Joel Andrews, Spiritual Seeker and Poet
Joel Andrews
There aren’t many personal records of the early inhabitants of Bethany. The information that exists is mostly bare genealogies along with entries in church and municipal records. In that respect, Joel Andrews stands out—he left behind what he calls an autobiography, although really a memoir, of his life. The overall impression of Joel is that he was a sincere and well-intentioned man, religious and perhaps a bit of a mystic, a daydreamer, a man who wrote poetry, and a man of sorrows. Joel didn’t have a Yale education; he learned his three “r’s” in a one-room schoolhouse, but most of all he was a man who loved to write.
Joel Andrews was born in Bethany on January 30, 1777, the son of Caleb and Ann Wolcott Andrews. He came of age in one of the most interesting eras of Bethany’s history, when the area was experiencing tremendous growth and change; politically, economically, and in religion. Straits Turnpike Road opened in 1800, bringing with it a steady stream of traffic both to and from New Haven, the shipping port and center of government, education, religion, and commerce. As the population surged, westward migration provided a safety valve for people who otherwise had few prospects; it was still basically an agricultural economy, and all the good farmland was already taken.
Joel was a joiner by trade; that is, a house-carpenter skilled at squaring timbers and making the pegged mortise-and-tenon joints that held the heavy frames together. He was also a farmer; it was usual in those times for a man to have many skills, many ways to cobble together a living.
On the grand list of 1808, Joel’s taxable property included:
One cow
One cow 2 years old
One horse
2 acres plowland
11 acres brush pasture
3 fireplaces, 4th class
10 sheep
This inventory describes a tidy subsistence farm that would supply his family with food and clothing (that’s where the sheep come in). He had a house, too, of course, wit three chimneys (fourth class), indicating a fair size structure, and barns.
Joel’s memoir was begun when he was 64 years old, and finished near the end of his life, when he was in his 80’s. Starting with the first paragraph, he launches into a litany of accidents and injuries that he suffered, including many serious head injuries, since he was three years old. Joel was injured by “edge tools” seventeen times that left him unable to work for a time; surely his was related to his occupation, as the joiner’s tools consisted mainly of axes, chisels, adzes, and saws.
At age 18, while digging a woodchuck out of a hillside, he was seriously injured by a rockfall which bruised his feet quite badly. When they began to turn black the next day, he and his family were alarmed that gangrene might be setting in. This caused Joel to think seriously about death and the fate of his soul, moving him to pray for help. But, although he thereafter became more religious, this did not produce a real religious experience--Joel said that that would come in his 24th year, shortly after he was married, in 1800 (to Martha who, despite his apparent attachment to her, Joel never once mentions by name in his memoir!). At that time, Joel heard the Rev. Ira Hart preach a sermon based on Psalm 84, verse 9: “Look on the Face of Thine Anointed,” which put in him the desire to seek salvation in earnest (more about the Rev. Ira Hart and revivalism in the article “Bethany in 1800”). He says: “After having many hard struggles with the Old Enemy, I at last found peace to my soul, on Sunday evening, in my bedroom, in secret prayer.”
That experience sounds like a conversion experience, a rebirth, but Joel wasn’t convinced that he’d had one; he would hold out for something more dramatic. Joel had heard about the conversion experience from “professors” (those who professed to be reborn or converted), but they were vague about describing it, only saying something like “I obtained a hope about such and such a time.” And there were no prayer meetings at that time; Joel had no one to converse with about religion, except on the Sabbath. He went to see the Rev. Stephen Hawley, pastor of the Congregational church, for advice; he advised Joel and his wife to join his church, which they did. Joel and Martha were apparently happy there, but Hawley’s health was in decline, and the church hired a young minister as his understudy. The Rev. Isaac Jones was ordained as “colleague pastor” on June 6, 1804. Hawley died within a few weeks.
