The first company in New Milford was organized in 1715, and was commanded for twenty years by Captain Stephen Noble. The service for the guarding of the frontier towns in the colony of Connecticut was an exceedingly arduous one. Every male citizen, except the aged, the infirm, and the ministers, was obliged to do military duty. These militia-men had to provide their arms and equipment at their own expense, and, if any business required their absence from the town, they were obliged to provide a substitute and to pay, themselves, for his services. The arms which each soldier furnished consisted of a musket or rifle, a bullet pouch containing twenty bullets, a powder horn containing twenty charges of powder, and such an amount of cloth or buckskin as would make sufficient wadding for this number of charges. These requirements were constant, and frequent examinations were made to see that all of the men of the company complied with them. As New Milford was, during most of these first fifty years of its existence, a frontier town, a line of guards was established which reached across the country from Woodbury to the New York boundary, and the members of the company had to take turns in patrolling this line. The second company in New Milford was organized in 1744, and both of these companies continued to exist until the Revolution. The first recorded service of the New Milford men beyond their own borders occurred about 1758. The greatest accumulation of men found on the record is a company raised for the French and Indian War in 1759. It was commanded by Captain Whiting and was known as the “Tenth Company of Colonel David Wooster’s Third Regiment of Connecticut Levy.” The New Milford men were First Lieutenant Hezekiah Baldwin, Sergeant Israel Baldwin, Corporal John Bronson, Drummer Zadock Bostwick. The privates were Isaac Hitchcock, Barrall Buck (there are two mentions of Buck, he being recorded also as David Buck), Martin Warner, David Hall, Dominie Douglas (whether Dominie stood for minister or was just the baptismal name, I do not know), Thomas Oviatt, Daniel Daton, Joseph Lynes, Ashel Baldwin, Elnathan Blatchford, Ebenezer Terrill, William Gould, David Collings, Joseph Jones, Moses Fisher, Zachariah Ferris, Jesse Fairchild, Joseph Smith, Benjamin Wallis, Benjamin Hawley, Moses Johnson. The Colonial Records do not show where this regiment was used. Colonel Wooster had a long Colonial service and marched with several expeditions toward Canada. How far these men marched is not on record. They were enlisted in the spring, and seem to have returned to their homes in the fall. Whether they went as far as the expedition of that year toward Canada does not appear. Possibly family traditions might throw some light on the matter. In the Eleventh Company of the Second Regiment, Colonel Nathaniel Whiting commanding, Ruben Bostwick was ensign, and the records show that Private James Bennett went from the town in 1760.