Produced by Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) THE TWO HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SETTLEMENT OF THE TOWN OF NEW MILFORD, CONN. June 17th, 1907. [Illustration] ADDRESS DELIVERED BY DANIEL DAVENPORT, Of Bridgeport, Conn. Press of The Buckingham, Brewer & Platt Co. Bridgeport, Conn. ADDRESS DELIVERED AT NEW MILFORD, CONN., JUNE 17TH, 1907, BY DANIEL DAVENPORT OF BRIDGEPORT, CONN., ON THE TWO HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SETTLEMENT OF THE TOWN. The settlement of New Milford began in 1707, exactly a century after that of Jamestown, Va. At that time, although Milford and Stratford at the mouth of the Housatonic had been settled almost seventy years, and the river afforded a convenient highway into the interior, for much of the distance, this place, only thirty miles from the north shore of Long Island Sound, was still beyond the extreme northwestern frontier of New England, and indeed of English North America. The inhabitants of Connecticut then numbered about fifteen thousand, settled in thirty towns, mostly along the shore of Long Island Sound, and upon the banks of the Connecticut and Thames Rivers. During the thirty years next before, a few families from Norwalk had settled at Danbury, from Stratford at Woodbury, from Milford at Derby, and from Farmington at Waterbury. With these exceptions, hardly more than pin points upon the map, and a few settlements about Albany, N. Y., the whole of western and northwestern Connecticut and of western Massachusetts and northern New York was a savage wilderness, covered with dense forests, and affording almost perfect concealment for the operations of savage warfare. Though the northwestern portion of Connecticut was then a most formidable and inhospitable wilderness, strenuous efforts were already being put forth by the Colony to encourage its settlement. For, strange as it seems to us now, at that time, owing to imperfect modes of cultivation and the difficulty of subduing the wilderness, the settled portions of the Commonwealth had begun to feel overpopulated. Twenty-five years before, the Secretary of the Colony had reported to the Home Government, that "in this mountainous, rocky and swampy province" most of the arable land was taken up, and the remainder was hardly worth tillage.