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October 17

LIBRARY RECALLS UNEXPECTED GIFT FROM NATIVE SON

THE HARTFORD COURANT

Barely a month after Cromwell's public library was established in 1888, an astonishingly generous gift arrived out of the blue. The donation came from a Cromwell native who had left his hometown more than half a century earlier as an orphaned, footloose youth embarking on an adventurous odyssey that ultimately landed him in California, where he became a very rich man.

Born in Cromwell in 1815, Josiah Belden lost both parents by the time he was 15. In need of a way to support himself, and also hoping to be of financial assistance to his two sisters, he accepted an apprenticeship to a jeweler in Albany, N.Y. He subsequently worked at that craft in Philadelphia, New Orleans, Vicksburg, and St. Louis.

Finally, in 1841, Belden, by his own admission a thrill-seeker eager to see the wild West, complete with real, live Indians, left Independence, Mo., as a member of the Bartleson- Bidwell party, which according to the Dictionary of American Biography made the "the first emigrant wagon-train journey from the Missouri to the Pacific." It took nearly six months for the half of the group that did not give up in despair to reach their destination. Toward the end of the grueling expedition, the travelers were reduced to eating acorns and even some of their horses to survive.

Less than a year after his arrival, Belden played a role in a somewhat comic incident that has earned him a footnote in the story of the annexation of California to the United States. On Oct. 20, 1842, Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones, commander of the American Naval forces in the Pacific, somehow got it into his head that a British fleet was on its way to take control of California, and that the United States and Mexico, which then ruled California, were at war. Determined to immediately gain the upper hand in the situation, Commodore Jones captured Monterey. Josiah Belden raised an American flag to symbolize the United States' conquest of California.

However, after just a few days, "Jones was embarrassed to discover that there was no war," according to Warren Beck and David Williams in "California: A History of the Golden State." Commodore Jones apologized to Mexican officials for his rash impetuosity, and the Stars and Stripes Belden had hoisted in a burst of patriotic fervor were hauled down.

Josiah Belden had made his way to California with the intention of remaining only a year or so. But news that the economy back East was stagnant, offering little prospect of finding a job there, prompted him to remain in California, where he worked as a shopkeeper.

When gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in 1849, Belden was running a store in San Jose. Belden joined the rush to the gold fields, leaving the store in the hands of a hired man. When Belden returned to San Jose empty-handed a few weeks later, he discovered that in his absence nearly everything in the store had been bought up by luckier fortune-hunters, who had paid for their purchases in gold. The lesson was not lost on Belden, who proceeded to get rich by the less exciting, but far more reliable, method of selling supplies to miners in return for the gold they wrested from the earth and the streams of California.

Belden eventually gave up storekeeping and turned to investing in real estate. In 1850 he was elected the first mayor of San Jose, and he went on to become a prominent member of the Republican Party.

In 1881, having spent 40 years accumulating remarkable wealth and influence in California, Belden came back East, settling in New York City. Whether he ever came back to visit the town of his birth, which he had left behind half a century earlier, is not known, although he did fulfill his desire to provide for his sisters, buying them adjoining farms in Cromwell.

Whatever contact Belden had with Cromwell after he returned from California, together with memories of his earliest years spent there, must have left him with warm feelings for his native town, and a desire to give something back to it. When he learned that a public library had been established in Cromwell on Feb. 29, 1888, he sent a donation of $1,000 -- worth perhaps 10 times that much in modern purchasing power. Judging from a newspaper account at the time, the funds were used to buy books.

Upon receipt of Belden's large and totally unexpected donation toward the Cromwell Library's purpose of promoting "the moral and intellectual improvement of our community," the library's founders, "in order to both perpetuate the remembrance of the giver and to express our own gratitude and appreciation of the gift," voted on April 7, 1888, to name the new institution the Belden Library. It retains his name to this day, honoring a man who, no matter how far he had traveled, how many decades had passed, or how high he had risen in the world, did not forget the town of his birth.

Copyright © 2018, Hartford Courant
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