Willington: A Governor's Lottery and a Woolen Mill Town

Willington was purchased in seventeen twenty by a group of investors, its sixteen thousand acres divided among them, and it was incorporated in seventeen twenty-seven. The principal organizer was Roger Wolcott, who later became governor of Connecticut from seventeen fifty to seventeen fifty-four. Settlers named the town after Wellington, Somersetshire, in England, though the spelling drifted to Willington.

Among Willington's notable births was Jared Sparks, who became a prominent historian and biographer of the founders, and served as president of Harvard. For most of its history Willington was a farming town, but the Willimantic River drew mills in the Industrial Revolution, and woolen mills and a glass factory rose along its banks. Today it remains a small, rural Tolland County town.