Kaaterskill Books

Expense Report for Colonial Proprietary School in Connecticut Attended by Oliver Wolcott, Jr.

[Colonial Education. Connecticut. Wolcott, Oliver].

[Manuscript Expense Account] The Expense of the Proprietary School on Town Hill for the Year 1774.

[Litchfield, Conn]: 1774. 1 sheet. 7.5 x 12 inches. Very good, minor tearing along folds, light soiling, damp stain to lower margin. Item #45963

Expense Report totaling a little over 46 pounds for the Litchfield school in which Oliver Wolcott, Jr., was educated, and to which Wolcott senior, was a provider. The main recipients were Col. Wolcott for 42 weeks Board and Master Beckwith for 10 1/2 months from 2nd Nov. 1773 till 10th Sept 1774. Four others received smaller amounts for providing firewood. Cost of running the school was £ 45.17.12

Oliver Wolcott ( 1726-1797) moved to Litchfield in 1751 and became a merchant. His father appointed him county sheriff, a position he held for twenty years. and was later a Signer of the Declaration of Independence, Lieutenant-Governor, and Governor of Connecticut. "Wolcott was not an important national figure, but he stood as one of the half-dozen most significant leaders of the independence movement in Connecticut and a central personality in state politics in subsequent decades."

Nathaniel Brown Beckwith (1749-1777) school master, a Yale graduate, taught in Litchfield from 1771 until sometime after 1774. Governor Oliver Wolcott, Junior (Yale 1778), wrote a pleasant reminiscence of the Master's joining with his pupils in their sports of fishing and hunting. "At about eleven years of age I went to the Grammar School, which was kept by Nathaniel Brown Beckwith, a graduate of Yale College ... I was far from being a student. One of the eldest and stoutest Boys was still less so; he and the Master were attached to Fishing and Hunting. Trouts, Partridges, Quail, Squirrels both grey and black, and in the season Pigeons and Ducks, were in great abundance. To these sports all our holidays well devoted, and I engaged in them with great alacrity, in which the Master joined on the footing of an equal. In his course I continued till, in the summer of 1773, Master Beckwith pronounced me fit to enter College. . . . "

Four others were paid for providing firewood: Roswell Kilborn (1734-1777) was a member of the Provincial troops for the French and Indian War in the Second Connecticut Regiment under Col. Elizur Goodrich with Capt. Samuel Bellows, where Roswell appears on the rolls for the expedition against Crown Point; Captain Solomon Marsh who was tried on charges being negligent of his duty as a Military officer primarily for his long delay in marching his company to Danbury in 1777; Salmon Buell (1739-1811) Revolutionary war veteran: Connecticut Militia, wounded at the "Danbury Alarm"; and Lemuel Kilborn (?).

References: Bruce P. Stark "Wolcott, Oliver" ANB article.0101003; Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society (Hartford, 1903_ volume IX page 35; Technical Report
Department of the Interior: Battle of Ridgefield April 27, 1777 (2022); Alain Campbel White,: "The history of the town of Litchfield, Connecticut, 1720-1920"(Litchfield, Conn., Enquirer print. 1920); Franklin Bowditch Dexter: Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College (Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1903) Vol. 3, Page 173.

Price: $150.00