Morris is a town in Litchfield County, Connecticut, United States. The population was 2,256 at the 2020 census. The town is part of the Northwest Hills Planning Region.
Europeans first began to settle the area that became Morris circa 1723. Originally part of the town of Litchfield, it was called the South Farms because of its location south of the center. Designated a separate Congregational parish in 1767 and incorporated as a town in 1859, it was named after native son James Morris, a Yale graduate, Revolutionary War officer, and founder of one of the first co-educational secondary schools in the nation.
Morris lies in rolling hill country of woods, wetlands, fields and ponds. It also encompasses much of Bantam Lake, originally called the Great Pond, which covers approximately and is the largest natural lake in the state. The traditional Town of Morris seal features the pine on Lone Tree Hill, which overlooks the lake. Morris is home to one of the oldest state parks in Connecticut, as well as to one of the newest.
The area's transition from 18th-century settlement to semi-rural community in the 2000s is the story of many Connecticut towns and much of New England. At first, farming barely made families self-sufficient, but in the 1800s, agriculture evolved into a business. Then, over the next 150 years, competition, rising costs and increasing regulation made it less sustainable, despite economies and innovation. In the early 1900s, local water mills, manufactories and other small businesses encountered similar challenges and gave way to industry in nearby Waterbury, Torrington and beyond.
By the 1970s and 1980s, the area was still largely rural, but residents' occupations had grown more diverse. Today, the farming tradition continues even as residents engage in a range of professions, businesses and arts locally and in the wider region. A number of second home owners come from the metro New York area. In addition to the two state parks and Bantam Lake, the White Memorial Conservation Center offers a range of opportunities for outdoor sports and recreation. Camp Washington is a spiritual retreat operated by the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut.
Morris center looks like a typical small New England village, with a white Congregational church, a school, and town hall. Interspersed with fields and woods, a mix of Early American and newer homes strings out loosely along the town's roads. Children attend the local James Morris elementary school, the Region 20 Middle School, and Lakeview Regional High School, which serves students from Goshen, Litchfield, Morris, and Warren. Perhaps counter-intuitively, Morris also holds a Buddhist temple, as well as a Jewish cemetery from the early 1900s.
History
Pre-European
The Morris/Litchfield region lay in the borderlands between Mahican territory to the north and west and Paugussett land to the south and southeast. Both peoples were part of an Algonquian language population that extended up the coast in a wide swath from Virginia to Canada. Those in the immediate area, the Potatuck, were a Paugussett subgroup.Carley, Rachel (2011) Litchfield: The Making of a New England Town, Litchfield Historical Society, p.19
The Potatuck were woodland dwellers whose bark wigwam and longhouse villages typically housed anywhere from 50 to 200 individuals. Their social structure was relatively simple and egalitarian. Kin groups were matrilineal, and women held authority over land rights and transfer.
Potatuck women gathered wild plants and fruits and raised the "Three Sisters" crops of squash, beans, and maize (corn), though there is some evidence that they began to cultivate maize only in the decades just before English settlers came to New England. Men fished and hunted deer and small game, also growing tobacco for ritual use. The Potatuck used fire as a tool for clearing underbrush to facilitate both hunting and planting. Some may have moved to the shore of Long Island Sound to fish and gather shellfish during the summer.
Like other first peoples in the northeast, the Potatuck believed in a Creator. His lodge, which lay to the west, was where worthy men and women went after they died. Individuals had spiritual guardians. These could be inanimate objects or ghosts but most often were animals. Festivals and other rituals taught that humans are part of nature — neighbors with plants and animals, which also possess spirits. Given their interdependence with the rest of creation, people were taught to respect and seek harmony in their physical and social environments and between earthly and spiritual worlds.
The Potatuck and the Paugussett, more generally, were part of a northeastern trade network whose water routes very probably extended to the midwest and possibly as far as the mid-south. Relations with neighboring groups were by and large harmonious. In the century before Europeans arrived in what became Connecticut, some of the Munsee people, a subgroup of the Lenape (who the English later called the Delaware), moved up the Atlantic coast. They appear to have coexisted and even intermingled with the Paugussett, whose pottery reflects the influence of their culture.
The Paugussett did not side with more easterly tribes such as the Narragansett and the Wampanoag in King Philip's War (1675–1678), which devastated the colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Providence Plantation and Rhode Island. The Potatuck in northwest Connecticut had even less incentive than other Paugussett groups to become embroiled in the war because European presence in their territory was so limited—and would be for almost another half century.
