Daniel  Wadsworth  had  been  the  largest  subscriber
and  took  altogether  six  pews  and  slips,  but  the  one  he
habitually  occupied  was  doubtless  Pew  No. 3  in  the
southwest  corner  of  the  building. There,  in  imagina-
tion, we  may  see  him  —  a  frail,  good-looking  young  man,
doubtless  wrapped  in  the  artist's  cloak  he  was  fond  of
wearing,  for  the  meeting-house  had  no  stove  or  furnace,
and  beside  him  his  wife  Faith,  who  was  the  daughter
of  the  second  Jonathan  Trumbull. Pew  No. 26,  in  the
opposite  corresponding  corner,  was  purchased  by  John
Caldwell,  the  first  president  of  the  Hartford  Bank,  a
merchant  of  large  experience  and  at  one  time  of  con-
siderable wealth,  who  had,  however,  lost  much  of  his  for-
tune in  the  French  depredations  on  American  shipping  at
the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century. Midway  between  the
two  westerly  pillars  on  the  north  side  of  the  church  in
slip  No. 32  sat  Theodore  Dwight,  brother  of  Timothy
Dwight,  then  president  of  Yale  College,  one  of  the
"  Hartford  Wits,"  who  had  just  declined  a  renomina-
tion  to  Congress,  and  was  writing  political  articles  and
verses  for  the  Connecticut  Courant  and  other  news-
papers. Another  of  the  "  Hartford  Wits,"  John  Trum-
bull, was  a  member  of  this  congregation  and  owned  slip
No. 1 20,  the  third  from  the  front  on  the  south  side  of
the  middle  aisle. At  the  time  this  building  was  dedicated
he  was  a  judge  of  the  Superior  Court,  and  in  the  fol-
lowing year  he  received  from  the  General  Assembly  the
additional  appointment  of  judge  of  the  Supreme  Court
of  Errors. It  is  probably  as  a  poet,  however,  and  the
author  of  "  McFingal,"  which  had  been  published  in
1782,  that  he  is  chiefly  known  to  posterity. In  the  slip
adjoining  John  TrumbuH's  on  the  south  sat  David  Wat-
kinson,  then  only  twenty-nine  years  of  age  and  engaged,


ANNIVERSARY   EXERCISES. 33

in  business  with  his  brother  William,  in  amassing  the
large  fortune  that  by  his  will  he  distributed  so  generously
for  the  benefit  of  the  city  of  his  adoption. Just  back
of  Mr. Watkinson's  was  the  slip  bought  by  Dr. Mason
F. Cogswell,  an  eminent  physician  and  philanthropist,
whose  diary  gives  us  vivid  glimpses  of  every-day  life
here  a  century  and  more  ago. 