Torrey preached throughout the world and wrote more than 40 books.

Timothy Dwight, meanwhile, developed a reputation as one of Yale’s most important presidents, helping steer the university toward a future in which the institution stressed academics and produced fewer “‘hair-brained escapades of the sons of wealthy parents.”

This story updated in 2022.

0 comment 399 views

The New Hampshire Volcano That Promised Untold Riches

As early as 1735, residents living along the New Hampshire-Vermont border reported a New Hampshire volcano erupted violently.

The inhabitants of Fort Dummer in Brattleboro, Vt., gave the story its greatest boost when they reported one night that they heard rumbling. The earth shook, they said, and flashes of light shot through the sky.

It was so jarring that the people at the fort sent out an expedition the next day to scour Mount Wantastiquet in New Hampshire. The mountain, also known as West River Mountain, lies on the border between Hinsdale and Chesterfield.

Near the top of the mountain, the searchers found an indentation and some strange rocks, which they took as signs of an eruption.

Volcanic Scam

The volcano next played a part in an apparent scam carried out by a travelling con man working the area around 1774. He persuaded several residents they could find silver in the earth under the site of a volcanic eruption. For a fee, he would instruct them where to dig.

After prolonged mining at the mountain’s top and at its base, the townspeople concluded that there was no silver to be had. The only thing that had been had was them.

But the story of the volcano went unchallenged.

The New Hampshire Volcano

Full Moon Over Kilauea (1887 painting by Jules Tavernier.

A lawyer named Daniel Jones had colleagues who’d heard about the New Hampshire volcano. They asked him to investigate and report back. So he traveled to the mountain and reported on his findings.

He then found the mountain 12 miles north of the Massachusetts line on the east side of the Connecticut River and opposite the mouth of the West River.

“On the south side of the Mountain, about eighty rods from the summit, there has been an eruption,-perhaps not within the present, or last century,” he concluded. “The peasants, in the neighborhood of the Mountain, discovered this place, and became possessed with the idea of gold dust being in the mountain.”

Those peasants, he wrote, believed the gold dust melted into a solid body by the extreme heat of the mountain’s explosion. As a result, they went to work in search of the supposed treasure.

“After fruitless searches, they formed larger connections, entered into covenant with the proprietors of the land, and with one another, to make search for all kinds of mine and mineral.”

Jones concluded something had exploded. He didn’t believe, though, that he saw definitive evidence of a volcano.

Timothy Dwight and the Volcano

The volcano next crops up in Timothy Dwight’s Travels in New England and New York, published in 1821.

Timothy Dwight

Dwight, the president of Yale College, visited Hinsdale, N.H., in 1798 to examine the mountain. He’d heard it was ‘to a very humble degree volcanic.’

Dwight went to see a Mr. Butler of Hinsdale, and he took him to West River Mountain. About 150 feet from the summit they found a pit, 60 or 70 feet deep. The inhabitants had dug it with the hope of finding ‘some species of ore.’

But Dwight reported they could only look down into the pit.

He heard the volcano story from Mr. Butler and some people he’d found at an inn. They told him that 23 years ago, ‘the people of the neighborhood were alarmed by a loud noise, proceeding from this mountain, and resembling the sound of cannon.’

The Pine Tree

“A Mr. Barrett, who visited the place, found a hole, forced through the mountain by a blast, evidently as he thought the result of intestine fire,” wrote Dwight.

Barrett described the hole as about six inches in diameter. Nearby, a pine tree was covered with a black mineral substance. The substance had been ‘forced violently out of the passage,’ he said. It consisted ‘chiefly of melted and calcified iron-ore strongly resembling the scoriae of a blacksmith’s forge.’

Someone had cut down the tree, however, but Dwight saw the substance stuck to the rocks and the earth. The substance couldn’t be broken off without a violent effort, he wrote.

“From the whole appearance it was completely evident that it was driven against the cliffs in the same liquid state,” he wrote.

And, he saw two holes below the pit that he decided animals couldn’t have made.

“They must have been formed by a blast of air from the bowels of the mountain,” Dwight then concluded.

The Volcano Dies Out

Dwight brought specimens of the vitrified ore to Yale, along with some yellow ochre he found.

