Westel Willoughby—Litchfield County Pioneer *

November in Goshen on its high hilltop is blustery and cold and raw. It may have its moments when Indian summer slips back for a last regretful visit, and a murky blue haze lies in the great hollow to the east, but the 20th of that month in 1769, was a day of cold skies with no sun to glint on the green ripples of Marshapogge, now Tyler Pond. There was a hint of snow in the air, and Ivy Mountain stood stark and black against a leaden sky. Pioneers had settled the town called New Bantam thirty-odd years before, silent Aaron Cook, able John Beach and the thrifty Lymans. A road running north and south, a road running east ahd west, a duster of cabins, a meeting-house, woods, here and there a cleared field; a wind-swept hilltop becoming a village. Here on November 20, 1769, was born a boy marked by the rigor of the season and the hardihood of his ancestors. Westel Willoughby was the third child born to Westel and Ruth Arnold Willoughby, who lived in the northwestern part of the Township of Goshen. Honest folk his people were, but not of Goshen's ruling class. His grandfather, John Willoughby, who started the line in Goshen, was not one of the fifty-three original owners of the town in 1737, although the town records record the marriage of John Willoughby and Mary Dibble in 1728. Of this marriage were born several children, Westel senior, the father of the subject of this sketch, being born in Goshen on March 31, 1739. He married Ruth Arnold on June 5, 1764. During the period from the settlement of the town to 1800 there were about twenty-five Willoughbys resident in Goshen, but except for a brief genealogical note and a statement that one John Willoughby was a deserter during the Revolution, Hibbard's History does not mention the family, and the town records do not produce much of interest concerning them. To recover, after the lapse of a century and a half of time, the common facts of the life history of an obscure individual is usually a difficult, if not impossible, task, and although it would be interest-