-28-
MY STORY OF
QUAKER
FARMS, a talk given by Terrance O'Neill, at a meeting of the
Derby
Historical
Society, Sept. 22, 1965 at Christ Episcopal Church, Quaker
Farms.
It
is now 345 years since the
Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock and thus became the founders
of The
New England Colony. I believe it to be true that we know more
about
early Plymouth than we know about the founding of the place in
which we
live. (There may well be a reason for this, because this place
was a
part of Derby for over 100 years; before that it belonged to
the
Indians.)
The spirit with which the people in
Plymouth
fought
the hardships and difficulties in those distant days, their
followers
carried with them down through the years along the winding
footpath of
time to the days of the Revolution.
Our independence has been won and two
thirds of
a
century later, our Federation of States had been preserved in
human
blood.
Thus, 263 years after the Pilgrims' bold
move,
the
people of the colony found themselves building their way of
life into a
new future. Let us see what shape we were in.
Our mode of travel was in those days on
foot,
horseback, or horse and buggy. The footpath was nearly a line
to where
we were going. The one on horseback took a similar course, but
the
horse and the buggy or wagon had to have a road to travel on.
Mud holes
were filled in with stones and long hills were arranged with
water-buts
to carry off the water and prevent the road from being
damaged. Steep
and long hills were avoided. Bridges were usually covered by
large flat
stones. The larger streams would have stringers of timber
across, hewed
flat on top and covered with plank.
The roads and bridges were let out on
contracts
to
low bidders for repairs. This went on for years. One day a man
drove an
automobile up the main street. That sealed the doom for the
dirt roads.
Shortly thereafter, State Aid for highways became the rule.
There are two main streams here; one
originating in
the Towantic section, known as Little River, ran through
Oxford and
entered the Naugatuck at Seymour.
The Eight Mile, the larger of the two,
begins
in the
springs around Lake Quassapaug and flows as the boundary line
between
Woodbury and Middlebury, Southbury and Oxford into Quakers
Farms, and
enters the Housatonic, below the Connecticut Light and Power
dam at
Stevenson.
On these two streams, many dams were
built,
supplying water to run small mills of different kinds. On
Little River
there were six of these mills -- four of them I have seen in
operation.
On the Eight Mile, there were five dams,
but
only
one mill was in operation -- Radcliffe's.
The old schoolhouses passed away with
their 3
R's,
geography, history and grammar. These were not good enough for
the
modern age.
The old inhabitants, to mention only a
few
were,
James Bartlett, Capt. Perry, H. Tomlinson, Stephen Mallett, -