Over the next several decades the New Hampshire volcano received publicity in newspapers throughout America.

Several decades later, geologists concluded the New Hampshire volcano was not a volcano. Instead, they theorized, the residents heard the sound of a rock slide, and in the darkness they mistook it for a volcano.

But then the story of the volcano gained credibility through repetition over many years until geologists could thoroughly investigate it.

But those who would love a New Hampshire volcano should take heart. Geologists describe the Ossipee Mountains, north of Lake Winnipesaukee, as the remains of a volcanic ring dike.

Ossipee Mountains

Ossipee Mountains: By Jrclark at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15450885

This story was updated in 2022.

1 comment 688 views

Mrs. Sigourney, Hartford’s High Priestess of Bad Poetry

During the first half of the 19^th century, Mrs. Sigourney wrote such bad poetic obituaries that people said she added a new terror to dying.

Mrs. Sigourney

Her writing style was popular in her day, and it made her celebrated and rich.

Lydia Huntley Sigourney was pious, overwrought, sentimental. She wrote about cows with satiny sleek coats that filled pails with creamy nectar. Ocean waves were horses of the deep that tossed their white manes. A woman influenced her household like the sunbeam silently educating the young flower.

Fellow Hartfordite Mark Twain complained ‘bad grammar and slovenly English’ flowed from her pen, Her own biographer called her a hack.

One man was said to refuse to take the train from New Haven to Hartford when she was on it because he feared the train would crash and Mrs. Sigourney would include him in a poem about it.

But even her critics conceded she was an extraordinarily good woman and a fine educator. And 150 years after her death, scholars are taking a kinder look at the woman known simply as ‘Mrs. Sigourney.’

Gardener’s Daughter

Lydia Huntley was born Sept. 1, 1791, in Norwich, Conn., the only child of Ezekiel Huntley and Zerviah Wentworth. Her father, a Revolutionary War veteran, was head gardener to the wealthy widow of Daniel Lathrop, a pharmacist who once employed Benedict Arnold. Mrs. Lathrop, childless and in her 70s, rented half her house to the small family.

Mrs. Lathrop took an interest in Lydia – or, as Mrs. Sigourney later put it, turned ‘the yearning tenderness of a heart which had continued to flow out toward the children of others … on the little one born in her house.’ The widow let her use her library, introduced her to poetry and sent her to Hartford to meet her wealthy relatives, the Wadsworths, who later became her patrons.

Lydia spent her late teens in Hartford’s best female seminaries, learning what young ladies were taught then: drawing, watercolor painting and embroidery. She found it tedious.

School Days

In 1811 she and her friend Nancy Maria Hyde started a girls’ school in Norwich – an ambitious and unorthodox venture. Three years later, arts patron Daniel Wadsworth invited her to head a school in Hartford for the daughters of the region’s elite.

Lydia was well-loved and respected by her students, who for the 50 years returned for an annual reunion with her. One of her students was Alice Cogswell, the deaf child who, with Thomas Gallaudet, later changed education for deaf people. Lydia strongly supported those efforts.

Her reputation as an educator might have rivaled Catherine Beecher’s, who opened her Hartford Female Seminary a decade after Lydia began teaching.

Mrs. Sigourney

In 1819 she gave up her career to marry Charles Sigourney, a well-to-do widower with three small children. It was quite a match for a gardener’s daughter. Charles, a prosperous merchant, built her an elegant mansion and became a bank president, college trustee and church warden.

The Sigourney mansion in Hartford

Before her marriage she published a book, Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse. With poetic cliches, she preached the virtues of piety, frugality, hard work and self-discipline. The moon appears 23 times in the volume: lifting her cheek through a wat’ry cloud, as gentle night’s resplendent queen, as veiled and shrinking from the gazer’s sight. She mentioned quite a lot of dew – dewy lawns, dewy tears, dewy wreaths, the dew of cold oblivion – and even more sighs. There was sighing parental love, a star that seemed to sigh, a sigh from a rent bosom, sighing with pain, sighing with grief. In one poem, a ‘warbling and tremulous sigh’ from some undefined source warned her not to value the things of the earth but to look forward to repose in the grave.

