Tolland: County Seat on the Old Boston Road
Near Hartford, Connecticut
Tolland, Connecticut, was chartered in May seventeen twenty-two after settlers pressed east from Windsor into what they felt was uncrowded land. One theory holds that the name comes from this road's former role as a toll station on the old road between Boston and New York; another traces it to Tolland in Somerset, England.
In seventeen eighty-five, when the state organized Tolland County, this town was chosen as its county seat, a role it held for decades in a region defined by farmland and early textile mills. The old county courthouse and jail still stand on the town green, among the best-preserved colonial civic landscapes in Connecticut. Tolland is now primarily a residential suburb in northeastern Connecticut, its green anchoring a quiet reminder of the time when it governed a county.
