Lordship, Connecticut

Lordship is a small waterfront neighborhood located in Stratford, Connecticut, USA. It is a peninsula that extends into Long Island Sound. Within Lordship the Stratford Point Light is located.

History

The first inhabitants of Lordship were the Paugussetts who had a large village at Fresh Pond and smaller encampments at Stratford Point and at Indian Well (areas in Lordship). Indian Well was a fresh water pond where the old trolley line crossed Duck Neck Creek just north of the rotary near the firehouse. When the first settlers arrived in 1639, they found that Indians were using this area to plant corn, so there was little clearing necessary. Originally Lordship, called Great Neck, was a “Common Field” worked and owned by settlers who returned home to the safety of the palisade fort at Academy Hill at night. Richard Mills was the first to build a farmhouse in Great Neck in the western end near present day Second Avenue. He sold his estate to Joseph Hawley in 1650 and moved. It is in connection with his name that the term “Lordship” is first found, as applied to a meadow on what is still known as the Lordship farm. It is said in deeds of land - 1650 to 1660 – several times, “Mill’s Lordship” and the “Lordship Meadow.” Richard Beach came to Stratford with a family and in 1662, he purchased one of five acres “on west point of the Neck,” butted south upon the meadow called “Mill’s Lordship”.

Gustave Whitehead is reported to have used the windswept sandy areas of Lordship during some of his early powered flight trials in the early 1900s.

External links

• Lordship History

41°09′14″N 73°06′43″W