Label
Pocket Watch, circa 1790
Owned by Gov. Thomas Chittenden (1730-1797)
Williston, Vermont
Silver, glass
Gift of Thomas G. Chittenden, #1931.1.2
Thomas Chittenden was born in East Guilford in the Colony of Connecticut on January 6, 1730. He married Elizabeth Meigs on October 4, 1749, in Salisbury, Connecticut. The couple had four sons and six daughters while they were living in Connecticut, all surviving to adulthood. He was a justice of the peace in Salisbury and a member of the Colonial Assembly from 1765 to 1769. He served in Connecticut's 14th Regiment of Militia from 1767 to 1773, rising to the rank of colonel.
Chittenden moved to the New Hampshire Grants, now Vermont, in 1774, where he was the first English settler in the town of Williston. He participated in the 1777 Vermont Constitutional Convention in Windsor, establishing Vermont as an independent republic. During the American Revolution, Chittenden was a member of the committee empowered to negotiate with the Continental Congress to allow Vermont to join the Union. The Congress deferred the matter in order to not antagonize the states of New York and New Hampshire, which had competing claims against Vermont. During the period of the Vermont Republic, Chittenden served as governor from 1778 to 1789 and 1790 to 1791, and was one of the participants in a series of delicate negotiations with British authorities in Quebec over the possibility of establishing Vermont as a British province.
After Vermont entered the federal Union as the fourteenth state in 1791, Chittenden continued to serve as Governor until his death in 1797.
Chittenden died in Williston on August 25, 1797 and is interred at Thomas Chittenden Cemetery, Williston, Vermont. Citing Vermont's tumultuous founding, his epitaph reads "Out of storm and manifold perils rose an enduring state, the home of freedom and unity."