had been educated under Rev. Dr. William Ames in Holland* and had somewhere procured the degree of Master of Arts,† was at once engaged to superintend the erection of the college building at Cambridge, in which, as soon as built, he was established as the instructor. Subsequently he settled in Virginia, and in 1642 was a minister there of the Church of England.‡ Samuel brought with him quite a library, one of the volumes being Sir Thomas More's Utopia;§ for were they not to set up in very truth the ideal commonwealth founded on virtue and religion, of which More had dreamed? It is probable that a relative had preceded them across the Atlantic, in the person of Mrs. Ann Higginson, the widow of Rev. Francis Higginson, though it is now certain that the tradition that she was a sister of Theophilus Eaton was incorrect. Her oldest son, Rev. John Higginson, now nearly twenty-one years old, was chaplain of the fort at Saybrook, and a resident of Connecticut, but undoubtedly met the Eatons soon after their arrival in Boston, near which he spent some time that summer as stenographer to the Synod of Cambridge, of which Davenport was a member. With Theophilus Eaton came his wife and children, including his two step-sons. The elder of these, David Yale, had apparently been already established as a merchant in London, for he is described as such in a power of attorney in his favor, executed early in 1640,¶ while in June, 1641, in a similar * Hutchinson, Hist. of Mass. + Lechford's Note Book, 147. where Dr. Ames was a professor. Bay, I, 91, note. Probably from the University of Francker, N. E. Hist. and Gen. Reg., XL, 294. SN. H. Col. Hist. Soc. Papers, VI, 312. || Professor Dexter's discovery of the record of the marriage of Hannah Eaton to Joseph Denman in 1622, and (in the register of St. Nicholas Acorns) of his death on November 15th, 1625, has been supplemented by proof of her second marriage with Robert Parke, given by the will of Rev. Samuel Eaton, made in 1664. Earwaker, "East Cheshire," II, 34; N. H. Col. Hist. Soc. Papers, III, 228. Lechford, Note Book, 232. document, he was styled "David Yale merchant, and resident in Boston."* Edward Hopkins also was one of the party, but like David Yale, soon left it, probably disapproving their plan of setting up a theocratic government, in which citizenship was founded upon membership in the church. Governor Winthrop, in his History of New England,† in mentioning the arrival of the ships in 1637 in which Eaton and Hopkins came, speaks of them as "two merchants of London, men of fair estate, and of great esteem for religion, and wisdom in outward affairs."§ It was Eaton's hope to found a commercial city, and he soon voyaged southward to seek a convenient harbor for such a purpose, and, says Hubbard, the explorers "pitched on a place called Quillipiuk, which is a pleasant land lying on both sides of the mouth of a small river, where it makes a bay of some miles in length and proportionably broad." They had had enough of narrow and crooked streets in London. Nothing could have been more suitable for a trading port and market town than the half-mile square which they laid out into nine smaller squares, the streets (State and George), which bounded it on two sides, running on the banks of navigable creeks, and meeting at a point opposite the center line of the main harbor. Coming, as most of the leaders did, from London, they naturally built their houses in city fashion, quite close to each other, so that the lot of each was hardly larger than might serve for a garden and a barnyard. The central square was reserved from the first for a market place and site for public buildings, and Eaton probably thought it would not be long before warehouses and shops would begin to surround it. Other plantations were *Lechford, Note Book, 224. I, 228: Hubbard copies this substantially in his History; XV Mass. Hist. Soc'y Coll., 262. ‡ One, the Hector, Hubbard describes as a "stately ship." § In the tax levy voted by the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay colony on March 12, 1638, Theophilus Eaton is taxed for £20 out of an entire levy of £1,500. He is not named as of any town and is the only individual named in the list, the rest being towns. Records of the Colony of Mass. Bay, I, 225. Bond, Gen. and Hist. of Watertown, 983, 984. ¶ Hist. of New England; XV Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., 241, 318. contemplated and were soon made on either side, at Milford and Guilford. Hartford and the adjacent river towns were already established. The Connecticut river was not navigable by large vessels, and the merchants who established themselves here hoped that the commercial facilities of the port would make Quinnipiac serve as a seat of trade for a considerable district of territory, including the opposite shores of Long Island. Coming here with these ideas, Eaton and his company built residences for themselves on the streets of the infant city of a style quite beyond what was really justified by their means and prospects. His own house was the best, and its size is shown by the fact that it contained nineteen fireplaces.