into details of the controversy here, as they have been set forth in another chapter. It is sufficient to say that Colonel Caleb Heathcote, who had been chosen one of the church wardens, fought the Puritans on the point of installing the non-conformist Mather. The ultimate decision rested with Governor Fletcher, and he refused to induct Mather to the living. Mather preached in the parish for several years, however, and quitted it in 1701 to remove to New Haven.

The first regularly inducted rector of the parish was John Bartow, who waselectedby the vestry of 1701-2, of which the town members were William Willett, Thomas Hunt, Joseph Haviland, John Bayley, Richard Ward, John Buckbee and Edward Collier. He came over from England in 1702 and was an ordained priest of the Anglican Church, having been vicar of Pampsford, Cambridgeshire. His first service in the Westchester Church was on December 6, 1702. He I had first been appointed to the parish of Rye, but Governor Cornbury had settled him at Westchester upon the petition of the all-powerful Heathcote. He appears to have been a hard-working pastor, for, in a letter to the secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, he commends his own conscientious discharge of his duty and informs him that he has " hardly ever missed to officiate on the Lord's Day " and has frequently ridden ten or twenty miles a day to visit the sick. His salary was always in arrears, but he managed to buy a house and five acres of land for one hundred pounds, and the town had [ granted twenty acres of glebe and three acres oi meadow within half a mile of the church, "which in time will be a convenient residence for the minister, j and also a small share in some undivided land, which ; will be to the quantity of about thirty acres more, but about four miles distant."