Isaac Jones (Yale 1792) had been a prodigy who was held back from entering Yale until he was 14. After graduation, he continued his studies under the Rev. Drs. Jonathan Edwards Jr. and James Dana, men of quite different schools of preaching, who led the rival White Haven and First Church congregations in New Haven, respectively. Jonathan Edwards Jr, the New Divinity pastor of the White Haven church, preached dull sermons that plumbed the depths of abstract theology, typical of many New Divinity preachers. Dana, on the other hand, avoided theology in his sermons, which were described as delightful. At one point, Edwards Jr. called Dana a heretic. While Dana was pastor of the First Church in New Haven, the mother church from which White Haven had split, he advised young Yale grads about to embark on a clerical career not to irritate their congregations with difficult points of theology, dogmas, and creeds, but to stick to the Bible—Protestantism in its purest form. Dana was not New Light or Old Light, but believed in allowing people freedom of conscience. He seemed to anticipate the accommodating theology of Timothy Dwight and Lyman Beecher, who led what came to be known as the Second Great Awakening, a renewed revival movement of the early 19th century, leading up to the separation of church and state in 1818. Isaac Jones’ ordination sermon was delivered by Dana, giving a good indication of which way Jones would lean as a preacher.
Jones’ first sermon, preached the week after his ordination on June 10, 1804, was cast in the mold of Dana. His sermon was based on I Corinthians, 2: 2: “For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” Dana told his congregation that he was there to watch over their souls, to guide them to self-knowledge and to warn them of the dangers of straying from Jesus’ teachings. He was there to be their friend, he said, and his fondest wish was that they be saved. He said: “Like a guardian angel I will hover over you and tell you of the constant dangers to which you are exposed…advise you to… practice every known virtue, that you may be blessed and receive that crown of glory that fadeth not away.”
There would be no hellfire and damnation sermons—Jones’ preaching would be a far cry from Jonathan Edwards Sr. and his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
Jones led the Bethany church for two years amid growing opposition. Stephen Hawley had been a New Light/ New Divinity preacher, and about one-third of the congregation were New Lights who opposed Jones. Often in these disputes, an Old Light minority paid the largest share of church taxes, and often wielded more influence than their numbers would seem to indicate. The society met numerous times over this issue, and Joel was a member of the committee. Col. Joel Hine led the faction in favor of Jones, and David Thomas led the faction against. But the congregation could not come to an agreement. The New Haven Consociation of ministers called him for a hearing, but Jones evaded a trial, and formed an independent church with the parishioners who supported him. As a result of that action, the New Haven Association revoked his license to preach ministry in 1806; in 1808, he withdrew the parish from the New Haven Consociation, on the grounds of theological and political differences.
Joel Andrews claimed that Jones was turned out by the Consociation because he was a Democrat, and claimed that Jones never mentioned politics, but in fact told him that preachers should preach the gospel and not meddle in politics. At that time, the standing church was fighting for its life. Generations of religious dissent and resentment against the domineering standing church peaked after the Revolution. While the new Constitution of the United States, effective in 1789, prohibited the Federal government from establishing a religion, many of the individual states, including Connecticut, still maintained a state religion. The French Revolution of the 1790’s further fueled the desire for religious freedom. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson was elected president, and the power of the Federal party weakened in favor of the Democratic Republicans. In Connecticut, political parties had formed, and the old Federalist party, associated with the Standing Order (the coalition of church and state that ran Connecticut) desperately clung to power. The new generation of politicians were tired of the religious squabbling that consumed so much political energy, and a Toleration Party, supported by dissident churches and the Episcopal church, won election in 1817 under Oliver Wolcott Jr, and the following year a new state constitution officially separated church and state.
But before 1818, Yale president Rev. Dr. Timothy Dwight, the face of the standing church, with the help of former student Rev. Dr. Lyman Beecher and others, fought hard to prevent disestablishment, fearing it would destroy the Congregational church. Isaac Jones apparently wasn’t loyal to the standing church, and he was therefore censured. After he and his congregation separated from the Congregational church, they went over to the Episcopal church, which was more liberal in theology, and in membership requirements, than the Congregational church. Jones went back to New Haven to study Episcopal theology and ended up leaving and going to New York, where he was ordained a deacon by Rt. Rev. Benjamin Moore, the same man who ordained Ammi Rogers.
Isaac Jones gave his farewell sermon on December 11, 1808, in the hall of Darius Beecher’s house (still standing; a local landmark designed by David Hoadley). The sermon was based on Jeremiah 12: 10, 11—“Many pastors have destroyed my vineyard, they have trodden my portion underfoot, they have made my pleasant portion a desolate wilderness. They have made it desolate, and being desolate it mourneth unto me; the whole land is made desolate, because no man layeth it to heart.” The sermon was not a bitter diatribe against the Consociation ministers who blackballed him; instead, Jones extolled the good influence that Christianity had had on the world over the centuries, and decried the divisions, which he said were caused by the Devil who instilled pride in men, causing quarrels and contention, church tyranny, and schism. Jones called for unity and brotherly love, to love virtue and to love one’s enemies. He thanked the congregation for their prayers, and hoped that they and their children would be examples of Christian virtue, and that their last moments in the valley of death would be their best and brightest ones.
