Forgotten Voices. Carolyn Wakeman

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      When Old Lyme celebrated America’s centennial in 1876, church treasurer William Coult drew from memory at age seventy-nine the floor plan of the town’s third meetinghouse, where he had attended services as a youth. His pencil notes locate the steeple and belfry above the west-facing entrance and the pulpit with sounding board on the building’s north side.

      Pews and galleries had not yet been installed or a steeple erected when the building committee decided in January 1739/40 to “proceed not further than to finish what they have agreed with.” It tasked Benjamin DeWolfe (1695–1742), the Society’s clerk and an experienced carpenter, “to take care that no boards and timber shall be carried away from the meetinghouse” and to “find out all such as he can that have carried timber and boards away already.” The loss of materials coincided with complaints about the minister.

      Criticism of Parsons brought an admission by William Borden (1674–1747), age fifty-five, in December 1739 that he had “at sundry times and places with an apparent heat and vehemence of Spirit” denounced “greedy ministers” who “accepted a certain sum to preach the gospel.”

      He had also criticized the choice of “young men of a college education” to preach at the neglect of “the age[d] and experienced brethren of the church among them.” Claims about the minister’s “ill conduct toward said Society in general” and allegations that he had defamed the Ecclesiastical Society “publicly in the meetinghouse” prompted an effort in 1739 “to proceed against the Rev. Mr. Jonathan Parsons.” But church members followed “the desire of the pastor” and voted instead to suspend Mr. Borden from communion and admonish him “for his obstinate continuances in the scandalous sin of defamation.”

      As confessions continued in the unfinished meetinghouse, David Lord (1715–1785) in 1738 acknowledged abusing and violently striking a man. The next year, John Peck (1716–1785) and his wife Catherine Lay Peck (1715–1810) confessed together to fornication. After Deacon Marvin confessed to intemperance in January 1741, six church members in rapid succession, including Lucy, the enslaved servant of Mr. Deming, confessed to fornication. In the coming months the Great Awakening, a sweeping religious revival movement that disrupted established churches with its fervent emotionalism, would dramatically alter religious practice in Lyme’s first church.

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      The Minister’s Wife

      The playful reputation of the minister’s wife dates from 1876, more than a century after her death, when a magazine article celebrating Lyme’s prominent families included a fanciful anecdote about her pranks in the meetinghouse.

      His wife was given to practical jokes. One evening as he was about to leave the house for the weekly prayer-meeting—after taking a last look in the mirror to satisfy himself that every particular hair was stroked the right way—she playfully threw her arms about his neck, passed one hand over his face, and kissed him. As he entered the church he was nettled by a ripple of smiles which ran through the congregation, and he noticed that some of the brethren were eyeing him suspiciously. Presently it was whispered in his ear that his face was blackened.

      The vivid details in a whimsical narrative about Phoebe Griswold (1716–1770), who at age fifteen married the town’s new minister, ten years her senior, are likely apocryphal. They seem to have originated a century after her death when Evelyn McCurdy Salisbury (1823–1917), a Griswold descendant eager to highlight the family’s distinguished marriages and praise “the beauty and spirit of its women,” provided a colorful anecdote to historian and journalist Martha J. Lamb (1829–1923). Mrs. Lamb included the charming story in her article celebrating Lyme’s illustrious past, which appeared in the centennial issue of Harper’s Magazine in 1876. The incidents she recounted became fixed in local lore and still shape the remembered past today.

      Martha Lamb’s purpose was to engage her magazine audience in an appealing portrayal of a historic Connecticut town. Her article describes how Parsons arranged his hair in front of a mirror, kissed his wife goodbye, and left for a weekly prayer gathering in the meetinghouse, where his smudged face elicited “a ripple of smiles.” It details an additional occasion in the meetinghouse when his “fun-loving wife,” who “was given to practical jokes,” removed a page from his sermon, then “sat in the little square pew before him, quietly fanning herself, and enjoying his embarrassment when he reached the chasm.” The anecdote later became confused with fact, as if Mrs. Lamb were actually reporting the reaction of those gathered in Lyme’s meetinghouse for a prayer meeting and a sermon in the 1730s.

      Historian Martha J. Lamb drew national attention to Old Lyme’s scenic beauty and the achievements of its “consequential families” in an illustrated profile of the town that appeared in 1876 in the centennial issue of Harper’s Monthly.

      Parsons’s own accounts of his ministry in Lyme offer no hint of playfulness in his household. He described efforts to eliminate youthful frivolity in the parish and reported that young people, at his urging, “turned their meetings for vain mirth into meetings for prayer, conference, and reading books of piety.” They then took pains, the minister noted, “to dissuade others from levity and frothy conversation.” His accounts of his ministry mention his wife only once, when he described his severe mental struggle after settling in Lyme. “Sometimes I thought I must be in hell,” he explained, and “I thought everyone that saw me must see my wretchedness.” When “Mrs. Parsons, taking notice of something extraordinary, asked what was the matter,” the minister told her that he “could not live so,” then retired “unto a secret place in the field” where he remained on his knees alone with his Bible.”

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