Windham County

Many of Windham County's towns were carved out of their neighbors: Brooklyn from Canterbury and Pomfret and Hampton from five surrounding towns, both in 1786; Sterling from Voluntown in 1794; Chaplin from Hampton, Mansfield and Windham in 1822; Eastford from Ashford in 1847; Putnam from Killingly, Pomfret and Thompson in 1855; Scotland from Windham in 1857. Ashford sits in the northwestern corner of the county's “Quiet Corner.” The Quinebaug River and the streams feeding it carried the mill economy — cotton at Killingly and at North Grosvenordale in Thompson, thread at Willimantic in Windham, dye works at Sterling, four railways crossing at Plainfield — until the flood that followed hurricanes Connie and Diane in August 1955 destroyed Putnam's factories and washed away its railroad bed. Israel Putnam runs through the county's stories too: the wolf den he crawled into at Pomfret in 1742, the Brooklyn farm where he died in 1790, and the town named for him. Prudence Crandall opened her school at Canterbury in 1831 and was tried at Brooklyn in 1833.