Originally home to the Paugusset people, the Nichols area was colonized by the English during the Great Migration of the 1630s as a part of the coastal settlement of Stratford.

The village of Unity (later called North Stratford) continued for seventy-two years before the privileges of a town were granted in 1797.

[4] In 1661, the Stratford selectmen voted to allow all inhabitants the liberty of taking up a whole division of land anywhere they could find fit planting ground as long as it was not within two miles (3 km) of the town meeting house, and they were prohibited from making it their dwelling place without consent.

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

[5] The common land in Nichols Farms was divided to individuals beginning in 1670 as a part of the three-mile or woods division, and continued up to 1800.

Jeremiah Judson and Joseph Curtiss established their farms on Mischa Hill before 1658, the year in which they were elected as freemen by the legislature of the Connecticut Colony.

Abraham Nichols was believed to have made the first permanent settlement within Trumbull around 1690 or 1700, depending on the source, and that others soon followed venturing 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.

It is a subject of profound regret on the part of many of the descendents of Abraham Nicholls that neither his will nor the inventory of his estate can be found of record.

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

The highway was laid out to the south side of Mischa Hill and at Zachariah Curtiss, his land, and at Captain's Farm.

A large 5' by 6' natural stepping stone was the only item saved from the Nichols Store; it was relocated to the front of the Ephraim Hawley House.

[17] State officials excluded 78 buildings from the initial district that were located on Huntington Turnpike, Nichols Avenue and Shelton Road.