Fairies of New England: The Little People of the Hills and Forests

In 2019, folklorists Simon Young and Chris Woodyard published a survey of North American place names containing the word hob. Hob denotes a supernatural being most often found in Yorkshire, England. As mentioned recently on this blog, a hob was a solitary spirit that entered farmhouses to perform good deeds for the family who lived there, to whom the hob often became attached. (The hob might also create trouble for the family, depending on how they treated it.)

Many place names throughout England contain the word hob, and folklorists believe these places were probably once associated with—and named for—the supernatural being.

On this side of the Atlantic, Young and Woodyard found a number of place names containing the word hob, one such location being Hob’s Hole, somewhere between Hartford and Windsor in Eastern Connecticut.

Hob’s Hole in the colonial era

The first reference to Hob’s Hole is in a will dated June 22, 1709, in which Obadiah Spencer bequeathed “a plot of land in the long meadow in Hartford. . . at a place called Hob’s Hole” to his son Samuel. The will’s date strongly suggests that the “place” in question received its name during the seventeenth century, Hartford’s earliest years. Based on the English pattern of hob place names, it’s possible that a seventeenth-century farming family living north of Hartford gave the location its unusual name because they believed a spirit inhabited it. (One non-supernatural possibility is that the location earned its name because it reminded an English immigrant of a similarly named “hole” back home.)

Fortunately, Obadiah Spencer’s description of the location—i.e., the fact that it was found in the “long meadow”—gives us a pretty good idea of where the “hole” may have been: Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the long meadow referred to a large, open tract of land running north of Hartford in between the Windsor road and the Connecticut River. This strip of land was later called the North Meadow and is now the site of Hartford’s “North Meadows” neighborhood and the Windsor Meadows State Park.

In the seventeenth century, the long meadow was the perfect place for a hob to live: Not only was it situated beyond the city limits, a place where only animals grazed, it was also within easy reach of the farmhouses lining the road to Windsor. The hob of Hob’s Hole, if it existed, would have had plenty of room to indulge its “wild” nature while also receiving offerings of bread and milk from the region’s farmers.

Hob’s Hole in the nineteenth century

The next reference to Hob’s Hole comes in 1890 when historian Gurdon Wadsworth Russell published a survey of the households that were located along the road between Hartford and Windsor in the year 1825. After stumbling upon Obadiah Spencer’s will and its reference to Hob’s Hole, Russell asked two local residents—Samuel Mather and John Marsh—if they’d ever heard of the place. The two men had indeed heard of it: they said it could be found in the North Meadow near a “pasture where you see the bright sunlight” and where the North Meadow Creek flowed.

Hob’s Hole was said to be “about as large as a small barnyard,” “about five or six feet deep,” and always fed with water from the creek. Russell, who sought out the hole and found it, described it as being a “few feet from the creek,” “surrounded by trees,” and formed by a “looping” of the creek, which had eroded a large hole.

[NB. Sadly, urban development in the mid-twentieth century led to the diversion of the North Meadow Creek, which once flowed from Windsor, through the “meadow,” to the Connecticut River at Hartford. It seems unlikely that the Hob’s Hole formation would have survived this diversion or the city’s expansion into the North Meadow.]

As for the word Hob in the Hob’s Hole name, for some reason, it didn’t occur to Russell to consider a supernatural reference. After experiencing “much anxiety” about the hitherto unknown-to-him hole, he decided that the name most likely derived from a man called “Hobbes” who may have lived in colonial Hartford and owned the land where the hole was located. He even speculated that this imaginary “Hobbes” may have drowned in the hole or that some “notable event” associated with him had occurred there.

Russell’s explanation is surprising given the fact that he was a historian who must have been somewhat familiar with English folklore, especially the hobgoblin Robin Goodfellow. What makes his oversight more surprising is the coexistence in his text of the following two things: 1) he admits that no record of a Hobbes living north of Hartford had ever been found, and 2) he uses the word hobgoblin earlier in his book when describing the folklore that surrounded him as a child in early-nineteenth-century Hartford. I’ll quote him here in full because the passage tells us a lot about the nature of early Connecticut fairy lore:

. . . the belief in the marvelous, and the things unknown but suspected, has come down to us through hundreds of generations, with a strength too great to be put aside by many, even of our own time. A full share of it fell to me from Rufus Watrous,¹ our hired man. Such stories as he told me about witches, . . ., “painters,” [panthers] who were ferocious, hobgoblins and “jack o’ lanterns,” were enough to frighten any little boy, to say nothing of some of larger growth.

If Russell’s depiction of nineteenth-century Hartford’s rich supernatural folklore is to be believed, it seems even more likely that Hob’s Hole was named after a supernatural being.

Conclusion

Did stories about a hob lurking in the wilderness near Hartford’s early farmhouses actually circulate among the city’s seventeenth-century settlers? The answer will most likely remain a mystery. Nevertheless, reading about Hob’s Hole has certainly strengthened my doubts about the commonly held belief that Puritan New England had little significant fairy folklore. Russell’s description of Hartford’s folklore echoes findings from other New England towns such as Marblehead, Massachusetts, where people believed in various types of fairies in the late eighteenth century; and Salem, where expressions about fairies were recorded in the late nineteenth.

Should we reassess the notion that the average New England Puritan didn’t believe in such things as hobs and hobgoblins? That’s an open question.

Read about more New England fairies in my book New England Fairies: A History of the Little People of the Hills and Forests.

1. There are records of a Rufus Watrous living in Hartford at this time. He would have been about twenty three, unmarried, and a laborer in 1825 when he told the ten-year-old Gurdon Wadsworth Russell about hobgoblins and jack-o’-lanterns. If the sleuths at Ancestry.com are correct, he was a sixth-generation English American, his ancestor coming to Connecticut from England before 1639. Interestingly, for our discussion of Yorkshire-based hobs, this ancestor (Jacob Waterhouse/Watrous) also came from Yorkshire. If this is indeed the correct ancestor, did he pass down a belief in (or expressions about) hobs? Perhaps it was someone like him who gave the hole the name Hob’s Hole. ↩︎