History of Newtown, Connecticut

The 36 became "petition proprietors" legally entitled to own its common land and share in the division when the town decided to parcel out tracts into private hands.

The rooster weathervane (a town symbol), located atop the Newtown Meeting House, is said to have been used as a target by French soldiers encamped here in 1781 during the Revolutionary War.

In the early 19th century, several small industries developed along the town's rivers, which supplied power to the water wheels of shops and mills.

Hat making was an early industry, but the several small shops that developed were put out of business by the 1880s by the larger, more efficient factories in Danbury and Bethel.

At one point there were 14 button shops, but after the Civil War, plastic began to replace the older materials and the industry shriveled.

Local industry has included the manufacture of furniture, tea bags, combs, fire hose, folding boxes, buttons, and hats, as well as farming and mica and feldspar mining.

The Newtown Bee, the weekly newspaper based in town, was founded in 1877, and owned (and operated) by the Smith family since 1881.

The town experienced a big change with an influx of Irish immigrants, many of whom came through the area as railroad workers in the early 19th century and stayed to farm land abandoned by earlier farmers.

[3] Most of the early Irish residents lived in the Sandy Hook and Walnut Tree Hill neighborhoods, as well as farms along Route 25 in the Botsford section of town.

Architect Philip Sutherland designed both the Edmond Town Hall and the Cyrenius H. Booth Library, both completed in the 1930s.

The library is a posthumous gift of Mary Elizabeth Hawley and was named after her maternal grandfather, a doctor in town from 1820 until his death in 1871.

Hawley's gift not only paid for construction of the building, but included a trust fund of about $250,000 which resulted in the town not financing the library until the 1980s.

Not only fireproof, it was furnished with cork floors and acoustic ceiling tiles to deaden sound, and had a built-in humidifying unit and a centralized vacuum cleaner.

In 1948, a lawyer, bought the rights to manufacture the game in exchange for granting the inventor a royalty on every unit sold.

The charter retains a limited Town Meeting form of government with a three-member elected Board of Selectmen, a First Selectman acting as the town's chief executive and administrative officer, and a 12-member Legislative Council acting as the legislative body, and a six-member Board of Finance.