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8 chapter two The Great Migration Elbert Parr Tuttle could trace his family line back ten generations, to April 1635, when the Planter left Gravesend, England, bound for Boston. On board were 117 passengers, including twenty-six-year-old William Tuttle, his twenty-three-year-old wife, Elizabeth, and their three small children: John, who was three and a half; Anne, who was two; and Thomas, who was only three months old. They arrived in Boston around the first of July. Two of William’s older brothers were also on board with their families. John, thirty-nine, sailed with his wife and seven children; he did not stay in the New World but instead returned to Ireland, where he died at Carrickfergus on December 30, 1656. Richard, thirty-two, who, like William, was listed as a husbandman, sailed with his wife and three children. Isabel Tuttle, William, John, and Richard’s mother, sailed with them; she was seventy.1 William and Elizabeth Tuttle were part of the Great Migration, when between 1630 and 1640 over thirteen thousand men, women, and children crossed from England to Massachusetts. For most, a search for religious freedom played a major role; the decade of the Great Migration coincided with the height of the Puritan crisis in England.2 But a drive toward the promise of prosperity also played a role. The New World offered opportunities that were foreclosed to many in England. A detailed genealogy of the family of William Tuttle, published in 1883 by George Frederick Tuttle, notes that William Tuttle was described as a husbandman on the Planter’s passenger list and concludes that he was a farmer who owned the land he tilled. Other historical sources maintain that the word “husbandman” described a tenant farmer.3 That he was able to make the crossing, accompanied by his wife and three small children, indicates he may well have been a small landowner in England. A farmer who leased thirty acres in the first half of the seventeenth century might earn fourteen or fifteen pounds The Great Migration » 9 in profit a year, but subsistence would absorb eleven pounds, leaving only three or four pounds extra. The adult fare on the Planter was five pounds; it would take extraordinary circumstances for a tenant farmer to raise the funds for a family of four or five to make the crossing.4 An early entry on a registry in the secretary of state’s office in Boston describes William Tuttle as a merchant; history does not record in what goods he traded. Whatever his occupation, he made a success of it. In 1641, only six years after they arrived in Massachusetts, William and Elizabeth moved to the new colony Quinnipiac (now Connecticut), where he bought the home and land of Edward Hopkins, who later became governor of the colony. Soon William expanded his holdings, buying ten nearby acres from Joshua Atwater. At her death in 1684, more than four decades later, Elizabeth still lived in the house Atwater had built early in the century. By 1717 the house had little value, and the property was sold to the trustees of a local collegiate school. They promptly demolished the Atwater-Tuttle homestead and erected a three-story building, which they named Yale College.5 William Tuttle’s standing in the community was not merely a matter of material success. At various times a constable and a road commissioner, he was often called upon to sit as a juror or to arbitrate differences among the colonists. His standing was most evident in his seat at church. He worshiped at the New Haven meeting house, where a committee assigned seats under the rules of precedence. William Tuttle was assigned to the first cross seat, which “was near the pulpit and among the highest in dignity.” For all of his success, he was matched by his wife. Elizabeth Tuttle bore eleven children and took into the Tuttle home the child of a deceased cousin, bringing the household to fourteen. All twelve of the children survived into maturity, a triumph over “privations, dangers, and trials, of which the mothers of the present day can hardly form a conception.”6 Elizabeth Tuttle died at age seventy-two on December 30, 1684. She survived her husband, who died suddenly in the early days of June 1673, by more than a decade. For a generation or two, William Tuttle’s many descendants stayed in New England. The most famous, his great grandson Jonathan...

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