Reading the record of a Norwich farm
Barn, mill, office, house. Four entries in the history of Constant Murdock lead a researcher to different kinds of evidence.
A name in a working landscape
The Meeting House Farm nomination records that Murdock built his own barn as well as his father’s. It names him as a justice of the peace in 1799 and as the owner of a fulling mill and dam in 1811. A family pedigree can connect the men. The building history tells us what work the son did; the dated entry for a justice identifies a public office.
Reading a photograph alongside the nomination
The published Norwich site history reproduces an early view of the Smith house credited to George Edward Anderson in 1908. It also records the tradition that the Smith family rented the house from Murdock. A photograph dates an appearance of a building. It cannot by itself supply the terms of a tenancy nearly a century earlier. A good way to study the New England origins of Mormonism is to keep the pictured building, the tradition and the evidence for the magistrate’s career in view together.
A local justice and a family that became the subject of national controversy once occupied the same small Vermont landscape. I approach their history through the evidence each kind of source can bear.
What passed with half a house?
On March 26, 1795, Thomas Murdock conveyed a Norwich farm and half of its dwelling house to his son Constant. The National Register nomination for Meeting House Farm reports the terms on page 44. Stock, hay, farm tools and outbuildings went with the land. In return Constant was to maintain his parents Thomas and Elizabeth for the remainder of their lives. By 1800 another conveyance described fifty acres at the western end of the farm. The agreements put a working household on the map five years before Constant’s name would otherwise appear to a reader beginning with that last deed.
A descent of title usually gets reduced to names and acreages. Here the provision for the parents explains why a son might hold a conveyance while his father and mother continued under the same roof. That detail bears directly on the kind of question raised by the Smith family’s Norwich residence. Establish who held the land, then ask who occupied which house and on what terms. Each question calls for evidence a deed may or may not contain.