The original inhabitants of the part of Farmington known as West Woods were Tunxis Indians, and early white settlement was scattered. The first house of record, noted in an estate inventory of 1725, was that of John Wiard, who had bought land in 1721. In 1774 the settlers, citing their distance from Farmington, petitioned for an ecclesiastical society, and the Society of West Britain was established; their first church was built in 1783. A number of Seventh Day Baptists from Rhode Island had settled here, and John Davis was appointed elder in 1771 to minister to the group as part of the Hopkinton, Rhode Island, church. By 1780 Elder Davis was appointed to organize an independent church, and it was built in 1800. In 1785 the parishes of West Britain and New Cambridge were set off as the Town of Bristol, and they remained so until 1808, when West Britain was incorporated as the Town of Burlington. Burlington was also the home or early home of prominent educators including Romeo Elton, minister and later classics professor at Brown University, and Herman Humphrey, who came here at age six, was educated locally, and in 1823 became president of Amherst College. Early manufacturers included Ethan Stillman, a firearms maker who contracted in 1808 with the Federal Government for 2500 muskets; Elisha Hotchkiss, a major clockmaker from 1820 to 1837 who made clocks for the trade and Yankee pedlars; and George J. Hinman, who came here in later years and erected a sawmill that ran the first circular saw in the state, with the fifth generation of the family remaining in the same business. The Bristol copper mine, located mostly in Burlington, was discovered in the late 1700's, first worked in 1802, operated only spasmodically afterward, and was abandoned in 1895. The town is now mainly residential and serves as a source of water supply to nearby cities.