“But we are told of no formal church services here for twenty-two years, and of no separate congregation until 1743. At this time, Dr. Johnson, that man of great learning and prudence and missionary zeal, had been ministering for twenty years in Stratford, extending his journeys to places adjacent and remote in the Colony, and exercising a strong and healthful influence on behalf of the Church. Among the young men whom he trained in the Church’s ways and in her theology, his pupils and members of his family, was John Beach, for eight years Congregational minister at Newtown, ‘a popular and insinuating young man,’ as was testified of him, who after ordination in England came back to his former field of labor and began a wonderful work there and in Redding, with a small congregation of five families. These two men came hither at [Illustration: ST. JOHN’S CHURCH] the request of a few Church people, of whom Mr. Beach wrote in 1743 there were about twenty families in New Milford and New Fairfield, who frequently attended church at Newtown, and to whom he ministered at their homes as he was able, but rarely on the Lord’s Day. The town, presently, on the petition of twelve men, granted them a piece of land in the street at its south end, ‘near where the old pound used to stand,’ forty feet by sixty, ‘in order to build a Church of England upon;’ and the building seems to have been erected in 1744.... “Under Mr. Beach’s care many in this part of the colony--for he had a wide circuit for visitations and services--accepted the Church’s ways; and thus was the Church established in the faith and increasing in number, as in the primitive times. When at last he asked to be relieved from the care of the congregations and scattered communicants in Litchfield County, the Rev. Solomon Palmer took charge of the Churchmen in this neighborhood, and became the first clergyman resident here. After five years he removed to Litchfield; and to him succeeded, in 1762, as by a kind of exchange, the Rev. Thomas Davies, whose grandfather and father, faithful laymen, had founded the parishes in Litchfield and Washington. His whole span of life was but thirty years, and he ministered here but four years; but he left a record for untiring labor, constant pastoral labor, persuasive eloquence, and godly living, which has not been effaced by time, and the results of which, we cannot but believe, still remain in this community. Even when there was talk of a division of his work, he proposed to retain the towns of New Milford, Woodbury, Kent, and New Fairfield as his mission, leaving Litchfield, Cornwall and Sharon, with a few Churchmen in nine other towns, to the care of another clergyman. During his ministry, a second house of worship was built, the old church being too small for the congregation; it stood in part on the street, some twenty or thirty rods north of the former site. After Mr. Davies, followed the Rev. Richard (or Richard