Surviving a Night in the New Haven Colony

A New Haven bed in the dead of winter required a brass warming pan, glowing with red-hot hickory coals, to be violently swept back and forth across the linen sheets. Pause for just one second, and the fabric would ignite. Remove the pan entirely, and the sleeper would freeze. In the long, brutal winters of the seventeenth century, water routinely froze solid inside wooden pitchers sitting just feet away from a roaring fireplace. There was no escape from the ambient temperature of the room, just a constant, exhausting negotiation with survival. And yet, for the Puritan founders of this coastal colony, this daily brush with freezing and fire was considered a life of remarkable comfort, a testament to their own success and standing in a world that was utterly unforgiving.

Source: https://rogershermanhouse.com/2020/01/15/how-the-people-of-new-haven-lived-in-colonial-days/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

A new haven bed in the dead of winter required a brass warming pan glowing with red hot hickory coals to be violently swept back and forth across the linen sheets. Pause for just one second and the fabric would ignite. Remove the pan entirely, and the sleeper would freeze. In the long, brutal winters of the seventeenth century, water routinely froze solid inside wooden pitchers sitting just feet away from a roaring fireplace. There was no escape from the ambient temperature of the room, just a constant, exhausting negotiation with survival. And yet, for the Puritan founders of this coastal colony, this daily brush with freezing and fire was considered a life of remarkable comfort, a testament to their own success and standing in a world that was utterly unforgiving. If you walk down Chapel Street in New Haven, Connecticut today, you are walking over the ghosts of a forgotten world. You are moving through a landscape that has been paved over, built upon, demolished and rebuilt so many times that the original topography is essentially a rumor. The local historian Arthur Molin once posed a fascinating thought experiment regarding this exact stretch of land. He asked us to imagine what would happen if the pious Puritans who landed at Quinnipiac in sixteen thirty eight could somehow return to life and spend a single day in modern New Haven. His conclusion was absolute. They would hardly know where they were, they would not understand what to do with themselves. They would quite literally need to learn how to live all over again because the basic mechanics of human existence have been so radically altered that the present day would look to them like an alien planet. The sheer physical dislocation would be the first shock. If these founders arrive by boat, expecting to pull up to the bustling muddy banks of the harbor they remembered, they would find that their old landing place is now more than a mile inland. The geography itself has been rewritten. The creeks that used to carve through the land, leading ships to the center of the settlement, have entirely disappeared, filled in and paved over by centuries of urban expansion. Wandering inland from a harbor they no longer recognized, they would likely seek out the old marketplace. Today we know this area as the New Haven Green, but what they would find there would baffle and perhaps terrify them. The tall buildings, the sheer verticality of modern brick and steel and glass would be completely outside their frame of reference. But it wouldn't just be the buildings themselves that confused them. It would be the fundamental way we live inside them. To understand just how strange our world would seem to them, we have to understand the intimate, sensory reality of the world they left behind. The architecture of colonial New Haven was by the standards of the time incredibly impressive. When the colonists lived there in the seventeenth century, there were large houses in New Haven, significantly larger and more ambitious than those found in most of the other early New England settlements, like Plymouth, or the initial Massachusetts Bay outposts. This was a colony founded heavily by wealthy merchants, men who brought capital and ambition to the shores of the Quinnipioc River. But despite their size, these houses were built entirely of wood, and they were profoundly lacking in what we would consider basic human comfort. Picture the interior of one of these grand seventeenth century homes. The rooms were undeniably large, but the floors beneath your feet were entirely bare. In many cases, to keep the wood clean and to provide a modicum of traction, the floors were simply sprinkled with sand. The sand would absorb spills, provide a sweeping compound when it came time to clean, and create a gritty, rough texture underfoot. You might assume that a wealthy merchant would have rugs, but carpets, as we understand them, were virtually nonexistent on the floors of early colonial New Haven. A carpet was not something you walked on. A carpet was considered a luxury textile, typically imported