European settlement
Europeans began to settle the region in 1715 after John Marsh came from Hartford to what was known as the Greenwoods, the thickly forested part of the colony that corresponded roughly to today's Litchfield County. Having explored and found friendly inhabitants, Marsh and a partner, John Buell of Lebanon, Connecticut, petitioned the General Assembly for the right to establish a town at "a place called Bantam"—the name possibly a corruption of the Algonquian word Peantum, the Potatuck group who lived in the area.
Representatives from Hartford and Windsor negotiated with the Potatuck for land, creating the town of Litchfield, which included the area later known as the South Farms, in 1720. The Potatuck reserved rights to a hunting lodge near today's Mount Tom and Mt. Tom Pond, both of which became part of a state park on the northwest side of Morris in 1915. While some natives welcomed, or at least tolerated, the newcomers, others did not. The region was subject to periodic Mohawk incursions from the north and west. Some years later, Zebulon Gibbs recalled a 1722 raid in which a settler was killed and scalped. "I was the first who found him dead," Gibbs said.Weik, Laura Stoddard et al. (1959) One Hundred Years: History of Morris Connecticut, Morris Centennial Committee
When colonists first lived in South Farms is unclear. Land deeds on the east side date to 1723, when local surveyors laid out the area's first east–west road.France, Walter D. (Mar. 1998), The Development of East Street, South Farms (unpublished) Also on the east end, and perhaps even earlier, a north–south road from Litchfield's Chestnut Hill ran down through the section that became known as The Pitch (so-called because the settlers "pitched", or drew lots, for land there). In 1724, the Connecticut Colony required settlers to build a fort, a log bulwark, on a hillside near the intersection of the old Woodbury (now Higbie) Road and present-day Benton Road. The work took them away from planting, diminished the year's harvest, and was consequently unpopular. The structure fell fairly rapidly into disrepair.
Colonial government policies and military action reduced the likelihood of conflict with native groups by 1726, when two European families lived near today's Litchfield-Morris border on a north–south track (now Alain White Road) that was more central to the area. At least thirty families very probably lived in South Farms by 1747, since it had a school, which the General Assembly required of places with that number. Meanwhile, colonial policies and disease had decimated the Potatuck. Some who remained merged with other nearby bands to form the Schaghticoke tribe, which still exists in Kent today. Individuals lived alongside the settlers through the 1700s and on into the 1900s. Typically, they adopted non-native customs and religion, though some also conserved elements of traditional culture such as the craft of basketweaving.
From settlement to town
Between 1747 and 1859, residents of South Farms were involved in sporadic arguments with the town of Litchfield, the colony, and after independence, the state, over control of their religious and civic activities.
Church and state were inextricably interconnected in the Connecticut Colony's early days. South Farms residents had to petition the General Assembly in Hartford for permission to build a meeting house, which would make it possible to avoid the long trip to the center of Litchfield in the winter. After years of resistance, the Assembly finally acquiesced in 1767, when it authorized the organization of a separate Ecclesiastical Society of South Farms. Instead of ending the friction over local control, this act presaged ongoing arguments about the fair division of payments for the existing Litchfield church as well as about funding for the new meeting house in South Farms and for the four, then five, then six schools there.
During the Revolutionary War, South Farms residents were taxed heavily to support the rebellion, and over 100 men served in either the militia or the Colonial Army.Schmidt, Eileen Porter ed. (2019) Litchfield Connecticut: Celebrating 300 Years 1719-2019, Greater Litchfield Preservation Trust, p.52 Some went to the defense of Danbury after British forces attacked a supply depot in 1777, others as far as Canada and Virginia.
Perhaps the most noteworthy was James Morris, who as a youth had been tutored by Bethlehem minister Joseph Bellamy, a significant figure in the religious Great Awakening. Morris considered a calling to the ministry after he graduated from Yale in 1775, but in 1776 he joined the Continental Army instead, fighting at Long Island and White Plains before being captured at the Battle of Germantown in Pennsylvania. He was imprisoned in Philadelphia, paroled on Long Island, and subsequently exchanged. In the last years of the war, he served as a captain of light infantry under Alexander Hamilton at the Battle of Yorktown.Strong, Barbara Nolen (1976) The Morris Academy: Pioneer in Coeducation, 1976, Morris Bicentennial Committee
After the war, Morris returned to South Farms, where he cared for his ailing parents. Concerned for the education and moral welfare of the community's youth, he began sharing his library with, and teaching, both boys and girls. Fearing that the girls would grow to be too independent, some locals tried to censure him. His alleged transgressions included permitting students to dance at the close of lessons, treating female students too familiarly, and allowing them to pursue an academic course of study in the first place. The controversy led to a public hearing in which Morris prevailed. In 1803, he opened an academy in a new school building.