“A Short History of the Ely Meadow in Lyme, CT”

One of the treasures of the Lyme Public Hall’s archives is the ledger recording the meetings of the proprietors of the Ely Meadow— the long, narrow strip of land south of Ely’s Ferry that is elevated enough for wild grasses to grow between the river bank and the Lord Cove marshes.

From 1748 until well into the nineteenth century this roughly 250-acre strip was managed as commons land by its thirty or so owners, or “proprietors.” A commons is an undivided resource—a piece of open land for haying, woodcutting or pasture, for example—that is managed for its long-term productivity by the rules made by the group of people who are entitled to use it. Each proprietor of the Ely Meadows hayed only his own unfenced lot each summer but pastured animals in the autumn jointly with the other proprietors over the whole meadow.

The earliest New England villages adapted land management practices developed in England for centuries before the Pilgrims landed. Practices varied by region in England, but almost all farmers rented their arable land from very large land-owners and made use of common land for pasture and woodcutting. Some early New England settlers were well qualified lawyers who drafted legal codes for the new villages in the early 1600s; the Connecticut colony’s laws were codified in 1650 by Roger Ludlow, one of these early lawyers. The laws combined English practices with the new colony’s emphasis on making every household an independent farm unit that owned its land for growing crops and was entitled to share in town land that was suitable only for  haying or pastures or woodlots.  Eventually most of these town common lands went into private ownership—except for the village green.

By February 1748 when the New London County court approved the use of the Ely Meadows as a common land by its proprietors under “the Connecticut Colony laws applicable to regulating and protecting common fields”, the automatic right of every land owner to use town common lands was much abridged. However, for resources like salt hay meadows, common land management practices made economic sense to the group of private owners.

The Public Hall’s ledger contains the minutes of proprietors’ meetings from 1788 to 1832.  Since the proprietors had been meeting for forty years before the ledger starts, it is clear from the minutes that well-established rules were in place, and no discussion about them was needed.  While the minutes appear to be the full official records for these years, they don’t always answer the questions we might have about how the proprietors operated.

We can infer how some things worked. The meadows were fenced only where necessary to keep grazing animals in and non-proprietors out. There was a gate by Ely’s Ferry and a cart track south the length of the meadows. Each proprietor owned a specific lot measured in acres and marked at the corners but not fenced off from the other proprietors’ lots.  Each proprietor paid property taxes to the town on his lot, and lots could be bought or sold—the periodic assessments of holdings show changes that would have been recorded as land transactions by the Lyme Town Clerk. The proprietors “taxed” themselves after voting in their own meetings to spend money on the meadows – to repair the boundary fences, to lay out and build the road, to build the gate and hire a gatekeeper, and for the periodic cost of re-surveying and assessing their lots. They fined each other for damages by animals, and built and operated an animal pound.

They elected officers who served without pay: a Moderator, a Clerk, a Proprietors Committee of three, two fenceviewers, a pound keeper, and three haywards who supervised haying operations and tried to ensure that each proprietor stayed within his own sketchily marked acreage.

Animals caused problems that needed decisions in meetings; any problems with haying must have been resolved on the spot because in forty years of minutes there are no haying disputes recorded or changes to rules governing haying practices.

In contrast, the rules about animals and grazing required constant tweaking. The dates that grazing would be allowed were set annually at the fall meeting, and varied widely from year to year, presumably depending on the condition of the meadows after haying.  Overgrazing or trampling the wild grasses into mud would reduce the next year’s hay harvest, but the longer animals could graze through the fall, the longer the proprietors’ stores of hay would last. In a few years no grazing was allowed; some years only for three weeks; some years for as long as three months into mid-November.

What animals could graze changed. Cattle were always permitted, and so were horses until the late 1820s. Pigs and sheep were occasionally allowed but mostly forbidden.  The rules governing how many animals each proprietor could graze changed several times.  Tables of equivalents between cattle and horses of various ages were agreed—and revised. Fines for damages and the duties of the pound keeper changed.

The one court case in forty years involved animals. In 1810 Marsh Ely, the largest proprietor with 39 acres, sued Charles Ely for forcibly removing Marsh Ely’s cattle from the pound. It is not clear from the minutes whether Charles Ely was an officer, but the proprietors must have considered that he was acting for the group because in 1811 they voted to raise $50 to pay Marsh Ely his demand. Some years later, they paid the gatekeeper $2 per year for his services, so $50 was a large amount.

Over the forty years the number of proprietors grew from 29 to 36 and the number of holdings over 15 acres dropped from four to one. Most proprietors owned between four and fifteen acres. In the nineteenth century horse- and ox-drawn mowing machines replaced men with scythes. But hay had to be transported from the meadows to the home barns. Jay Harding describes the famously large hay-wagon of a proprietor who lived at some distance from the meadows – he could haul four tons of hay at a time using six pairs of oxen.

In the twentieth century the Ely Meadows lost their economic value. Dairy cattle required hay with more nourishment than wild hay could give. The 1938 hurricane washed so much sand onto the meadow that haying was impossible for a time and the land began to regrow with brush and reeds. Jack Tiffany remembers cutting reeds for animal bedding in the 1940s and 50s, but there were no proprietors’ meetings and the State of Connecticut began to buy up lots for duck-hunting. Today the state and the Nature Conservancy own about half the original acreage, and private owners, mostly descendants of the proprietors, own the rest. The undeveloped fresh-water marsh and meadow site now contributes importantly to the richness of the Lower Connecticut River estuary’s habitats. Although there is no public right of access, it can still be said that the Ely Meadows represent a common resource.

Courtesy of Tina West, excerpt of a paper prepared for an exhibit, “Treasures from the Archives,” at the Lyme Public Hall, Lyme, CT July 4, 2008

 

Bibliography

Earle, Alice Morse.  Home Life in Colonial Days.  Jonathan David Publishers, 1975.

Harding, James Ely.  Lyme as it was and is. Privately printed, 1975.

Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Powell, Sumner Chilton.  Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town.  Wesleyan University Press, 1963.

Thistlethwaite, Frank.  The Dorset Pilgrims.  Barnie & Jenks, 1989.

With thanks to Deb Yeomans, Jack Tiffany and, of course, Carolyn Bacdayan.