at great expense, often a turkey carpet, and it was used exclusively to drape over a table or a cupboard to display wealth. Only a very few people, men of immense wealth and status, like the colony's co-founder and governor, Theophilus Eaton, owned such items, and even Eaton wouldn't dare put a turkey carpet on the floor to be destroyed by muddy boots and fireplace ash. The furniture populating these large, sandy floored rooms was stark, heavy, and rigidly utilitarian. If you were a child in colonial New Haven, you did not have a soft chair to curl up in. Children usually sat upon hard, backless wooden benches, both at home and when they were at school. The chairs that did exist were reserved for the adults, particularly the male head of the household, and they were hard, straight backed wooden constructions designed for posture rather than relaxation. There was no concept of lounging in the communal spaces of the house. You were either working, eating, praying, or sleeping. And sleeping was its own kind of arduous labor. The beds of the era were nothing like these sprung, cushioned mattresses we take for granted. There were no metal springs. The foundation of the bed was often a grid of tight ropes woven across a wooden frame. Over time these ropes would sag under the weight of the sleepers, requiring a specialized wooden tool called a bed key to violently twist and tighten the ropes back into tension, a labor-intensive chore that gave birth to the phrase sleep tight. On top of these ropes sat a mattress tick, stuffed with whatever material was available. If you were wealthy, it was stuffed with soft feathers. If you were not, it was stuffed with straw, wool, or horse hair, creating a lumpy, uneven surface that prickled and compacted over time. But the true enemy of sleep was the cold. The winters in New England were notoriously vicious, a deep, bone cracking freeze that lasted for months. There were no furnaces, there were no wood stoves as we know them, and there was certainly no coal. The entire house relied on the massive, cavernous great fireplace in the central keeping room. This singular fire served as the heating plant, the cooking stove, and the primary source of light during the long winter nights. But a fireplace is a terribly inefficient way to heat a large wooden room. The vast majority of the thermal energy was sucked violently up the chimney by the draft. You could be standing with your face practically blistering from the radiant heat of the flames while your back remained shivering in the drafty air. The ambient temperature of these houses was staggeringly low. Historical accounts note that it was a common occurrence for water to freeze solid in a bucket or a pitcher sitting in the very same room where a fire was blazing, simply because it was placed in a far corner away from the hearth. To keep warm, the family had to physically cluster in a tight semicircle around the flames. Moving away from the fire meant stepping into a biting indoor winter. The windows offered no help, they were small, designed to retain whatever meager heat existed, and in the earliest days of the colony, they weren't even made of glass. Glass was an expensive, fragile import. Instead, the windows were covered with thick paper that had been heavily oiled to make it translucent, letting in a hazy amber light, while attempting to block the howling winds off the harbor. This brings us back to the sheer terror of going to bed. Leaving the hearth to walk into an unheated bed chamber was like stepping out into the snow. The linen sheets would be icy, practically drawing the heat out of the human body. This necessitated the warming pan, usually made of copper or brass, about a foot in diameter with a perforated lid and a long wooden handle. The pan was filled with glowing coals from the kitchen fire. A family member, often a servant or an older child, would thrust the hot metal pan between the icy sheets and move it continuously and rapidly. The sensory experience of this world extended heavily into what these people ate, and just as importantly, how they ate it. If the visiting founders of New Haven were somehow invited to a modern dinner party, they would be utterly bewildered by the food served and equally confused by the implements used to consume it. The very table setting would be foreign. In the early days of the New Haven colony, China plates were incredibly rare and fragile imports that few possessed. Instead, you ate off a trencher. A trencher was essentially a block of wood, usually square or round, that had been meticulously hollowed out in the center to hold food. Pitchers for pouring liquids were also made of wood, heavily coopered and usually referred to as tankards. Perhaps the most startling absence at the colonial dinner table would be the fork. Forks were simply not used at early colonial dinners. The entire culinary ecosystem was designed around the spoon and the human hand. Meals consisted largely of thick stews, pottages, and soft foods that could be easily scooped. Meat, when