The history of Pomfret
Pomfret, Connecticut, grew along Pomfret Street, now a historic district, where colonial-era lives and later institutions left their mark on the land. Among its records is the death of Sarah Grosvenor in 1742, following a secret abortion that led to one of early America's first such prosecutions.
Sarah Grosvenor died in Pomfret, Connecticut, in 1742 at nineteen, after complications from a secret abortion arranged with her cousin and lover Amasa Sessions. Her death led to one of early America's first recorded abortion prosecutions, decades before the land became the Pomfret Street Historic District.
A secret pregnancy ended in a young woman's death
Sarah Grosvenor died in Pomfret in 1742. She was nineteen years old. Her death came after complications from an abortion, carried out in secret to hide a pregnancy she could not explain.
Sarah Grosvenor had been seduced by a cousin, Amasa Sessions, a young man from a prominent local family. When she became pregnant, the two of them turned to a woman known locally for performing abortions. They hoped to end the pregnancy quietly before anyone noticed. The procedure went wrong. Sarah sickened over weeks, in pain, while those around her tried to keep the truth hidden.
She died that year, in a house somewhere in this stretch of countryside north of the green. The Grosvenor family was one of the town's oldest and most respected. Their name would later mark a school, an estate, an inn. But in 1742 it marked a young woman confined to a sickbed, dying of an injury nobody could name in public.
Her death became a colonial abortion prosecution
Word of what had happened reached the Connecticut courts. The case became a criminal matter, one of the earliest in colonial America built around an abortion death. Sarah could not testify. What survives comes from the depositions of neighbors, family, and the people who had been in the room with her.
Amasa Sessions was tried. So was the woman accused of performing the procedure. The court proceedings stretched over several years, moving slowly through depositions and delay, the way most colonial trials did. The exact outcome for each defendant is unclear in the surviving record. But the case itself lived on. It has been cited since as one of the clearest records of how New England communities handled a pregnancy nobody was supposed to know about.
Pomfret in 1742 was farmland and scattered homesteads. It looked nothing like the campuses and inns that would rise on this same street more than a century later. The Pomfret Street Historic District that now covers this ground did not take its shape until the Grosvenor family's descendants, and other prominent names, built the schools and estates that still line the road. Sarah's death predates all of it by a hundred and fifty years, buried under later brick and later reputations.
A headmaster died carrying a sick pupil
The town's respectability took another quiet loss more than a century later. This time it happened inside the school built on Grosvenor land. William E. Peck was the founding headmaster of Pomfret School. During an epidemic, he carried a sick student to the infirmary himself. He caught the same illness. Bronchitis turned to pneumonia. Peck died on January 7, 1897.
The school he had opened just three years earlier absorbed the loss and kept going. There was no public reckoning, no scandal attached to his name. A headmaster who founded an institution to shape the town's future died from an ordinary act of care. The record states it plainly.
Fire destroyed the church facing the old green
The Congregational Church had stood on the eastern edge of the old town green for generations. It faced Pomfret School across Pomfret Hill. It burned down on December 7, 2013. The fire took a building that had watched over the same stretch of ground since long before the schools arrived.
A sudden loss of an old landmark. The green it faced remains, but the church that once anchored it does not.
Putnam's wolf hunt became the town's own legend
Israel Putnam is remembered locally for tracking down and killing what people believe was Connecticut's last wolf. The wolf was in a den at Mashamoquet Brook, a few miles from the green. The story is told as local legend, not as a dated event. Guides and town histories repeat it as the kind of tale a place keeps about itself.
The wolf's den sits quietly within the same countryside where Sarah Grosvenor's story unfolded. This is land that was being tamed. It removed what did not fit the town it was becoming.
A school borrowed an English earl's coat of arms
When Pomfret School needed a coat of arms, Harriet Peck Jones wrote to the Fermor family in England. They were hereditary earls of Pomfret. They offered their own heraldry. It was a black band between three red lions' heads. The school took it as its own. A Connecticut boarding school, four years old, dressed itself in the arms of an English earldom it had no blood tie to.
The gesture gave the campus a borrowed weight of age and lineage. This was laid over ground that had held its own unspoken history. That history stretched for a century and a half. It was there before Ernest Flagg ever drew a plan for it.
Pomfret Street carries its brick and its ivy over a green that has already buried a scandal, a headmaster, and a church.
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