Wallingford, Connecticut
Wallingford, South Central Connecticut Planning Region, Connecticut
Marker Inscription
Wallingford This territory was purchased by the New Haven Colony in 1638 from Montowese, son of an Indian sachem. It was named after Wallingford, England, and was settled in 1670 by planters from New Haven and Stratford. Its boundaries originally encompassed present-day Cheshire, Meriden, and part of Prospect. From 1766 when the "True Sons of Liberty" order was formed in the town, the cause of liberty was of foremost importance. A native son, Dr. Lyman Hall, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Originally agricultural, the town has made a lasting name for itself through the development of the silverware industry. Erected by the Town of Wallingford, the Wallingford Historical Society and the Connecticut Historical Commission 1976
Erected by The Town of Wallingford, the Wallingford Historical Society and the Connecticut Historical Commission
The Story
The land here was bought from Montowese in 1638 and settled in 1670 by planters from New Haven and Stratford, who named it for an English town. Fiercely patriotic — home to a 'True Sons of Liberty' chapter and to Declaration signer Dr. Lyman Hall — the town later traded its farming roots for lasting fame in the silverware industry.
Why it matters
Wallingford's arc from Puritan plantation to Revolutionary hotbed to industrial silver town compresses much of New England's whole story into a single community.
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Related people
- · Montowese
- · Lyman Hall
Related events
- · Purchase of the land, 1638
- · Settlement of Wallingford, 1670
- · Sons of Liberty organized, 1766
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Wallingford Parade Ground (Town Green)
Wallingford, CT
Set aside as the town common in Wallingford's original 1670 plan, this green — long called the 'Parade Ground' — is as old as the town itself. Puritan founders placed the common and meetinghouse here to embody the shared faith and purpose behind their migration; by the 1800s it had become the central park of a bustling industrial town.
Opposition to Tyrants Monument, 1896
New Haven, CT
The stern motto carved here — 'Opposition to tyrants is obedience to God' — echoes a Revolutionary-era American ideal, a version of a sentiment famously proposed for the national seal in 1776 and embraced by generations who held that resistance to unjust power was a sacred duty. Set on a monument dated 1896, the words carried that founding conviction into the Gilded Age, when Americans often looked back to the founders' language of liberty.
Guilford Granite
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In 1886, when the Statue of Liberty rose over New York Harbor, the granite that anchored her pedestal came in part from the storied quarries of the Connecticut shoreline near Guilford. The region's dense, salmon-hued Stony Creek granite was prized in the Gilded Age for grand public works, shipped by rail and barge to build banks, bridges, and monuments up and down the East Coast. A century later, on June 28, 1986, the town set this marker to claim its small but enduring share in the nation's most famous symbol of welcome.
Meigs' Raid American Revolutionary War
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