served, was cooked until it was falling apart or cut into small pieces by the cook before being brought to the table. Breakfast was often a heavy, unglamorous soup made of salt meat, dried beans, and whatever herbs were available, colloquially called bean porridge. It was thick, incredibly salty, and provided the heavy caloric energy needed for a day of intense physical labor. The ingredients of these meals reflect a completely different agricultural reality. If you offered a seventeenth century Puritan a potato, they would likely refuse it with genuine fear. Potatoes, despite being native to the Americas, were deeply mistrusted by the early New England colonists. They were considered a nightshade, unfit for human consumption, and in many places it was believed that if you fed potatoes to cattle or horses, the animals would sicken and die. It would be many decades before the potato lost its toxic reputation and became a staple of the regional diet. Instead of potatoes, the absolute anchor of the colonial diet was corn. When the settlers first arrived, their European crops often failed in the rocky New England soil and the unfamiliar climate. It was the indigenous Quinnipiac people who taught the white settlers how to cultivate native corn, how to grind it, and how to prepare it for eating. In those early desperate years, corn was quite literally the staff of life. It was boiled into mush, baked into dense bread, and utilized in every conceivable way to ward off starvation. Protein came heavily from the surrounding environment. The abundance of the natural world was staggering compared to today. The harbor and rivers provided endless fish, while the woods furnished the colonists with immense quantities of wild meat. Accounts from the period describe skies darkened by massive flocks of wild pigeons, which were netted and shot by the thousands. Wild turkeys, significantly larger and leaner than the domesticated birds we know today, were a regular feature on the trencher. Dairy was present, but utilized differently than we might expect. Milk and cheese were plentiful, heavily relied upon for daily calories. But butter was surprisingly scarce, considered a luxury that took too much time and cream to produce in large quantities. If our time traveling Puritans looked for a morning stimulant, they would be deeply disappointed. The holy trinity of modern morning beverages, tea, coffee, and chocolate, did not come into common use until long after New Haven was firmly established. Breakfast was accompanied by water, milk, or more commonly, weak beer or cider. Sweetness, when it could be found, did not come from refined white cane sugar, which was an impossibly expensive import from the brutal plantation economies of the West Indies. Instead, the colonists learned to tap the surrounding forests, relying heavily on maple sugar and maple syrup for sweetening their food. This intense physical reality was mirrored by an equally intense, highly rigid social structure. The clothes people wore and the way they addressed each other were strictly governed by unseen rules of hierarchy. New Haven, more than many other settlements, was a colony of merchants. Because of this, they were accustomed to a slightly higher standard of living. The settlers here generally wore finer rainment than the farmers and fishermen of the Massachusetts Bay or Plymouth colonies. Interestingly, unlike some of those other settlements, the New Haven court never passed sumptuary laws, legislation explicitly forbidding common people from wearing expensive, luxurious clothing. Because of this merchant wealth, it is highly likely that bright colors, fine fabrics, and elaborate ruffled collars were frequently seen parading across the town green and filing into the first church. The men of that early time dressed in a manner that would look theatrical to us today. They wore knee breeches, thick woolen stockings and heavy leather shoes fastened with gleaming silver buckles and elevated by solid wooden heels. Every scrap of this clothing, unless imported at massive expense by the elite, was manufactured within the home. All domestic cloth was woven by the family, and all everyday clothing was made from this coarse, durable home spun. The entire economy of the household revolved around textiles. Spinning was not a hobby. It was a fundamental, mandatory part of every Puritan girl's education. The rhythmic clatter of the loom and the whirr of the spinning wheel were the constant background noise of the colonial home weaving the flaxen wool into the very fabric of their survival. But despite the lack of laws restricting fine clothes, the social hierarchy was razor sharp and rigidly enforced through language and custom. If our founders walked into modern New Haven, they would be profoundly shocked to hear every adult man addressed as mister. In the seventeenth century, mister was an exclusive title, a linguistic badge of honor reserved only for men of the highest social, political, or economic rank, men like Theophilus Eaton