“In all this time, the parish of St. John’s, New Milford, was a true center of missionary work. We wonder when we read of Dr. Johnson from Stratford extending his journeys to Newtown and Middletown and New London; of Mr. Beach from Newtown visiting New Milford and other places, really caring for a whole county with ‘parts adjacent’; of Mr. Davies from New Milford going about in circuit, preaching and baptizing in Roxbury, and New Preston, and Salisbury, and Litchfield, and Sharon, and divers other places in the Colony, and crossing the line into Great Barrington, where he found difficulties incident to another government, but where a church was built under his care; and how he, in his turn, directed to that place the steps of Gideon Bostwick, who ministered for more than twenty years in Berkshire, in the southern part of Vermont, and in the eastern part of New York. Moreover, there came in 1769, to the clergy of Connecticut, assembled in Convocation in New Milford, a memorial from the few Churchmen in the new settlement of Claremont, in New Hampshire, asking that their case might be presented to the Venerable Society in England, with the hope that they would be allowed at least a catechist and schoolteacher, until (as they said) they should have passed ‘the first difficulties and hardships of a wild, uncultivated country.’ Such a man was commissioned, and did good work as an unordained missionary; while a clergyman was presently sent to make a personal exploration of the northern provinces. It is apart from our immediate topic; but we can never think of the religious history of New Milford without being reminded of that remarkable man, Count Zinzendorf, who held the episcopate among the Moravians, and for a while ministered to the aborigines in this very place--one of the few places in which the Indians remained, and in which they were affected by the preaching of Christianity. There were others also here whose very presence was a challenge to the teaching of the Church at one time or another--Separatists, and Quakers, and Jemimaites, and Glassites. Among them all, the Church held her place, and guided the life of no small part of the whole community.