In 1798, Judge Samuel Hinckley of Northampton, Massachusetts, drew the 72nd draft in the Connecticut Land Company's land lottery and received 15,305 acres in Township 4, Range 1, paying $12,903.23, less than one dollar per acre. The area had long been inhabited by trappers, missionaries, and Native Americans. Among the earliest settlers was James McMullen, who acquired the first 160-acre parcel from Hinckley in 1801. Brookfield Township became the crown jewel of Hinckley's holdings; he named it after a city in England and set aside land for the village green and cemetery for public use forever. During the mid-1820s, the Overland Stage Line ran through Brookfield, linking it with Salem, Warren, and Youngstown in Ohio, and Erie, Pennsylvania, and Dunkirk, New York. In 1823, a company of light infantry militia was organized there under Captain Willis Finzel and 1st Lieutenant Chad Bromley, made up of farmers who furnished their own muskets and dress uniforms and drilled several times a month, mostly on the village green. Brookfield remained largely agricultural until coal was discovered in the 1830s. In the early 1900s, Frederick Masury manufactured explosives in the township's southeast section, which now bears his name, and the business closed with the demise of the coalmines in 1930. Change continued when Yankee Lake Village was incorporated in 1934 to allow Sunday dancing. Today Brookfield combines rural, residential, and industrial areas in the land first described by local Native Americans as "Menshadowa Crebo," meaning "Land of Many Springs."