TIMOTHY WOODBRIDGE was born in Hartford, where he was baptized October 3, 1686. He was the eldest child of the Rev. Timothy Woodbridge (Harv. Coll. 1675), minister of the First Church in Hartford, and one of the original Trustees of this College; and was the first cousin of his classmate, Jared Eliot, his mother being Mehitabel, daughter of the Hon. Samuel Wyllys, of Hartford, and by previous marriages wife of the Rev. Daniel Russell (Harv. Coll. 1669), of Charlestown, Massachusetts, and of the Rev. Isaac Foster (Harv. Coll. 1671), her third husband's predecessor in the pulpit of the Hartford church. A younger half-brother, the Rev. Ashbel Woodbridge, graduated at Yale in 1724.
He probably studied divinity with his father, and resided in Hartford until after the death, August 3, 1710, of his cousin, the Rev. Dudley Woodbridge (Harv. Coll. 1694), pastor at Simsbury, Connecticut. He had previously (1707) become interested in the copper mines lately discovered in that town, and was called, November 20, 1710, on the advice of the neighboring ministers, to supply the vacant pulpit, and proving acceptable to the town, was invited to settle, at a meeting held March 19, 1710–11. He was accordingly ordained there, November 13, 1712, and continued in office until his death, August 28, 1742, in the 56th year of his age.
He married, February 14, 1712, the widow of his predecessor, Dorothy, daughter of Joshua and Mary (Alcock) Lamb, of Roxbury, Massachusetts. She survived her husband a few years. Four sons and one daughter are mentioned in his will ; the eldest son was graduated here in 1732, and the daughter married George Wyllys, of the Class of 1729.
His ministry was disturbed by a bitter controversy, which began in 1725 (on an attempt to fix the site of a new meeting-house which the town wished to erect), and was only ended by the division of the parish in 1736 into four societies. In the meantime, Mr. Woodbridge was repeatedly obliged to appeal to the General Assembly for help in collecting his salary.
He preached the annual election sermon, May 10, 1739, of which a copy was as usual desired for publication, but it does not appear to have been printed.
He resembled his cousin, Dr. Eliot, in his scientific tastes; we find him in 1707 one of the three contractors for smelting the copper ore from the newly worked mine in that part of Simsbury which is now Granby; and after his death a company which had been granted by the General Assembly the monopoly of making iron into steel in the Colony, petitioned for further indulgence as to time, because “the Reverend Timothy Woodbridge, late of Symsbury, deceased, was one of their assigns, on whom they principally depended for the skill in preparing the furnace and making the experiment.” This turn for business helped, it is said, to increase his difficulties with his parishioners. At the time of his death, he was classed as an “Old Light."
AUTHORITIES.
Conn. Colony Records, vii, viii, pasrim.
Mitchell, Woodbridge Record, 26, 235.
N. E. Hist, and Geneal. Register,xxxii, 296.
Phelps, Hist. of Simsbury, 55, 114.
R. D. Smyth, College Courant, July 25, 1868, 51.
