Near this place in 1636, Thomas Hooker and his party may have passed by way of the Connecticut Path on their way to settle what is now Hartford. In 1674, John Eliot, Apostle to the Indians and pastor of the First Church in Roxbury, Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Major Daniel Gookin visited a peaceful encampment of Wabbaquasetts living near present-day Woodstock, preached from nearby Eliot Rock, and sought to establish their church among the natives of these lands. King Phillip’s War broke out in 1675, during which the Wabbaquasetts deserted the area. The site was then chosen for settlement, and on April 5, 1686, Peter Aspinwall, Thomas Bacon, Henry Bowen, Matthew Davis, John Frizzel, Nathaniel Gary, John Gore, Benjamin Griggs, George Griggs, John Marcy, Ebenezer Morris, Benjamin Sabin, and Jonathan Smithers came from Roxbury as the Thirteen Goers to found the Town of New Roxbury, the first European settlement in the area that became Windham County. Judge Samuel Sewall gave it the name Woodstock in 1690 because of its nearness to Oxford, for the sake of Queen Elizabeth, and the town remained part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony until 1749, when it seceded to become part of the Connecticut Colony. From these hills, Captain, later General, Samuel McClellan went following the alarums sounded from Lexington and Concord in 1775 with 184 men, a greater number than from any other town in the colony. Woodstock was also the birthplace of Jedediah Morse, called the father of American geography, and Henry C. Bowen, founder of the Independent, a pre-Civil War anti-slavery newspaper, builder of Roseland Cottage, benefactor of Woodstock Academy, founded in 1801, and donor of Roseland Park. The many small rural industries of 19th century Woodstock are now represented by the making of electrical components and plastics in a community mainly agricultural and residential.