#Middlebury #RevolutionaryWar
By DR. ROBERT L. RAFFORD
He had a “tall, straight form, and long, gray hair, his wife, almost as tall, and equally straight, following Indian file, about ten feet behind him.” This was how, in 1896, the Hon. Frederick J. Kingsbury, LL.D, (1823-1910) described Job Oviatt, a Mohican Indian, and his wife, Lizzie, who once lived on Park Road in Waterbury. He added that, “they supported themselves by basket making, chair bottoming, and similar industries, supplemented by charity” (Waterbury Evening Democrat). Job was living in Middlebury at the time the 1820 federal census was enumerated, and before that, in Woodbury.
The occasion of Kingsbury’s description was his speech delivered December 28, 1896, at the dedication of a tablet in the main hall of the Silas Bronson Library building, which had been completed two years earlier. The tablet, given by the Melicent Porter Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, memorialized the Revolutionary War soldiers whose ashes had reposed in the Grand Street cemetery replaced by the library. The tablet contained 32 names of patriots whose graves had been removed to make way for the library building.
Kingsbury may have known Job as a young man or heard descriptions of him from others later on, but it was said of him that he had a remarkable memory. He was a prominent attorney, politician, banker, businessperson and historian of Waterbury, author of several chapters for Joseph Anderson’s monumental “History of Waterbury” (1896).
In his speech, Kingsbury praised the DAR for memorializing the names of those soldiers who “risked their lives that we might forever be one people, sovereign, free and independent.” However, he concluded by lamenting the absence of the names of two soldiers, those of Job Oviatt and Ebeneezer Brown, whom he thought had been buried in this ground. He closed his speech with these words about Oviatt and Brown, “They were noble old men. Peace to their ashes, repose to their souls.”
Job enlisted as a private in the Continental Army in Major General Charles Lee’s Division, Brigadier General James Varnum’s Brigade, Colonel John Chandler’s Eighth Regiment and Captain Samuel Maddocks’s company of the Connecticut line, on April 6, 1777, and served over six years until discharged by General George Washington at West Point in June 1783. About 31 other Middlebury men enlisted in the Continental Army. His pension deposition listed the battles he was engaged in during the war as Germantown, “Mud Fort” (the siege of Fort Mifflin in Philadelphia), Monmouth and Morrisania. He was there with 11,000 other troops during their brutal winter encampment at Valley Forge.
He died January 2, 1839, in Waterbury, at the age of 81, which would place his birth year around 1757-8. Nothing is known of his parents, but his Mohican ancestors were traditionally clustered around the Albany, New York, area. He was married and had at least two daughters as of 1820, Patty and Mary.
His family intermarried with African Americans in Middlebury, as did many Indians, and had a presence in town throughout the 19th century. Despite his six years’ service establishing the United States of America, the new nation’s Constitution did not extend citizenship to him, his family or other Indians; they could not vote or take part in the democratic process of their native home. Job and his family served as laborers on farms and sold baskets.
A fact that makes his story more absorbing is that his grandson, Andrew Harrison, born in Middlebury in 1834, of whom I wrote in the February 2018 issue of this newspaper, served in the United States Navy during the Civil War. Newspaper stories about him a few years before his 1917 death in Kensington, Connecticut, called him one of the “last of the Mohicans.”
Thirty-five years after the end of the war, Congress, granted pensions to veterans, and in 1820 Job was awarded eight dollars a month. His name was mentioned only in Joseph Anderson’s “History of Waterbury” as “Job Oviat or Uffit,” but not in any other area history. The remains of Job and Lizzie were probably buried anonymously in the “colored burial plot” of the Grand Street Cemetery. Despite an online description stating Job was buried in the Riverside Cemetery in Waterbury, there is no evidence of that, so they have no known place of burial or headstone of record.
You are urged to join the Middlebury Historical Society by going online at MiddleburyHistoricalSociety.org or visiting them on Facebook. Questions about membership can be sent to Bob at robraff@frontier.com.
