William Cutler was born April 13, 1770 at Killingly Connecticut, just five weeks after and fifty miles away from the Boston Massacre. His parents were Benoni and Lurana (Leavens) Cutler. Among William's earliest recollections was the confusing night a week after his fifth birthday when his father had rushed off to Lexington to fight Redcoats. On his sixth birthday he was trudging northward with the whole family to a place in the wilderness called Windsor, where his father told him that he was to help take care of his mother while he was gone. On his seventh birthday he was not allowed to stray much beyond sight of the house, since his scalp was worth $5 to the Indians who lived in the area. In the summer of 1777 his father returned and things returned more toward "normal" for the times. A certain amount of confusion ruled all of William's first twenty-one years, for during this entire period he couldn't really tell what country he belonged to. He had been born a British Colonial Subject, was claimed alternately by New York, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, and then for the eight years before they joined the United States as the fourteenth State in 1791, he was a citizen of the entirely independent State of Vermont. Despite such distant distractions, the family actively pursued the problems at hand. William's father bought and developed properties, so along with his brothers, he spent a great deal of time clearing land, putting up buildings, and related chores. When he was fifteen years old the family moved up the River to a village named Guildhall, which would be their permanent settlement. Here all members of the family immediately took an active part in community life. For the first two years their hands were full getting their 400 acre farm in shape, and then in 1787 his father took possession of the two mills just completed on the newly named Cutler's Mill Brook. With the completion of the mills, both lumber and grain could be milled locally, thus reducing the costs of settling in the area. William and his brothers often went downstream to interest people in moving to Guildhall. One problem in developing the area was the tangled ownership. Guildhall had been chartered in 1761 to a total of 64 people, among them Isaac Hall, Isaac Hall 2nd, Isaac Hall 3rd, Elihu Hall, Elihu Hall, Jr, John Hall 5th, Lt. Enoch Hall and Daniel Hall, Jr. The later two actually moved to Guildhall, and one of the Hall daughters married Micah Amy, the town's first Treasurer, but most of the grantees continued to live in Connecticut. Over a period of time these people sold their interests, gave them to daughters as dowry, or left them in their wills to be subdivided into tiny interests. William was particularly active in working out these problems, and became acquainted with many of the leading families of Wallingford and Meriden, Connecticut. |