An Astronomer's Wife: The Biography of Angeline Hall

One fine winter morning a little more than a hundred years ago the sun peeped into the snow-clad valley of the Connecticut, and smiled cordially upon the snug homes of the sons and daughters of the American Revolution. The Yankee farmers had long been stirring. Smoke curled up from every chimney in Ellington. The cattle had been fed and watered. Pans of new milk stood on the pantry shelves, breakfast was over, and the family was gathered about the fireside to worship God and to render Him thanks for peace and plenty. At Elisha Cook’s, on this particular winter morning, the simple Puritan rites were especially earnest. The mother had gathered the children into her arms, and the light of high resolve lit up her face; for this day the family was to begin a long, hard journey westward—away from the town of Ellington, away from Tolland County, away from Connecticut and New England, beyond the Dutch settlements of New York State to Lake Ontario and the Black River Country! I will not attempt to describe that journey in January, 1806. Suffice it to say that Elisha Cook and his wife Huldah, setting their faces bravely westward, sought and found a home in the wilderness. They went to stay. No turning back for those hardy pioneers. Children and household goods went with them. With axe and plough, hammer and saw, spinning-wheel and loom, they went forth to enlarge the Kingdom of God. There was no Erie Canal in those early days. The red men had hardly quitted the unbroken forests. Not many years had passed since Fort Stanwix resounded with the warwhoops of St. Leger’s Indians. Indeed, Huldah Cook herself—she was Huldah Pratt then, a little girl of ten years—had been in Albany when Burgoyne surrendered. No doubt as the emigrants entered the Mohawk Valley, little Electa Cook heard from her mother’s lips something about Arnold and Morgan and their victorious soldiers. Perhaps she saw in imagination what her mother had actually seen—soldiers in three-cornered hats, some in uniform and some in plain homespun, every man armed with powder horn and musket, hurrying through the streets of the quaint old town to the American camp beyond. Perhaps she saw the fiery Arnold himself, mounted on his fiery warhorse. Perhaps she saw Daniel Morgan and his men—of all the heroes of the Revolution none was braver and truer than he, and of all the soldiers in Washington’s army none could shoot straighter than the men that magnanimous general sent to Gates—Morgan’s riflemen.