or the Reverend John Davenport. Only those men who today would carry a title like the honorable were permitted to be called mister. For the vast majority of the male population, the men of ordinary rank who farmed the fields and built the houses, the proper term of address was good man, and for their wives good wife or goody. This hierarchy was not just spoken, it was physically mapped out in the most important building in the colony, the meeting house. The church was the absolute epicenter of Puritan life, both spiritual and civic, but you did not simply walk in and sit wherever you pleased. People were assigned seats strictly according to their social rank, their wealth, and their standing in the community. This process, known as seating the meeting, was handled by a committee and was a source of intense social anxiety and frequent disputes. It was considered a serious social and moral offense for a person to sit in the wrong pew, an act that disrupted the divinely ordained order of the community. This deference to rank permeated every interaction. Great respect was demanded and paid to persons of high rank in public gatherings, passing on the muddy streets, and even within the private walls of the home. The concept of childhood as a time of carefree expression did not exist. Children were considered miniature, inherently sinful adults who needed to be strictly molded. They were absolutely not expected to speak in the presence of their social bettors or their elders unless directly spoken to. If a person of high rank walked down the street, children were trained to immediately stand aside, lower their eyes, and yield the path. The lives of these children were heavily constrained. The days must have felt endlessly long. They engaged in physical play, historical records mentioned games like hopscotch and tag, but there was no industry of childhood, there were no manufactured toys, and there were absolutely no picture books to spark the imagination. Education was functional, focused on reading the Bible and learning a trade. The calendar offered very few reprieves. The Puritans viewed the celebration of Christmas as a corrupt, unbiblical, pagan tradition that had been grafted onto Christianity by the Catholic Church. Therefore, they were strictly not allowed to celebrate Christmas. There was no feasting, no decoration, and certainly never a visit from Santa Claus. December 25th was treated as just another brutal, freezing winter day of labor. The organized sports we associate with youth were entirely absent. Boys never played baseball or American football, and the concept of recreationally going and swimming was largely foreign, often viewed with suspicion or simply considered too dangerous in the unpredictable tidal waters. The passage of time itself was experienced in a completely different way. The mechanical measurement of hours and minutes, the constant ticking that dominates our modern lives, was missing. Clocks and watches would be deeply unfamiliar objects to the vast majority of the founders of New Haven. Pocket watches were incredibly rare, fragile mechanisms that only European aristocrats could afford. Even large domestic clocks were exceedingly scarce. The Reverend Mr. Davenport, a man of immense status, is recorded as owning a clock at the time of his death, but it is a matter of historical debate whether he brought it with him across the Atlantic to Quinnipiac or acquired it later. For everyone else, time was a fluid concept dictated by the sun. The colonists relied entirely on natural light to partition their. Days. They used portable, primitive sundials to get a rough estimate of the hour while working in the fields. Inside the home, time was tracked by the noonwork. A family would painstakingly carve or paint a straight line into the floorboards or the windowsill of the house. When the shadow cast by the sun perfectly aligned with that mark, the household knew it was exactly noon. The rhythm of life was entirely tethered to the horizon. When the sun went down, the work largely stopped because candles made of animal tallow were difficult to produce and expensive to burn. Information moved at the speed of a walking horse or a sailing ship. The only way to obtain news in colonial days was through physical letters or the chance arrival of travelers. When someone in New Haven received a letter from England or from a colony like Virginia, the information was not considered entirely private. The recipient would often pass the letter around among their neighbors or read it aloud to a crowd gathered at the local inn or tavern. A traveler passing through town would be swarmed by villagers desperate to hear the latest news from distant settlements or foreign lands, even though this latest news was often many months old by the time it reached their ears. The world was vast, slow and deeply isolated. Even the most intimate milestones of life, like marriage, were handled with a bureaucratic starkness that would seem alien today. If you intended to marry in colonial New