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captions, page 4:
clockwise: Above: Cady-Copp Cottage kitchen with dry sink. At right: From left: Bill Pearsall, Margaret Weaver and Linden Whipple at the Meetinghouse..
Right: Walking back toward the historic Meetinghouse, across the common. More photos Wed. night on FB: Putnam Town Crier & Northeast Ledger.
Bill Pearsall, right, with a Walktober participant at the Cady-Copp Cottage.
'Quiet' history
of the Quiet
Corner?
By Linda Lemmon
Town Crier Editor
PUTNAM — Pastors with bad luck. Militia training on the common after the “Lexington Alarm.” Meetinghouses that moved. A rare 1740s gambrel-roofed house that never had running water or electricity. Nationally famous students?
Quiet? Quiet no more with a Walktober event Oct. 8 in Putnam Heights. Putnam Heights was formerly known as Killingly Hill, before Putnam was carved out of Killingly, Pomfret and Thompson in 1855, according to Killingly Municipal historian Margaret Weaver. Providing more history was Linden Whipple who has lived his entire life there. His mother, he said, worked for Mrs. Danielson for 16 years (1932 to 1949) and Whipple absorbed stories of the area from his family.
The Congregational Meetinghouse built in 1818 was the third meetinghouse for the 1st Society. Originally it was across Aspinock Road. The nearby road was originally Howe Turnpike (ca 1803) and ran from Pomfret to Glocester but the bridge for it over the Quinebaug River was washed out and never replaced.
Aspinock Road saw Aspinock Springs open and also a stone fire lookout tower. The 55-foot tower didn’t stay too long. They thought it wasn’t tall enough and used stones larger than the bottom stones to make it taller. That didn’t work.
Back in the 1700 and 1800s, the homes along Rt. 21 (Liberty Highway) housed businesses. There were tailor shops, blacksmiths, gun shops, even a hearse house — everything you could need. Names now well known, like Danielson, Peckham, Cady, Copp and Harris settled there and built homes. Homes along Rt. 21 are the Elisha Atkins House, the E. Carpenter House, the Sampson Howe House (once a post office), the Thomas Thurber House, the Danielson House, the Jacob Dresser House, the Simon Copp House and the Cady-Copp Cottage.
Down the length of the common, used to train militia for the Revolutionary War, Joseph Cady, Esq., in 1745, deeded two parcels of land to Perley Howe, who was married to his daughter, Damaris. Cady built what is now the Cady-Copp Cottage in 1745. According to Bill Pearsall, former president of the Aspinock Historical Society, the cottage is rare. It has a central chimney with four rooms on the main floor, each with a fireplace at 45 degrees. Very few examples of that setup remain in the U.S.
Howe was the pastor of the Congregational church in Dudley. He was dismissed from that church, said Pearsall, for drunkenness. The minister he replaced on Killingly Hill had his house burned down. Howe died of TB seven years later and Damaris married Aaron Brown, also a pastor, within a year of Howe’s death.
Pearsall said Brown used the upstairs room at the cottage for tutoring people. The most famous student was Manassash Cutler who was the co-author of the Northwest Ordinance. That ordinance declared that when the area around Ohio came into statehood, pre-Civil War, that no slavery was allowed. “That was one of the reasons that the Cady-Copp Cottage was placed on the registry,” Pearsall said. In 1776 the house became the property of carpenter David Copp and remained in the family for almost a century.
It is now owned by the Aspinock Historical Society. Archeological digs have been done, the exterior and the sills stabilized. Now, Pearsall said, the society has almost all of the $24,000 that would be needed to address the inside of the home. Another $17,000 would be needed to create a road into the property and a parking area.
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