Into the Lake and the Town Vaults

Squantz Pond from Candlelight Cottages

     In October of 2007, I spent some steamy October days in New Haven, Ct, visiting the Beinecke Library to look at my father's papers there. This year I determined to take advantage of Global Warming and swim in Connecticut's wonderful lakes. One morning, as I drove to Squantz Pond State Park from the motel, I noticed a sign for lakeside cottages. I decided they should be my home for the next two weeks. I called and Shirley answered and all was arranged, no credit card, word of mouth. After I arrived, Shirley brought sheets, towels, a heater and a cashmere "house sweater." Now that is Yankee Hospitality!

     

     After settling in and swimming across Squantz Pond and back, I drove the few miles to breakfast at The American Pie Company. Who knew that great biscuits and gravy would come to Sherman? Then on to the Town Clerk's Office. I wanted to see if I could learn anything more about the chain of ownership of Hidden Hollow and the surrounding properties. Vassar College teaches you there's nothing like original sources, and soon I was immersed in the grantor and grantee indexes and deed books. Sherman used to be the northern section of New Fairfield; records here begin with the separation in 1802. A telephone call with my farm banker sister, Molly, alerted me to the truth that I was going about this backward: tax maps and recent deeds should have a chain of possession that would save time. 

    

     Sorting out the descriptions of real estate, with their piles of stones, white oak and soft maple as corners will take months, but their was immediate satisfaction in the wills inventories of estates Probate Records. As best I can determine, Lida's father acquired Hidden Hollow from the Estate of John Durgy. According to the Probate Records, John had been declared an insane pauper and committed to the Insane Retreat at Middletown just six months before his death. The probate of his estate indicates that at his death his wife and children were living in Missouri, and the Census confirmed this. 

     Lida's husband, Burton Beckwith, acquired the house and 90 acres next door when first John Reynolds Worden and then his widow, Jane Ludington Worden died. Her heirs were her children by her first marriage, and the land had to be sold to satisfy their claims. 

     In my training as an anthropologist, I studied the system of inheritance of Jamaica, where each heir receives title to a portion of land. The land stays in the family, but is broken into smaller and smaller pieces. In Hidden Hollow, the properties remained more or less intact, and insanity and death broke the family ties to the land.