New Milford: Frontier Town, Housatonic Shore

In seventeen oh-seven, when the first English settlers pushed into the upper Housatonic valley, they were at the edge of the known English world. New Milford was, by the reckoning of the era, beyond the northwestern frontier of New England, a stretch of river valley that Milford and Stratford at the coast had been settled for sixty years without anyone pushing this far inland. The first arrivals were Zachariah Ferris in seventeen oh-six and John Noble and his daughter in seventeen oh-seven.

Noble's daughter Sarah was eight years old when they arrived. The town received full town privileges in seventeen twelve. The location at the Housatonic made it a commercial and milling center for northwestern Connecticut through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the village green it developed became the longest in the state.