Bethany Parish

The population of Amity continued to grow, and more and more families settled down in the northern reaches. On September 16, 1755, Timothy Peck, James Sherman, Joel Hotchkiss, and Abner Smith submitted a petition to the General Assembly to the effect that the six miles and more distance from the Amity meetinghouse, on poor roads, was a hardship, especially in winter and spring, and requested permission to hold services four months in the year in what was to be known as Bethany parish.

            The petition was signed by the heads of thirty-three households, which was no doubt the total number of households in Bethany. This represented one-third of Amity Parish, and Amity formally opposed the petition; every household paid a “rate” to support the minister, so the establishment of Bethany Parish represented the loss of one-third of the parish income. However, the petition was granted, and Bethany received winter preaching privileges.

            In 1762, Bethany petitioned for full Society status, and once again, the Amity parish protested; once again, the petition was granted, and Bethany Parish became an independent Society within the town of New Haven. A committee was formed to find a minister, and they applied to the New Haven Association on May 31, 1763 for help. The committee recommended Stephen Hawley (Yale 1759), and after a few month’s trial, the parish voted to call him to service, which he accepted. Hawley was ordained on October 12 in the open air, no suitable meetinghouse existing at that time. The sermon was preached by Joseph Bellamy, who was the uncle of Hawley’s wife, Mary. Bellamy was often referred to as the “pope” of Litchfield County, and was a disciple of Jonathan Edwards. Bellamy was one of the leading theologians of the New Divinity school of theology, and Hawley was in sympathy with his views.

            New Divinity theology was the attempt to bring the emotional enthusiasm of New Light revivalism under control, and to rationalize Calvinism in the light of Enlightenment philosophy. The ruling mood of New Divinity was the “still, small voice of the Holy Spirit,” and revivals were marked by “stillness, silent weeping, and melancholy,” in contrast to the “physical shaking, rolling, dancing, jerking, and barking” that marked the revivals of the Great Awakening.

            Bellamy’s leadership led local pastors to focus on theology in their sermons, keeping the tithingman busy. The tithingman watched carefully over those assembled for Sabbath services, making sure they stayed awake while the pastor droned on with arguments that tried to reconcile Free Will with Predestination. The tithingman wielded a six-foot staff with a feather or a fox-tail at one end, to awaken the ladies, and a knob or a thorn attached to the other end, to awaken dozing men. Disruptive boys received good thwackings.

            In 1784, at the instigation of Bethany, Amity and Bethany parishes were combined, and granted town status by the General Assembly, becoming the town of Woodbridge, in honor of Amity’s long-serving pastor. Bethany was still an independent parish, as a hamlet within Woodbridge. At this time, Bethany was a community of subsistence farmers. Money was scarce, and barter was the usual way of doing business. Church taxes could be paid with commodities such as flax-seed, which always had a ready market in New-Haven (around this time, Newhaven as a single works began to be spelled as a hyphenated New-Haven). New-Haven had enthusiastically joined Britain’s mercantile economy, and New-Haven ships helped to supply the sugar islands of the Caribbean West Indies with needed supplies.

             The sugar plantations were worked by enslaved Africans, and provided big profits for British investors. The sugar islands, such as Barbadoes and Jamaica, didn’t grow their own food, and had insufficient timber and other necessities, some of which was supplied by Connecticut towns, including Bethany. Any farmer with a crop surplus, or such items as barrel-staves and hoops, could take his products to a local middleman, such as a tavern-keeper or store-keeper, and get credit, which could be used to purchase luxury items such as molasses, coffee, indigo, sugar, and rum. The steadily increasing supply of rum would lead to a rise in alcoholism, a problem that would come to a head in the nineteenth century.

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For further information see:

Joseph Avitable. “The Atlantic World Economy and Colonial Connecticut,” PhD Diss. The      University of Rochester, 2009. Accessed September 26, 2019.   http://hdl.handle.net/1802/8785

William Carvosso Sharpe. Bethany Sketches and Records, with contributions by W.D. Humiston, H.W. Johnson, L.F. Morris, A.V.R. Abbott, and Isaac Jones Jr.,with a new preface by Alice Bice Bunton,(1908) repr., Bethany: The Bethany Library Association, 1989.Accessed May11, 2012, https://archive.org/details/bethanysketchesr00shar.

Reverdy Whitlock. The Parish of Amity, Volume One. Woodbridge: The First Church of Christ, 1982.