Local Life 200 Years Ago
The Reverend Rufus Hawley recorded 50 years of Avon history
Story by Leonard Felson | Photography courtesy of the Avon Historical Society
 What was life like in the Farmington Valley in the middle of the 18th
century? Avon historian Nora Howard gives us a glimpse in her new book, Catch’d on Fire: The Journals of Rufus Hawley of Avon, Connecticut, a title that connotes Hawley’s religious fervor.
The book captures the early history of Avon, which was ultimately incorporated as a town in 1830, through Hawley’s private journals, which cover a half-century from 1763 to 1812. As a pastor, Hawley held what was arguably the most important position in the parish then called Northington. This year marks the 200th anniversary of his completion of his last journal.
Hawley was born in Farmington in 1741, near where the Farmington Country Club is today. When he was 11 years old, his family moved to Turkey Hills, now East Granby, not far from Newgate Prison. They lived near his cousin,
Justus Forward, who became his
mentor, helping him get into Hatfield Academy in Massachusetts, where
Forward taught, and later into Yale, which Hawley attended from 1766 to1767 and which he described as the most exciting time of his life.
Just as Hawley, then 26, was graduating from Yale, Northington’s first pastor died. In search of a new pastor, the congregation’s 60 families invited Hawley to preach. “Preach’d att Northington & was the first Time that ever I preach’d there,” Hawley noted in his journal on Decemer 18, 1768. Over the years, Hawley and his wife, Deborah Kent, who hailed from Suffield, added seven children—six boys and, finally, daughter, Sophia in 1782—to the
community’s population.
Hawley wrote of everyday pursuits, chronicling the farming of his land, growing hay, caring for cows, hogs, oxen, horses, and visiting the members of his parish. He rarely traveled more than 50 miles form home except for three trips in the early 1800s to Ohio’s Western Reserve, which was settled by folks from Connecticut. Hawley wrote in his journals every day for 50 years,
beginning his chronicles when he was 21 and a student at Hatfield Academy and finally putting his pen down in 1812 at the age of 71.
Although he was an ordinary minister and farmer, Hawley’s legacy is extraordinary, says Howard. “He quietly wrote his own story in thirty-three journals four inches wide, composing a few lines daily in diminutive cursive,” she writes. About 70 percent of the journals have survived, and what unfolds in the daily entries is a glimpse of life in the Farmington Valley through the stories of the nearly 1,400 people he knew and met, including some 200 ministers. In the journals, Hawley writes about epidemics and smallpox, his encounters with the military during the American Revolution, neighborhood tragedies, and life with seven children. Sadly,
17 journals are missing, many from
the period during the American
Revolutionary war years.
The surviving journals now belong to the Avon Free Public Library, having been donated in 2002 by Gladys and the late Bob August, whose former home had been the Hawley family residence for five generations.
“From his daily entries,” writes Howard, “the story unfolds of a minister doing his job without fame or fanfare.” Maybe so, but Hawley encountered several people who went on to make history.
One was Wilford Woodruff, whom Hawley baptized in 1807 and whose father operated a sawmill and flourmill on what is today the property of Avon Old Farms School. Woodruff grew up to become a Connecticut governor and founder of the Wadsworth Atheneum; later, as the fourth president of the Mormon Church, Woodruff was responsible for outlawing polygamy.
Hawley also was friends with the Reverend Lemuel Haynes, a West Hartford native and a Torrington minister who was the first African-American ordained by a Protestant denomination. Hawley also performed the marriage of a Native American woman, Lucy, to an African American named Abel.
Despite his prolific journaling, Hawley’s life story had never been recounted until Howard tackled it for her book. The historian, who also serves as historian of the Avon Congregational Church, had to do a fair amount of research. “I had to put it all together and figure out who was who. To do that it took months and months of researching data bases,” she says. She spent 10 years researching Hawley’s life and is grateful for assistance she received from the library’s executive director Virginia Vocelli, who oversees the Hawley collection. Teri Wilson, the president of the Avon Historical Society, also assisted, reading the manuscript and offering suggestions.
Among Howard’s challenges were determining who was living in Avon at the time and filling in missing information from cemetery records and other historical sources. “Some names appeared on cemetery stones and nowhere else; some in his journals and nowhere else,” she notes.
Howard is available for lectures, which include a 40-minute slide show to community groups. (She can be reached at oakeshoward@gmail.com.) Hawley’s journal entries, she says, represent “a slice of his life. It’s me looking back two hundred or more years and trying to put the puzzle together, but it’s a fair and honest look of his life and life of Avon at the time, even if we’re just peering in the window.”
Leonard Felson, a regular contributor to Seasons, is a freelance magazine, newspaper, and copy writer whose passion for local history began at a young age. For more about him and his work, see www.leonardfelson.com.
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