Samuel Beach Papers

Background on Samuel and Harriett Beach

Spread out across the early national landscape, the Beach and Cooke families were bound by the ties of family, friendship, and business. Both families originated in New Haven County, Connecticut, but were divided in 1832 when Increase W. Cooke and his new wife Harriet Griffing began a new life on the prairies of Illinois.

Settling in the small town of Mendon, Cooke taught school and served as a deacon in the local church while raising a family of three children, Samuel G. (1835-1915), Harriett, and Sara Elizabeth (Lizzie). When Increase died unexpectedly in 1847, just 39 years old, his widow returned home to Connecticut and settled in the shore town of Branford. Although Connecticut remained the family anchor, the east-west connections continued: after completing his apprenticeship as a carpenter in New Haven in 1855, Samuel Cooke returned to Mendon to take up farming.

Samuel Beach was born in Branford on July 27, 1827, the son of Samuel Beach and Mary (Barker). In March 1851, he married the elder daughter of Increase Cooke, Harriett, raising a family of two daughters (Isabella and Harriett) and two sons (Paul and Samuel). Increase's younger daughter, Lizzie, married John A. Leggat in Mendon in May 1857.

When the Civil War began, then, Samuel and Harriett Beach were settled in Branford and Samuel Cooke and Lizzie Leggat in Mendon. Samuel Cooke was the first to rise to his country's demands, volunteering in the fall 1861 for service in the 50th Illinois Infantry, a regiment that saw action from Fort Donelson through Shiloh and Corinth, and in the Central Mississippi and Atlanta Campaigns. While stationed in Tennessee during the spring 1864, Cooke left the 50th to take up a commission as Captain in the 44th U.S. Colored Infantry, which served in eastern Tennessee and Georgia through the end of the war.

On August 31, 1862, Samuel Beach was drafted into the 27th Connecticut Infantry, a nine-month's regiment noted as much for the hardships of its service as its brief duration. Part of the First Division, Second Corps of the Army of the Potomac, the regiment was thrown into the toughest part of three of the most momentous battles of the eastern theater. At Fredericksburg in December 1862, the 27th sustained 110 casualties during the failed assault on Stonewall Jackson's forces on Marye's Heights. After a harsh winter spent in the mud along the Rappahannock gave way to spring, the 27th was swept by illness. Beach was among several who required hospital care to recuperate, and he was thus not present at the Battle of Chancellorsville, when eight of the regiment's ten companies were taken prisoner. Two months later je was in a convalescent camp when the regiment's remaining companies, much reduced, sustained fifty percent casualties the Battle of Gettysburg, fighting in the Wheat Field.

Both Beach and Cooke returned to Branford after the war and found great success in farming and fruit culture, so much so that Beach reported real property of $40,000 in the census of 1870. Acquiring a large property on Indian Neck in 1866, Beach developed a popular day resort and picnic grounds there during the 1880s. With a pavilion at its center, Pawson Park featured dances, dinners, and roller skating among other amusements, with Beach renting the premises and providing catering for excursions sponsored by groups ranging from woolen manufacturers to the local chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic. Beach died in Branford in 1891, with Cooke following in 1915. Both of the brothers-in-law and their families are buried in Branford Center Cemetery.