The service of a doctor requires skill, understanding, patience, and knowledge. To become one after being torn from your family and forced into servitude for a man you know nothing of makes the already arduous feat exceptional. In the late 18th century, after years of enslavement Dr. Primus Manumit became Windsor’s first Black doctor.
Through inheritance, business acumen, and social aplomb, the Wolcott family rose in just a few generations from being tenant farmers in England to political elites in America. Henry Wolcott Sr., has been described as “the most prominent member of the Windsor settlement throughout his long life, and its richest citizen.”
In 1903 the Connecticut Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) acquired, restored, furnished and opened the Oliver Ellsworth Homestead in Windsor, Connecticut. It’s a milestone that represents the beginning of the landmark-as-museum phenomenon in Connecticut.
Most people know that there were once two ferries in Windsor: the Rivulet Ferry on the Farmington River and the Bissell Ferry across the Connecticut River. However, there was also another, almost unknown, ferry operating here in the 18th century. It was called the Wolcott Ferry.
Grave markers can only tell so much about a person's life in a small space. This article focuses on two individuals and their families whose graves are in Palisado Cemetery, and who in life served their Sovereign politically and militarily when Connecticut was still a colony of England.
Windsor’s Palisado Cemetery is a beautiful place to walk and explore town history. It is the home to (purportedly) Connecticut’s oldest surviving gravestone commemorating the life of Reverend Ephraim Huit who died in 1644.