#WiltonCT

By St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church on Episcopal News Service on June 22, 2023

During the COVID-19 pandemic, St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Wilton, Connecticut, began to explore the church’s complicity with racism since its founding in 1802. At its 2020 annual convention, The Episcopal Church in Connecticut adopted a resolution “to direct each Parish, Worshipping Community, and Intentional Episcopal Community to take steps to discover and document historic complicity in racism in their parish and communities.” Early research showed that founding members of St. Matthew’s were enslavers while later, many freed Black individuals had been active members.

Known as the “Georgia of the North” by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, Connecticut was a key participant in the Triangular Trade that brought Africans to the Americas via the Middle Passage. Slavery existed in New England just as it did in the South in colonial times, with Connecticut finally abolishing it in 1848. Parishioners learned these facts alongside personal stories of people enslaved in Connecticut, which were collected from primary documents by middle school students and their youth leaders of congregations in three different towns in Connecticut during the first six months of 2023. Continue reading.

“The story of the African-American people is the story of the settlement and growth of American itself, a universal tale that all people should experience.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Beginning in October 2021, St. Matthew’s (through our Social Justice & Racial Healing group) began to explore how we might engage with The Witness Stones Project as one avenue of exploring our church’s complicity with racism over the course of history since the church’s founding in 1802. We recognized that during the 17th and 18th century many individuals, including clergy in local communities, had enslaved others – Indigenous and African. In Connecticut, our towns were settled for the most part by Puritans who came to be known as the Congregational Church and soon after the Church of England that became the Episcopal Church. And our communities enslaved others.

We knew this project was one we could not, and should not, do alone. So we began to seek partners from neighboring congregations. As people of faith, no matter our doctrine or belief system, we all believe in the dignity of every human being. In the spirit of collaboration, we give thanks to all who supported this work in a multitude of ways: spiritually, financially, and educationally – especially The Episcopal Church in Connecticut, St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church, The Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Westport, St. Paul’s on the Green in Norwalk, Wilton Historical Society, and Dr. Julie Hughes whose research provided us with more than we could ever have or imagined.

On June 10, 2023 we celebrated the installation of our first Witness Stone Memorial to commemorate John C. Wallyat Wilton Historical Society where the stone will be placed for the wider community to view. Read the John Wally Program Book from the ceremony as well as Comments by Julie Hughes sharing how important this acknowledgment of John C. Wally’s humanity is to his descendants, and Cannot Unring that Bell by Nate Pawelek of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Westport.

The community in Wilton gathered on June 10, 2023, to remember and honor John C. Wally. We invite you to click on the image before to read the full program.

By Steve Hudspeth in Good Morning Wilton on June 6, 2023

On Saturday, June 10 at 4 p.m. at the Wilton Historical Society, an important event will take place: a Witness Stone will be dedicated for the first time in Wilton. Here is its significance.

How do you remember a life that history has obscured? In the case of those enslaved in Connecticut, slavery and poverty account for a lot of the “missing lives.”But skillful historical research can sometimes fill in the voids. When that happens, there can be a eureka moment — not one in which we know all that we’d like to know but enough to understand something of his or her life, its struggles and accomplishments, and to put it into the context of those times. The results put real flesh on otherwise little-known bones.

So how do we learn all that we can about people who seem lost to history? That’s where careful research comes into play, and fortunately in Wilton, we have the very skilled historical researcher Julie Hughes, Ph.D. She is the archivist of the Wilton Library’s Carol and Robert Russell Wilton History Room and its impressive collection of materials from the archives of the Wilton Historical Society as well as from the Library’s own collections. Her ability to tease fascinating historical information from obscure documents has become legendary in our region.

So, where does a researcher go to identify slaves in a household? Wills provide a very solid source of information, though the enslaved person may be identified as no more than “one wench.” Bills of sale for enslaved persons can also help, though again the record may not identify the person except as to gender, approximate age, and capabilities (size and strength for farm work for men, household skills such as cooking and sewing for women). Court records are also at times a very good source of information about present or formerly enslaved people who intersected with the courts in civil suits or criminal matters. Land records and census data can also be useful. Scouring of all of these types of sources has yielded much information in the case of one specific person here in Wilton whose life spanned both enslavement and emancipation.

Very unusually for formerly enslaved people of his time, John C. Wally owned his own home right here in Wilton. He served as a slave with the Abbott family from his birth to his enslaved mother in around 1800 until he turned either 21 or 25 depending upon his exact birthdate. (Under Connecticut’s 1784 emancipation law, slavery ended on a very gradual basis between 1784 and 1848 based in part on birthdate; the last enslaved person in Wilton was finally freed in 1848.)

After his emancipation, Wally did a variety of types of work including at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church here in town where he swept its floor, rang its bell, and started its warming fire on Sunday mornings (for an annual salary of $9). Other work he did included tending horses for Daniel Betts who lived across the street from what became Wally’s home.  Betts seems to have been a friend to Wally.

In fact, Wally’s home is still standing though it has been added onto extensively since the time when he owned it. How he came to own that home remains an open question: Was it a gift, a sale, or a payment for services rendered? Betts’ Will describes the house as a gift to Wally, but that reference may have been included to assure that Wally was actually able to retain the home after Betts’ death. Did Wally face attempts to have the home taken from him? If so, how did he avoid that outcome? In any event, Wilton land records indicate that Wally received a payment on the sale of the house that was three times its value when he first came into ownership of it.

Wally’s life after he left Wilton was also a mystery until very recently, when more historical detective work enabled the identification of the place to which he moved after he left Wilton: namely Bridgeport, where his name appears on land records. In Bridgeport at that time there was a successful community of formerly enslaved people. However, it appears that Wally was not a part of that community in the sense of living there but may nonetheless have had regular dealings with its members. Death records indicate that Wally died in Bridgeport on January 22, 1859; his burial site is unknown, though the burial sites in Bridgeport of his wife Harriet and daughter Betsey have been identified. It is not known what happened to his son Samuel Solomon Wally (who was baptized at St. Matthew’s).

All of this information has been garnered over multiple months by painstaking research into the life of one formerly enslaved person.  So, with it all now in hand, what can be done? The answer has been provided by St. Matthew’s joined by Westport’s Unitarian Universalist Congregation and Norwalk’s St. Paul’s on the Green and partially funded by the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut. These congregations, and especially their youth and leaders, were trained by the nonprofit Witness Stones Project, Inc. about slavery in general and about the specifics of reading primary source documents such as Dr. Hughes’ research has identified.

To commemorate John C. Wally, a Witness Stone will be placed at the Wilton Historical Society to acknowledge Wally’s personhood along with that of the other enslaved and formerly enslaved individuals who lived right here in Wilton. They numbered in the hundreds over the two centuries that slavery persisted here in our own backyard — not just on distant Southern plantations.

We can all join in this recognition and acknowledgement process by attending the dedication of the Witness Stone on Saturday, June 10 at 4 p.m. at the Wilton Historical Society. The ceremony will include tributes prepared by the youth who worked so effectively and with such dedication on this highly significant memorial project.