History of Trumbull, Connecticut

Trumbull, a town in Fairfield County, Connecticut, in the New England region of the United States, was originally home to the Golden Hill Paugussett Indian Nation, and was colonized by the English during the Great Migration of the 1630s as a part of the coastal settlement of Stratford.

However, to have a voice in governmental functions such as adopting laws and establishing taxes, the inhabitants were required to attend town meetings in Stratford, an overnight journey for some.

The new town was named for George Washington's staunch supporter, Revolutionary War governor, patriot, statesman, and merchant Jonathan Trumbull (1710–1785).

[1] The Golden Hill Paugussett Indian Nation occupied the territory of Trumbull as a self-sustaining community for thousands of years before the arrival of the English in the late 1630s.

Trumbull was originally settled as a part of Cupheag, the Pequannock word for "harbor", a coastal settlement established in 1639 by Puritan leader Reverend Adam Blakeman (pronounced Blackman), William Beardsley and either 16 families—according to legend—or approximately 35 families—suggested by later research—who had recently arrived in Connecticut from England seeking religious freedom.

[6] Stratford is one of many towns in the northeastern American colonies founded as part of the Great Migration in the 1630s when Puritan families fled an increasingly polarized England in the decade before the civil war between Charles I and Parliament (led by Oliver Cromwell).

Some of the Stratford settlers were from families who had first moved from England to the Netherlands to seek religious freedom, like their predecessors on the Mayflower, and decided to come to the New World when their children began to adopt the Dutch culture and language.

By the mid-1650s, the Golden Hill Paugussett Indian Nation began to petition the Court of the Colony of Connecticut for compensation for lost territory taken by the encroaching English settlement.

Elder Phillip Groves, Captain William Curtiss and Lt. Joseph Judson, early farmers in Trumbull, were named to a committee to lay out the land as they saw fit.

However, by the 1670s, after numerous individuals were encouraged to and had received permission to dwell outside of the two-mile limit, the Stratford selectmen stopped recording outlivers altogether.

The common land grants were laid out in a fashion so that each tract had a share of a run of water, woods, natural meadow, plains, swamp and ledge.

[12] In 1685, some families filed complaints at the court at the Colony of Connecticut at Hartford saying they were not receiving their land grants from the woods division in a timely manner.

Therefore, the court ordered the town to apportion all common land located between two and six miles from the Stratford meeting house, which included all the territory in the lower third of Trumbull.

John Curtiss, "of Woodbury", sold 4 acres (0.016 km2) to Abraham Nichols that was located "near the place called and known by the name of Lt. Joseph Judson's Farm.

It has been said that Abraham Nichols made the first permanent settlement within Trumbull around 1690 or 1700, depending on the source, and then other families subsequently ventured into the wilderness to establish mills, churches, and schools.

There it stood for decades, without a neighboring habitation within a circuit of several miles; while the sepulchral quietude of its surroundings was rarely broken, even by the echo of a sound adequate to dispel the day dreams, or waken the nocturnal slumbers of its peaceful inhabitants, save that of the casual lowing of kine, the appealing cadence of the whop-poor-will at nightfall, or the grewsome howling of wolves....

Furthermore, in a deed recorded in 1699, Lt. Ebenezer Curtiss received 15 acres (0.061 km2) of land from the three-mile division that was said to be bounded west with Lt. Joseph Judson's farm, now belonging to Abraham Nichols.

[27] The Nichols and White Plains areas were the first to be cultivated and settled within the present-day bounds of Trumbull, due to the fertile soil, spring-fed ponds and natural meadows found there and their proximity to the main village located less than three miles away.

[34] On March 12, 1778, the parish of North Stratford raised money and over 200 pounds (91 kg) of cheese and gammon for those residents, including two slaves, Nero Hawley and Caesar Edwards, and thirteen other residents serving in the southern army in Captain Beebe's Company, Huntington's Brigade, 2nd Connecticut Regiment, stationed at Valley Forge under the command of General George Washington.

This high rocky bluff, at the time, commanded a view of Long Island Sound for 70 miles (110 km), and was used to spy on British ships.

[42] The army was marching in the Washington–Rochambeau Revolutionary Route south to reinforce American troops under the command of General George Washington at the Siege of Yorktown.

A Great Jubilee Day to commemorate the end of major fighting in the Revolutionary War was held on May 26, 1783, at the grounds of the North Stratford meeting house.

Benjamin Plotkin purchased Pinewood Lake and the surrounding acreage and built forty cabins and an auditorium with a revolving stage and incorporated as the Pine Brook Country Club in 1930.

[59] On December 7, 1696, the Farm Highway, present-day Nichols Avenue (Connecticut Route 108), was laid out by the Stratford selectmen to the south side of Mischa Hill.

[60] The highway was 12 rods wide, or 198 feet (60 m), where Broadbridge Brook runs off the south side of Mischa Hill, at Zachariah Curtiss, his land, and at Captain's Farm.

[63]In February 1694, Thomas Lake purchased land on the east side of the natural grassy flood plains of the Pequonnock River near an area called The Falls.

It was financed by NRA grants and Connecticut Highway Department funds, the White Plains Road Overpass is not a typical Parkway structure.

[65] Upon completion of the Merritt, George Dunkelberger, the designer of all sixty-nine original bridges, was asked to sketch a bird's-eye view of a Parkway scene he particularly enjoyed.

He was a cabinet maker by trade and lived his entire life at Nichols Farms where he and his brother Eben commenced the manufacture of saddletrees on a large scale around 1810.

[85] Helicopter inventor Igor Sikorsky lived in Trumbull from 1928, after moving his aircraft manufacturing company that bears his name from New York to Stratford, until 1951.