Litchfield

Variant name of place

Letchfield

Geographic position

41.7472° N, 73.1897° W

Sources

Carley, Rachel. Litchfield: The Making of a New England Town. Litchfield, CT: Litchfield Historical Society, 2011. Print. http://www.townoflitchfield.org/Pages/LitchfieldCT_WebDocs/hist?textPage=1.

General note

The town of Litchfield is located in central Connecticut. The land was inhabited by the Potatuck Tribe, members of the Paugussett confederacy, when the British colonists arrived in the seventeenth century. In the earliest written records, the town’s Native American name is referred to as Bantam, or alternatively Peantam, meaning "he prays" in Algonquian. The name Peantam may have derived from Christian Indians who lived in the area. In 1715, colonists John Mitchell, Joseph Minor, and John Minor purchased a 44,800 acre tract of land for fifteen pounds from the Potatucks, but a provision in the deed stipulated that the Potatucks reserve a piece of land near Mount Tom for their hunting houses. The town was incorporated in 1719 by the Colonial Assembly of Connecticut, and the name was changed to Litchfield after a market center in England. Throughout the 1720s, colonists inhabiting the town built forts and sent alerts to stave off the threat of Native American raids, but throughout the 1730s and 1740s, threats diminished and the town began to stabilize. During the American Revolution, Litchfield served as a center of patriotic activity.