* Apparently it was built in the manner common of late years, but almost unknown in New England for the century and a half preceding, with a large hall at the entrance, which served as the principal parlor, and might be used also on occasion as a diningroom. This was furnished with elegance. There were high chairs and low chairs, long forms with green cushions, an embroidered easy chair, several tables and a Turkey carpet. On one side, probably in a wing, was his counting house, and library, or study. The chambers were known by the color of their decoration and furnishings. There was the green chamber and the blue; each with appropriate hangings. In the green chamber was a broad window seat, probably in an oriel or bay, with its long green cushion, and several smaller ones. What remained in the house at the Governor's death, after twenty years of wear and tear, and when his fortune had become considerably impaired, as we find it described in the inventory of his estate in our old court records,† shows how handsome an * See a cut of it in Lambert's History of the Colony of New Haven, p. 52 (copied in "Connecticut at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition" in 1904, 203), and a suggested restoration of the interior in Isham and Brown's Early Connecticut Houses, pp. 97, et seq. 1 N. H. Probate Rec. MSS., 69, Bacon's Hist. Discourses, 356. It mentions a dozen tablecloths, besides two great damask ones, and over ten dozen napkins, eighteen of them damask. Gov. John Winthrop, Jr., soon after Eaton's death, desired to buy the linen, pewter, cushions, chairs, and stools. See letter to him from Rev. John Davenport of Sept. 19, 1659, in "The Davenport Family," Suppl. Ed., 836. establishment must have been that in which he first set up housekeeping in the new world. Hubbard, a contemporary, in his history of New England tells us that the New Haven planters laid out too much "in building of fair and stately houses, wherein they at the first outdid the rest of the country."* Johnson, another historian who must have known Eaton personally, says, in his “Wonderworking Providence," that New Haven was found by those who planted it “a fit place to erect a Towne, which they built in very little time with very faire houses, and compleat streets; but in a little time they overstocked it with Chattell, although many of them did follow merchandizing and Maritime affairs, but their remoteness from the Massachusetts Bay, where the chiefe traffique lay, hindered them much."+ In Boston, the metropolis of the Bay, and, as Mather called it, of English America, a contemporary chronicler tells us that there were not, in 1675, so many as twenty houses of more than ten rooms, and he also states that at that time there was but one in New England having over twenty. Eaton's, with its nineteen fireplaces, probably still remained the largest that was to be found east of the Hudson river. He built on the north side of Elm Street, about where the warehouse of Parker & Co. now stands,§ and almost opposite to him rose the spacious residence of John Davenport, which President Stiles, who went over it, describes as having thirteen fireplaces. Eastward from these two house-lots the ground sloped down to the East creek, part of the bed of which still remains in the shape of the railroad cut. The road to Hartford, a bridlepath through the woods, began somewhere near the junction of State and Grove Streets. Edward Hopkins, who in 1640 became governor of Connecticut, often rode down from there to see his New Haven relations, and long after his SER 2. v.5-6 *Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., XV, 334. Cf. ib., 327. Ibid., VII, 2d series, 7. N. E. Hist. and Gen. Reg., XXXVIII, 379. § The late Dr. Chas. A. Lindsley told me that in digging the cellar of that building, traces of an ancient cellar were discovered. return to England spoke with feeling of the hearty welcome he was always sure of receiving from Governor Eaton, who would walk down Elm Street to meet him as he saw him approaching.* Eaton's household was, at first, a large one. It certainly comprised his wife, his mother, Mrs. Elizabeth Eaton, his only surviving child by his first marriage, Mary Eaton, then (1638) about thirteen years old, and three children by his second marriage, Samuel, now a boy of ten, Theophilus three years younger, and Hannah, a child of five. Probably Thomas Yale also lived with him until his marriage, and David Yale during the brief period that he was in New Haven. There were two or three maids and a man-servant, besides a tenant farmer. To preside over the domestic concerns of such a family, which the presence of visitors sometimes ran up to thirty in number,§ was no small task for the mistress of the house. Mrs. Eaton is described by Mather as having been a prudent and pious woman; but the strain upon her was too great. Her temper soured; she became dissatisfied with the life she led; fell into the condition that is sometimes politely called nervousness; and was a disturbing element in house and church alike. Madam Eaton, after a few years, thought it best to withdraw and set up a separate establishment; and she had previously suffered great discomfort and even indignity, at the hands of her daughter-in-law. These things must have sadly jarred upon Governor Eaton. Misunderstandings and estrangements followed at home, and in the church Mrs. Eaton was brought to a trial, resulting in a formal admonition from the pastor and finally in her excommunication.|| When his younger daughter was ten or twelve, she found a friend of about her own age in a ward of Governor Hopkins, * Mather, Magnalia, Book II, Chap. VII, §7. † Baptized March 11, 1631, in St. Stephen's, Coleman St. Baptized there, October 6, 1632. § Magnalia, Book II, Chap. IX, §7. | Papers of the New Haven Col. Hist. Soc'y, V, 133; New Haven Col. Rec., I, 268-270. |