Her husband tried to put a stop to her writing. Over the next decade she published anonymous poems and occasionally a poem signed ‘Mrs. Sigourney.’ In 1827, she published a book of poetry identifying herself without consulting him. It caused a marital crisis and she asked for a separation. He refused and she gave in. In 1828 she had a daughter, Mary Huntley, and two years later a son, Alexander Maximilian.

Merciless

But she was the sole support of her aging parents, and her husband began to experience, as she put it, ‘obstructions in the course of mercantile prosperity.’ The Sigourneys had to move to a smaller home. She found a way to make money and keep her husband happy. She did it by writing what her husband wanted to hear: A woman’s place was in the home.

Mrs. Sigourney wrote on other acceptably ‘feminine’ subjects. By 1833, she was writing openly and prolifically. She wrote 67 books and more than 2,000 magazine articles over her lifetime. She made money at it, too. Two popular women’s magazines paid her just to have her name on the front cover. In 1844, the town of Sigourney, Iowa, was named after her. She traveled abroad after her husband died and met Queen Victoria, whom she called a ‘sister woman.’

And she wrote poems about people who died. They were described as ‘facile effusions related to the tomb.’

Her critics were merciless.

Emeline Grangerford

Yale President Timothy Dwight was one of the harshest. After Mrs. Sigourney’s death, he wrote:

Whenever any person has died in our country during the last score of years, who was of public reputation sufficient to justify it … a kind of calm and peaceful confidence has rested in our minds, that, within a brief season, a poetical obituary would appear in the public prints from the well-known pen of Mrs. Sigourney. Indeed so general has been this confidence among the people of Connecticut, that some persons, who, from peculiar modesty or from some other reason, have desired to escape the notice of the great world after death, have been beset by a kind of perpetual fear that she might survive them, and thus, having them at a great disadvantage, might send out their names unto all the earth.

Dwight complained that she painted a picture of Norwich, where he lived as a boy, so idealized he couldn’t identify places or people.

Twain had Mrs. Sigourney in mind when he created the Huckleberry Finn character Emeline Grangerford, who wrote treacly funeral verses.

“In these faded verses there now appears to be little real thought, still less real poetry,” wrote Francis Parsons in 1922.

Mrs. Sigourney by Matthew Brady.

Rediscovery

Critics have recently rediscovered Mrs. Sigourney. They credit her with establishing herself as the first female poet with a distinctly American voice. Her fame and money inspired many young women to become poets. Her autobiography was the first written by a poet, dramatist or novelist – a forerunner of Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento. She wrote about injustice to Native Americans and advocated an end to slavery. She also remained committed to the education of deaf children, supporting Thomas Gallaudet’s school for the deaf until her death.

In 2010, Natalie Merchant of 10,000 Maniacs set her poem Indian Names to music in a 2010 solo album. It begins,

Ye say they all have passed away,

   That noble race and brave,

That their light canoes have vanished

   From off the crested wave;

That ’mid the forests where they roamed

   There rings no hunter shout,

But their name is on your waters,

   Ye may not wash it out.

’Tis where Ontario’s billow

   Like Ocean’s surge is curled,

Where strong Niagara’s thunders wake

   The echo of the world.

Where red Missouri bringeth

   Rich tribute from the west,

And Rappahannock sweetly sleeps

   On green Virginia’s breast.

Lydia Sigourney died on June 10, 1865. Then after her death, reported the tenant living in her house, nice old ladies from the country made pilgrimages to her home. There they plucked a sprig of lilac and viewed the rooms where Mrs. Sigourney ‘mused.’

The Lathrop House is now a bed and breakfast. With thanks to Lydia Sigourney: Selected Poetry and Prose edited by Gary Kelly. This story was updated in 2022.

1 comment 366 views

Timothy Dwight and the Pangs of Despised Love, 1676

Timothy Dwight began to act strangely in the summer of 1676 when he could not see the woman he loved.

He was the son of a Dedham ship captain and apprenticed to Joseph Hull, the father-in-law of Samuel Sewall. Hull, one of the most prominent merchants in Boston, had won an appointment as mintmaster of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The son of a blacksmith, Hull had taught himself silversmithing. He formed a successful partnership with Robert Sanderson, who had apprenticed in London before migrating to Massachusetts Bay. The two were the first silversmiths in New England, and they taught the next generation of silversmiths — including Timothy Dwight.

