(with photos)

BY KAAREN VALENTA

Joan Crick held her breath as she watched Al Potter and Brian Talmadge of Newtown Tree Service carefully hang the new sign for the Ram Pasture from brackets on the cement pillar at the corner of South Main Street and Route 302 last week.

"Doesn't it look wonderful," she exclaimed as the new cream and gold sign swung, catching the sunlight.

The borough warden was on hand to watch as her husband, Jim Crick, and Bob Hall, officers of Newtown Village Cemetery Association, supervised the erection of the new sign. It replaced a weathered black-and-white sign that commemorated the purchase of the land from the Pootatuck Indian tribe in 1705.

The cemetery association owns the Ram Pasture and maintains it for the enjoyment of the community. Jim Crick arranged for the new sign to be made by Jeffrey Smith of A Sign Depot. Al Potter volunteered his services to remove the old sign and hang the new one.

A remnant of the old village common, bounded by Elm Street, Hawley Road and Routes 25 and 302, the Ram Pasture has become the focus of many community activities, including the annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony.

It is such a well known piece of property that when Town Historian Daniel Cruson was asked to draw up a brief historical sketch about it, he assumed his research would be little more than a quick trip to a back issue or two of The Bee. Many frustrating hours later, the complex history of the Ram Pasture finally started to become clear, along with some very unexpected twists and turns in its evolution toward a true town green.

Dan Cruson's Research

Mr Cruson's research, published in Newtown Historical Society's newsletter, The Rooster's Crow, began with what was widely known. The property was owned by town benefactress Mary Elizabeth Hawley. When she died in 1930, it was one of several pieces of land that were not disposed of in her will, so it went with the rest of her undistributed estate to Yale University.

Arthur Treat Nettleton, then president of Newtown Savings Bank, was Mary Hawley's financial advisor. Mr Nettleton felt that, because of its historic associations, Ram Pasture should remain in the hands of a Newtown agency, if not owned by the town itself. He therefore prevailed upon Yale to deed the land to the Newtown Village Cemetery Association in 1931, supposedly for the token payment of $1. The major question, Mr Cruson said, was how did Mary Hawley acquire such an important piece of town common land?

Any answer to this question must start with the establishment of Newtown village, he said. After the town's proprietors were given a charter by the Colony of Connecticut in 1709, they chose a Committee of Newtown consisting of four men whose job it was to lay out the town. By the next year they had laid out a village which would become the town's nucleus. This village consisted of a very wide main street, crossed by a northern and southern cross highway (West Street-Church Hill Road and Sugar Street/Route 302-Glover Avenue, respectively) and four-acre home lots which were laid out along these three roads. Early in 1710 these lots were distributed to the proprietors. Whatever property had not been distributed remained as common land.

Common land in colonial Connecticut was land in which all the proprietors had an undivided interest. It was much like a modern town park or village green. All residents could use it for any activities that did not alter the landscape, such as grazing cattle or sheep, or for the gathering for firewood.

At a town meeting in 1732, it was voted that the commons should be cleared for the benefit of grazing sheep. Each farmer was assigned an ear mark for the identification of his own stock.

There were several parcels of common land in the fledgling town, but the central one was the Home Common which was located just south of the village. It included what is today the Ram Pasture as well as the land to the south as far as Country Club Road. The full extent of the Home Common as well as a reconstruction of the original village layout was determined by John Neville Boyle who, as a lawyer in town, had frequently searched through the earliest land titles in the village and the areas to the southwest toward Palestine where his home was located. In 1945, The Bee published his notes under the title, "Historical Notes and Maps: Newtown: 1708-1758."

Mr Boyle's notes give a good picture of the Home Commons during its first 50 years, including one surprise: by the end of that half century homes had been built on it. The modern conception of a colonial common is that it functioned as a town green held as public space in perpetuity. In reality, the colonial common was just land that had not yet been divided among the already existing proprietors or given to future homesteaders. It was land waiting to be owned.

In the case of the Home Commons it waited 50 years. In 1758, various sections of the commons were struck off and deeded to at least 12 individuals. The area known today as the Ram Pasture, extending only to Hawley Road, was divided between two men: Nathaniel Briscoe, who was given about one sixth of the Ram Pasture in the southwest corner, and Dr Lemuel Thomas, Newtown's first physician, who was given the rest.

The Ram Pasture became Dr Thomas' homelot. In the southeast corner of the lot, he built his house, the forerunner of the present house at 16 South Main Street (now the home of Newtown Probate Court clerk Peggy Gross). Dr Thomas had not been one of the original proprietors but he was quickly given proprietary status when he came to town around 1756 because of his valuable skills as a surgeon. Unfortunately he died at the age of 45 in 1775, so ownership of the homelot passed to his widow, Ruth. Within five years Ruth remarried and moved to Brookfield where, with her husband Nehemiah Strong, she began to sell off parts of the homelot to several other individuals.

