Originally part of Plainfield, Canterbury was incorporated in October 1703. Its area included the original Quinebaug Plantation of Major James Fitch, son of the Reverend James Fitch of Saybrook Fort and a first settler of Norwich in 1659. In 1697, Major Fitch became the first Puritan settler at Peagscomsuck, in that portion of the Colony of Connecticut comprising the most fertile, stone-free area in the Quinebaug Valley, known as the Quinebaug Country. The Narragansett Indians had claimed and held this region until King Philip's War in 1675. In the nearby village of Packer stood the site of a trading post established by Roger Williams of Providence Plantations soon after the Pequot War in 1637, and the area later became a settlement for Rhode Island planters. General Moses Cleaveland, a lawyer, veteran of the Revolutionary War, and founder of the city of Cleveland, Ohio, in the Western Reserve, was born in Canterbury on January 29, 1754, and died there on November 16, 1806. In 1831, Miss Prudence Crandall of South Canterbury, a Quaker school teacher, opened a boarding school for young ladies at Canterbury Green in the house built by Elisha Paine in 1792. After accepting a black girl as a day student, she became a victim of the prejudice, bigotry and snobbery of puritan intolerance prevailing on Canterbury Green at the time, and in April 1833 she established the first school for black girls in the State of Connecticut.