On This Day, 1752: Scantic parish votes 500 pounds for its first meetinghouse

EAST WINDSOR - On Oct. 30, 1752, the people of the new North Society of Windsor, the Scantic parish in what is now East Windsor, voted to pay for a church of their own, according to Henry R. Stiles's 1859 History of Ancient Windsor.

The colonial assembly had created the society that May from the part of Windsor's Second Society north of the Scantic River. At an adjourned meeting that October, members "Voted that they would raise five hundred pounds, old tenor currency, for the building of a meeting-house," Stiles records.

Building it took longer. The society asked the county court to fix the site, then objected to a court committee's choice in December 1752. Until a site was settled, the parish hired preaching at members' homes, including John Prior's. In June 1753 the society asked the court to accept the site where its last committee had set a stake, and that August it voted to build the meetinghouse and gather timber.

The town of East Windsor itself was not incorporated from Windsor until 1768.

Source: Henry R. Stiles, History of Ancient Windsor, Connecticut (1859), pp. 293-295, via the Internet Archive; Historic Towns of the Connecticut River Valley (1906), East Windsor chapter; Connecticut Secretary of the State, Connecticut Towns in the Order of their Establishment.

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