From One Generation to Another

Mobility in Seventeenth-Century Windsor, Connecticut

Bibliographic Data

ID3351902
AuthorsLinda Auwers Bissell (corresponding author)
Year1974
Volume31
Issue1
Pages79
Publication date1974-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1918983
OpenAlexW2322308477
LanguageEN
Citations received9

W T THEN the Reverend John Warham and his congregation founded Windsor, Connecticut, in i637, they were not strangers to the process of migration. Most of them had formed a church in England and had emigrated to Massachusetts Bay where they settled in Dorchester, namesake of their English home. Later they moved on to the Connecticut River Valley, settling Windsor and establishing their church for the third time in eight years. The mobility illustrated by these settlers poses some interesting questions about the society they formed. How stable was seventeenth-century New England society? How isolated were men and communities within it? How much mobility-geographic, economic, and social-occurred? How did communities deal with it? What do the answers to these questions tell us about social relationships? The Dorchester group exemplifies the apparent incongruities of a society that combined geographic mobility with social and religious stability. Answering questions about mobility and community structure requires detailed information, best gathered on the local level. Four recent local studies agree on the importance of the goal of stability for the seventeenth-century New England community.1 While one group of religious reformers contributed to a religious and political revolution in England, others sought to escape the instability of English society. As individuals and as groups, men and women in New England sought

Political science · Windsor · Environmental Science · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History

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