Enfield
Settled 1680
Established as the township of Enfield, 1683, this area was part of the Springfield Plantation granted to William Pynchon and others by the Massachusetts General Court. Springfield was settled in 1636, but no effectual grants were made here until after King Philip's War of 1675-1676.
In 1679 John Pease and his brother Robert, of Salem, Massachusetts, visited the land and spent the winter alone, in a hut on the hillside of the present Enfield Street Cemetery. The next spring, 1680, they removed their families along with those of their father John Pease, Sr. and Elisha Kibbe to Freshwater Plantation. Within three years thirty more families from Salem and vicinity joined them.
In 1688 a purchase for twenty-five pounds sterling was made of the Indian sachem Nottatuck of all lands from the Asnuntuck or Freshwater Brook to the Umquatuck at the foot of the falls, and extending eight miles east. The Springfield Committee governed Enfield until 1693, when the town began to control its own affairs.
Enfield became part of Connecticut in 1749 by secession from the royal government of Massachusetts Bay and union with the charter government of Connecticut. The groundwork for such a step had been laid more than a century earlier by an error of the surveyors Woodward and
Saffery, who in 1642 established a boundary between the colonies running southwestward nearly to the site of Windsor.
Erected by the Town of Enfield
the American Revolution Bicentennial
Commission of Enfield
and the Connecticut Historical Commission
1976
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