Samuel Sewall

Sewall and his new wife Hannah were living in John Hull’s Boston mansion. So were Timothy Dwight, an apprentice silversmith, and John Alcock.

Timothy Dwight in Love

Sewall would serve as a judge of the Salem witch trials, for which he later apologized. For 55 years he also kept a diary, in which he recorded much of what happened to the third generation of English settlers in Massachusetts. He did not fail to mention young Timothy Dwight’s paroxysms of love.

Saturday Even. Aug. 12, 1676, just as prayer ended Tim. Dwight sank down in a swoon, and for a good space was as if he perceived not what was done to him…

After that, wrote Sewall, he kicked and sprawled, “knocking his hands and feet upon the floor like a distracted man.”

John Alcock carried him on his back to bed and pulled off his clothes, wrote Sewall. “In the night it seems he talked of ships, his master, father and uncle Eliot.”

The next Sunday, Sewall wrote that “Father” (presumably Dwight’s father, also Timothy Dwight; Sewall’s father had died by then) went to the young man and asked what ailed him. He asked if he could pray for him, and what did he desire his friends to pray for?

“He answered, for more sight of sin, and God’s healing grace,” wrote Sewall. Then Samuel Sewall, alone with him, asked whether his troubles came from any outward or spiritual cause. “He answered, ‘spiritual’,” wrote Sewall.

“I asked him why then he could not tell it his master,” he wrote, “as well as any other, since it is the honor of any man to see sin and be sorry for it.”

He gave no answer. Then Sewall asked if he would go to meeting. “He said, ’twas in vain for him; his day was out. I asked, what day; he answered, of Grace.”

“I told him ’twas sin for any one to conclude themselves reprobate, that this was all one. He said he would speak more, but could not, &c.”

Sewall then concluded the trouble “arose from a maid whom he passionately loved.” When his father and his master, John Hull, let him go to her, he soon afterward “grew well.”

Coins by John Hull

What Happened Next

Timothy Dwight married Elizabeth Alcock, probably John Alcock’s daughter. Hull gave him his freedom, and he went into business as a goldsmith. He apparently prospered, as he left in his will a house and land in Boston, land in Roxbury and a farm in Marlborough.

He and Elizabeth were said to have had no children. On Dec. 9, 1691, he wrote his will, having been “visited by the hands of ye Just & Almighty God with a sore and languishing sickness.” Dwight left all of his property to his “dear wife Elizabeth,” except for one item: his musket. That went to his brother Michael.

Sewall noted the pallbearers at his funeral included another former apprentice of Hull and Sanderson, Jeremiah Dummer, and Sanderson’s son, Robert.

The Museum of Fine Arts Boston holds in its collection a silver salver and tankard made by Timothy Dwight.

The Dwight Family

Many members of the Dwight family achieved prominence as educators, writers, clergy, military leaders and at least one well-known actress. Timothy Dwight’s father, also Timothy Dwight, had six wives. He outlived all except one, Bethia, who died a week after he did in 1718. Timothy Dwight the silversmith was the son of his father’s second wife. Many of the famous Dwights had his half-brother from wife No. 3, Nathaniel, as an ancestor.

William Morris Hunt, Timothy Dwight V, Kyra Sedgwick.

Nathaniel’s descendants include three Yale College presidents, Timothy Dwight IV and V and Theodore Dwight Woolsey. They also include two prominent writers, father and son named Theodore Dwight, and 19th-century novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Other Sedgwicks include actress Kyra Sedgwick, model Edie Sedgwick and lawyer Theodore Sedgwick. Nathaniel was also the great-great-great-great- grandfather of brothers William Morris Hunt, a well-known painter, and architect Richard Morris Hunt.

Photo: Detail from ‘Samuel Sewall’ by John Smibert – Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Kyra Sedgwick By Angela George, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6993763. With thanks to Hermann Frederick Clarke, “The Craft of Silversmith in Early New England,” The New England Quarterly, March, 1939. This story was updated in 2021.

1 comment 428 views