Joel Andrews and his wife were confirmed in the Episcopalian church in 1810, but Joel wasn’t happy as an Episcopalian. He says that there was a revival in the church around 1818, and that many were converted, including George F. Peck, Abner A. Perkins, Minot Collins, Abel Lines, Major Hotchkiss, and some others, who gathered in prayer meetings during the week, at the houses of Ezra Sperry, Reuben Judd, Abner A. Perkins, and Lysias Beecher. However, says Joel Andrews, the minister and almost all the leading members of the church opposed the meetings, and they were ended. Many of that group would later join Joel in forming a new Methodist church, where prayer meetings and revivals were routine and encouraged.
Joel began attending Methodist meetings, and became convinced that the Episcopal church was made up “partly of the children of God, and partly of the children of the devil.” After some soul-searching, he and his wife Martha joined the Methodist church around 1820. The first Methodist society in Bethany was formed around 1830, and the founding members included Joel and his wife, George F. Peck and his wife, Kneeland Downs, Lebbeus Dickerman, and Benajah Tuttle. Until 1837, services were held in the schoolhouse, or outside in a shady grove. Joel went out fund-raising, and collected $926.84, which was used to build a church on the turnpike.
Joel said that from the time he joined the Methodist church, and for about seventeen years, he was “happy and sorrowful by turns”; Joel still wasn’t convinced that he’d been “born again,” and a book he came across convinced him to seek “sanctification” anew. For months, Joel prayed and struggled with his demons, and finally, on December 5, 1837, Joel had a breakthrough. His morning praying had seemed especially satisfying, and he was so distracted with joyful thoughts that Martha asked him what was ailing him, and Joel replied that he’d never felt better in his life. All day his mind was occupied with devotional thoughts, but still he didn’t feel he had the blessing he so fervently sought.
That evening, he went to a prayer meeting at Brother John L. Bradley’s house, and continued to pray for his blessing. At some point, Joel fell into a deep trance, and when he came to, the meeting had already ended, and everyone gone. Sister Bradley was holding his hand, and told him she was glad that he’d finally gotten the blessing that he’d been hoping for. Finally, at age sixty, Joel felt that he’d been reborn in the spirit: “I felt as if I were in a new world. Everything seemed to praise God… how astonishing it is to think that the great God, who made heaven and earth, should ever condescend to look upon such a poor, unworthy worm of the dust as I, and pardon my sins, and set my soul at liberty, and make me happy in his love, and rejoice in his goodness.”
After this point, Joel began a long, slow decline into poor health and personal sorrows. He developed a painful, protracted illness in May 1838; then his oldest daughter, Abigail, 27, died in 1839. There are many long gaps in Joel’s memoir—it seems he was mostly in good spirits, but then in 1845, he had a memento mori moment, at the grave of his daughter-in-law Angeline and three of her children. There, Joel reflects on death; his father, his daughter, his daughter-in-law, three grand-children, and his brother-in law, all dead and buried, and he feels it won’t be long before he, too, will be there.
At age 69, Joel still was practicing his trade of joinery, and while engaged in a house-raising, a timber fell, and struck him on the shoulder, causing an injury that would plague him for years. Later that year, his wife of 46 years, Martha, died, and Joel was naturally very lonely without her. Joel’s son, Ziba, was an alcoholic, a cause for constant sorrow, as Ziba and his wife and children lived in Joel’s house, and he was confronted every day with the unhappy results of that addiction. Ziba not only disrupted Joel’s household, but also quarreled with neighbors. Joel was moved to write, on March 5, 1847:
My grief it is so very great,
I’ve wet my pillow with tears.
It seems as if my heart would break
My trials are so severe.
In July, Joel writes that he has been out of health for some time, and sick at heart as well—"truly a man of sorrows,” caused mainly by the troubles brought on by his son’s alcoholism. Joel took life very seriously, and his sad sack demeanor apparently spurred some to torment him. Joel was told one day that his son had murdered one of his children and the sheriff had taken him to the jail. This turned out to be false, someone’s idea of a mean-spirited joke. There was also a story, overheard one day while entering church, from an anonymous source:
"Eli Terrill: Did you hear the parson upbraiding Joel Andrews for not attending church last Sunday?
