Family-histories and genealogies : containing a series of ...

mtUin=WioUoti
sented to Miss Pitkin. Simon Wolcott of Windsor [who had been about four years
a widower, in his thirty-sixth or thirty-seventh year] was fixed upon, and beyond
expectation succeeded in obtaining her hand. Her brother favored the pro-
posal. . . ."
Thus wrote the late venerable Rev. Dr. Robbins of the Connecticut
Historical Society. Her son Gov. Roger Wolcott, in his autobiography,
says :
" ' She
was a gentlewoman of bright natural parts, which were well improved by
her education in the City of London, She came to New England in 1661 ; the same
year was marryed to my father. The rest of her useful life she spent in this
wilderness, in doing good and setting an example of piety, prudence, charity and
patience.' "
She died October 13, 1719, in her eightieth year, as Mrs. Martha
Clark, having, after Simon Wolcott's death, married Hon. Daniel Clark,
" one of the first settlers, and a man of much influence and position, at
Windsor,"' whom she also survived.
The wise heads of the colony seldom showed more wisdom than in
their plan to retain, in this country, Martha Pitkin, who had come over
from England with no thought of remaining. Their selection of the young
widower Simon Wolcott as the most fit person, and the most likely, to
induce her to stay, was the highest compliment to hmi ;
and the result
proved this to be one of the many cases where the sagacious interposition
of friends brings about the most successful of marriages. The late
Rev. Dr. Samuel Wolcott told the writer that, though the early Wolcotts
' Stiles's Anc. Windsor, ut supra, p. 569.
" He was a distinguished lawyer," says a record of the
Pitkin family which we shall give later as a part of this monograph, " was Secretary of State before the
Charter, and one of the Magistrates named in that instrument, and was afterwards elected Secretary of
the colony." He was also a Judge of the Particular Court, the highest judicial body in the colony, and
a member of the Governor's Council—The Mem. Hist, of Hartford County .
. . Ed. by J. H. Trum-
bull. . . . Boston, i886, i. 109 ; ii. 278. On the elevation of Mr. Clark to the magistracy, the
" ' Mr. Clark was appointed
the wainscoted church-pew appropriated to the magnates.
following vote was passed at the Town Meeting in Windsor, May 5, 1651 :
to sitt in the greate pew '
"—
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