Notable Owners

Among the many subsequent owners of parts of the homelot were several who are well known to modern Newtowners. One of the best known was Judge William Edmond after whom the town hall is named. By 1800, he had purchased several parcels of the pasture, giving him ownership of the northern third consisting of four acres.

The four acres in the southern third were acquired by Philo Booth in 1805. Philo Booth himself is not a notable Newtowner, but his son Cyrenius H. Booth is, and he inherited his father's portion of the Ram Pasture in 1830.

Cyrenius H. Booth married Sarah Edmond, the daughter of Judge William Edmond. Sarah inherited her father's land when he died in 1838. When she died, the property passed into her husband's hands.

The middle third of the pasture was owned for about 30 years by Deborah and Hermon Warner. Cyrenius Booth managed to purchase their shares in 1855 so that when he inherited his wife's lot, he effectively owned the entire Ram Pasture except for the two-acre parcel in the southeast corner where Dr Thomas had built his home.

The history of this odd, two-acre parcel is independent of the rest of the land. In 1806, a year after he had acquired the southern portion, Philo Booth struck off that parcel with the "Dwelling house thereon standing," and sold it. It passed through a sequence of 11 owners until Mary Hawley purchased it in 1926. The house, by then rebuilt, was used by Miss Hawley as quarters for her chauffeur during the last four years of her life.

Mary Hawley's purchase of the two-acre parcel effectively rounded out her ownership of the full 12.5-acre Ram Pasture. Cyrenius H. Booth was her maternal grandfather. When he died in 1871, ownership of the land had passed to his daughters, and ultimately to her.

Steck's Letter

During most of the title search it had been supposed that Mary Hawley's ownership was essentially passive. She knew that she owned the Ram Pasture, but she had no active plans for the land. Thus at her death it had not been accounted for in her will and passed to Yale University. The discovery of a letter in The Bee written in the early 1980s changed this picture dramatically. The letter was written by Howard A. Steck, the son of Charles Steck who was the proprietor of Steck's Nursery in the late 1920s. The story is best left in his words:

"There is a little known and curious story about Newtown's Ram Pasture of which this writer has first hand knowledge. Back around 1929, Mary Hawley and Arthur Nettleton, her financial advisor, visited my father, Charles A. Steck, who was the proprietor of Steck Nursery which adjoined the cemetery and was separated from the Ram Pasture by Elm Drive, which at the time, like most of Newtown's roads, was a grass grown single lane dirt road. The nursery is now a development of homes known as Birch Rise. The purpose of Miss Hawley's visit was to unveil a plan to transform the Ram Pasture into a park with rose arbors, flower bordered garden walks, lawn areas and park benches, something similar to the rose gardens of Hartford on a smaller scale. My father had done much landscaping for Miss Hawley, and I recall he had created a beautiful garden framed with a white picket fence and garden gates, at her home. It has since become a paved parking area for Hawley Manor. Plans for creating the park were progressing nicely and I think it is safe to say the planning and anticipation of the beauty spot she was about to create gave Miss Hawley, who was a great lover of trees and flowers, a great deal of pleasure. Before the project could become a reality, Miss Hawley died. Mr Nettleton, understandably, had made no legal provisions for such an eventuality and as a result the Steck nursery lost the largest order in its history, the town of Newtown lost a rose garden and park and Yale University, thanks to a prior will, inherited the Ram Pasture."

Mr Steck went on to suggest that the Village Cemetery Association should deed the Ram Pasture to the town, "on the same terms by which it was received," and that the town could then turn it into a rose garden as Mary Hawley had originally wished. This, then, would be maintained as a memorial to the town's benefactress.

In the mid 1970s the town did, in fact, debate the acquisition of the property. The arguments raged back and forth as they so often do whenever Newtown debates any land purchases. The result was to claim that the cemetery association was doing quite well in maintaining the property and that the town should not become involved in such land ownership. The subject of turning it into a rose garden never came up. To this day, the cemetery association owns and maintains the Ram Pasture.

Naming The Ram Pasture

Historically the property never was known as the Ram Pasture, according to Mr Cruson. In the 50 years of its existence as town common land, it was known simply as the Home Common. When it was in private hands, the various parcels were known by the name of their owners.

The name Ram Pasture developed after its acquisition by the Village Cemetery Association, and it was meant to reflect the time when the town herd of sheep was grazed on the meadow. Sheep were one of the town's most important agricultural concerns in the early 18th century, and the town vote in 1732 to clear the commons for sheep, certainly associated these animals with the Home Common. However, by the time that the town herd gained its greatest importance in the 1830s, the Ram Pasture had been in private hands for over 60 years. There were probably few sheep that actually ever grazed on it.