Lebbeus Dickerman: No, I thought Joel never missed a church service.
Eli Terrill: He never has missed before last Sunday. It seems he was all dressed up ready to leave for church, and went out to his barn to get his horse. Someone had put a pail of sour milk over the top of the door inside the barn, in such a way that when he opened the door, the whole pail dumped over him and he was covered from head to stern."
Later in July of 1847, his home life became so chaotic and disruptive to his peace of mind, due to the misbehavior of his alcoholic son, that Joel left his house and went to stay with a friend in Prospect. That would continue to be a pattern for the next couple of years; when thing got to be too much at home, Joel would hit the road for a while, sometimes on foot, and stay with friends at scattered locations: Westville, Oxford, Prospect, Bristol, Goshen, Wolcottville (Torrington) among others. Possibly these are friends Joel met through church connections. In the Methodist tradition of watching over one other, he often prays with them, offers advice to the troubled, and writes personalized, inspirational religious poetry for them.
At one point, in March 1849, Joel had been staying with a friend in Norfolk. He laments: “Foxes have hole, and the birds of the air have nests, but I have not where to lay my head in this place. He writes:
I soon must leave my friends who’re here,
So good to me, so kind, so dear,
Perhaps never to meet them again,
While in this world of sin and pain.
Joel’s income was not steady. He often couldn’t work; he was still accident-prone, suffering a succession of falls, and head injuries, and sickness as well. He was tired of wandering and imposing on friends for shelter, but it was preferable to staying at his unhappy and chaotic home. But his alcoholic son, Ziba, took a turn for the worse. Ziba’s wife had died of tuberculosis, and now Ziba had it as well. It was called “consumption” in those days, and Ziba was dying of it. He was being cared for in Hamden, and Joel was finally able to move back into his own home. Like King Lear, Joel had found out the hard way that it was not a good idea to give your property to your children while you are still alive. But now all was quiet. His friend Philos Dorman moved in with him.
Ziba died on January 8, 1850, at the age of 44. Joel mourned the loss of his only son, whom, he thought, would be “my stay and staff to lean upon in my old age.” Joel was still suffering from injuries, and was unable to do physical work. At this point, he was 73 years old. He took up the peddling of books, which gave him a good excuse to resume his wandering from the house of one friend to another. In those days, overnight guests were often quite welcome, providing some diversion from daily routine, and bringing news from elsewhere.
Despite all his injuries and illnesses, and his apparently feeble condition, Joel lived to be 88 years old. All that walking must have been good for him. On his 80th birthday, he wrote this poem:
THIS IS MY BIRTHDAY
This day I am eighty years old,
Yet life is more precious than gold,
I wish for to live and do good,
And faithfully to serve my God.
Lord, what is life! It’s like a flower,
We see it flourish for an hour,
It blossoms and then it is gone,
With all its royal beauty on.
But death comes like a winter day
And takes the feeble life away,
Life fails so soon, to-day it’s here,
To-night perhaps may disappear.
For life in all its health and prime,
But death may come in a short time;
Lord, what is life if spent with thee,
To all a long eternity.
Now eighty years are gone with me,
How much longer can I stay;
Now when I go I hope to rest
Among the sanctified and blest.
***
For further reading, see:
Joel Andrews. Sketch of the Life Of Joel Andrews of Bethany, written by himself. New Haven:Storer and Morehouse, printers, 1857.(click on thumbnail above to access pdf version).
Franklin Bowditch Dexter. Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, Vol. V. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1911, 21-24. Accessed May 9, 2021, https://archive.org/details/cu31924092714520/page/n33/mode/2up?q=Isaac+Jones.
Isaac Jones Jr. A Sermon Delivered on Sunday June 10, 1804, before the Church and Society of Bethany, in Woodbridge, of New Haven County. New Haven: Printed by Green & Son, 1804. (first sermon after ordination).
Isaac Jones Jr. A Sermon Preached at Bethany the 11th December 1808, Being a Farewell Discourse and made Public by Desire. New Haven: Printed by Oliver Steele & Company,1809.
William Carvosso Sharpe. Bethany Sketches and Records: A History of Bethany Connecticut from the time of the first settlers to 1913. (1908) reprint: The Bethany Library Association,1989. Available online, accessed May 9, 2021, https://archive.org/details/bethanysketchesr00shar.