Haven, your intentions were not kept secret. It was the absolute custom, mandated by law, to have your names called out in the meeting house beforehand, a practice known as reading the bands. This allowed anyone in the community to object if they knew of a legal or moral reason the marriage should not proceed. And when the actual ceremony took place, it was not the Reverend Davenport or any other minister who officiated. The Puritans viewed marriage not as a religious sacrament, but as a civil contract. Therefore, ministers were explicitly not allowed to marry people. Only a civil magistrate, a judge of the court, held the authority to legally bind a man and a woman in matrimony. This strict, arduous way of life persisted for generations, slowly evolving as the colonies stabilized and grew. By the time the eighteenth century arrived, New Haven had transitioned from a desperate pioneer outpost into a functioning, albeit isolated, colonial metropolis. We can see this transition clearly in the history of one specific piece of land on Chapel Street, the very site that prompted Arthur Mullen's thought experiment. This was the property that would eventually become known as the Roger Sherman House. In the year 1761, a man named Roger Sherman moved to New Haven. He found a little port town sitting quietly by the sea, functioning as a metropolis for the colony with its roughly 1,500 shopkeepers, artisans, and farmers. It was a town that trafficked in molasses and rum with the West Indies, yet remained fiercely independent and somewhat narrow in its isolation. Sherman moved into a large salt box-shaped colonial house located on Chapel Street, directly opposite Yale College. Here he lived a life that bridged the gap between the rigid Puritan founders and the coming American Revolution. The Sherman household was a microcosm of colonial domesticity and political consequence. Roger Sherman lived there with his second wife, Rebecca Prescott Sherman, and his staggering fifteen children. The house was not just a home, it was the nerve center of his operations, housing the family store. From this unpainted wooden salt box, Sherman would walk across the town green, a green where horses, cows, and pigs still wandered freely, cutting deep ruts into the turf with heavy cartwheels to serve as New Haven's first mayor. He would eventually become a United States Congressman, and he holds the unique distinction of being the only person in American history to sign all four of the great state papers, the Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the United States Constitution. The physical house on Chapel Street bore witness to the birth of a nation. During the American Revolution, while Sherman was away helping to forge the new republic, the British invaded New Haven in 1779 and ransacked his home. Yet the house survived. In 1789, it even hosted President George Washington, who visited Sherman's New Haven home as part of his presidential tour of New England. The ghosts of the early Puritans, the memory of John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton, were slowly giving way to the reality of the founding fathers. But cities are living organisms, and they consume their own history. The classic colonial salt box where Roger Sherman lived, where water once froze in pitchers and warming pans scorched the linen could not withstand the march of progress. In eighteen sixty, the Sherman House was demolished. It was replaced by a grand Italianate style villa designed by the famed architect Henry Austin for a wealthy industrialist named Gaius Fen Warner. The land had shifted from Puritan survival to revolutionary politics to gilded age industrial wealth. In 1880, the site became Marshall Peter R. Carl's Opera House. By 1903, the building received a Beaux Arts facade and an addition by architect Richard Williams to house the Union League Club. Today, if you walk to 1032 Chapel Street, you will find an upscale French restaurant. The physical remnants of how the people of New Haven lived in colonial days have been almost entirely erased from the surface of the city. The wooden trenchers have rotted away, the warming pans are locked in museum glass, the noonmarks carved into the floorboards were pulverized when the old salt boxes were torn down. The creek is buried under asphalt, and the strict, silent children have been dead for centuries. If the founders walked out of the harbor today, they would be lost in a world of glass, artificial heat, and endless noise. But the foundation they poured, the rigid determination to carve a society out of the ice and the rock, the sheer willpower required to tighten the bedropes and strike the flint in the dark, remains the bedrock upon which the modern city rests. They are still here, beneath the pavement, waiting in the cold. If you found yourself captivated by this journey back into the freezing, forgotten reality of early New England, send this episode to a friend who loves history and ask them how long they think they would survive a 17th century winter.