Tour Celebrates First Town Meeting

On June 1, 1836, North Groton became an independent town called Ledyard. On June 11, it held its first town meeting. And 175 years later, town historian Kit Foster marked the anniversary with a historic walk.

The tour began at 1 p.m. on Saturday, June 11, at Ledyard Center School. It covered a fairly short distance. The group walked around and through buildings in Ledyard Center, especially those around the town green.

Many of these buildings, or the institutions that occupied them, played an important part in the town’s birth. One of these is the church. Although Ledyard became an independent town 175 years ago, Foster said, “Ledyard’s history doesn’t start in 1836. It starts well over 100 years earlier.”

The “seeds of secession,” he said, started to grow in 1724. In that year, the residents of what was then North Groton petitioned the General Assembly for their own church.

“We didn’t have separation of church and state in Connecticut in the 1700s,” Foster said. “The Congregational church was the established church, so things having to do with the church were passed by the legislature.”

The colony granted their request, and the North Groton Second Ecclesiastical Society was created. However, the society didn’t meet yet in the current Ledyard Congregational Church. Their first meeting house stood on the present Ledyard Fairgrounds. This church later began to fall into disrepair until the Rev. Timothy Tuttle raised money to restore it in 1810. It was pulled down eventually anyway.

The new church was also a part of the tour. “Here you have the classic New England meetinghouse,” Foster said. “No pretentions here.” The Ecclesiastical Society still exists and uses the new building. The church keeps copies of the 1724 petition in a display case.

Another site was Ledyard’s first Town Hall. At Ledyard’s first meeting in 1836, residents chose selectmen and other officers, among them a clerk. “Mr. Allyn, the first town clerk, did the business of the town free (of charge), and the records were kept at his residence,” Foster said.

These records would include, among other things, people’s vital records. “All the records were kept in private homes. This could be a problem if houses burned down, as they sometimes did.”

The town hall was built to create a secure location for these documents. It still stands, but belongs to the Ledyard Congregational Church. Inside it is a vault where records were stored.

Near the old town hall is the town’s one-room schoolhouse. In 1732, North Groton built three schools. It funded them with money from the colony, which it divided equally among the schools.

“State aid to education is not a new thing,” Foster said. “We had in the 1740s.” The schoolhouse sits at the edge of the fairgrounds and can be seen from Route 117, but was originally located behind the Bill Library.

The Library was another stop. It is named after Henry Bill, a member of a prominent local family. Bill played an important part in Ledyard’s separation from Groton. He gave the church 500 books and shelves to keep them in. Some of these same books are still in the library, in the Janice W. Bell Historical Room. This treasury of historical books and documents was open to the public Saturday.

These sites surround the town green. The green, or common, existed in 1719, before North Groton had a church. It was used as a training ground for the local militia.

Before ending, the tour set off down 117 to talk about early shops. The Ledyard Community Store once stood in what is now the Starr-Woods parking lot. The group even trooped quietly through the store to see the pictures of Ledyard’s earlier stores hanging over the customer service desk.

Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Bill Library was named for Bill family patriarch Gurdon Bill.