POPULATION: 25,032 AREA: 60 square miles GOVERNMENT: Board of Selectman/Town Meeting INCORPORATED: 1711 DISTANCE TO MAJOR CITIES: Hartford: 40 miles Boston: 133 miles New York City: 61 miles Providence: 100 miles EDUCATION: Performance on Scholastic Assessment Test, June 2001 Graduates Average Math and Verbal Total: 1077 2000-01 Net Current Expenditures Per Pupil (NCEP): $8,094

The Settlement of Newtown
Daniel Cruson

The settlement of Newtown began in 1708 when 36 men petitioned the Colony’s General Assembly for permission to settle a town in an area north of Stratford. These 36 “petition proprietors” were the first real settlers of Newtown. The term “proprietors” had a specific meaning in Colonial Connecticut. It defined the inhabitants of a town who owned its common land and were entitled to share in its division when the town chose to put that land into private hands.

Coming primarily from the towns of Stratford and Milford, the men were in their late twenties or thirties. Most were farmers, second and third generation English immigrants who were finding the coastal areas cramped.

The first area to be settled away from the village was Sandy Hook. There, the water power of the Potatuck River lured settlers intent on erecting the saw and grist mills necessary for the town’s continued growth. Although Sandy Hook would not grow dramatically until the industrialization of the mid-19th century, there was a small but important community here within a year of Newtown’s becoming a town.

Tracing the establishment of the 20 school districts can provide some ideas of how fast the settlements grew. By 1738 the population around Taunton Lake was large enough to demand its own school. Ten years later the areas of Zoar in the east and Land’s End to the north had also prospered and grown to the point of needing a school. In 1748 Palestine wanted its own school, and by 1755 Hanover had joined the group. Thus, by 1760 there were seven schools including two in the village itself.

By 1794, the number of schools in Newtown had grown to 19. (Walnut Tree High School was not established until 1866.) Although the old school districts were abolished in the 1920s, their names have survived and are still used to designate different areas of the town. The little communities with engaging names such as Dodgingtown, Lake George, Hanover, Hattertown and Head O’Meadow are all fossils of the settlement patterns as well as quaint reminders of our agricultural past.