Thomas Abbey was born April 11, 1731, and died June 3, 1811. He served as a soldier in the French and Indian Wars, taking part in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in 1758 and the conquest of Canada in 1761. He was a corporal in the First Regiment of Connecticut Troops from May 25 to November 22, 1758, and a lieutenant in Captain Seth King's Company from April 1 to December 1, 1761. According to tradition, at the Lexington alarm in April 1775, he drummed the congregation out of the meeting house that stood on this spot, then marched to the relief of Boston with the Enfield Company led by Major Nathaniel Terry and Captain John Simons, Jr. He was a lieutenant in Captain Hezekiah Parson's Company in 1775. On May 9, 1776, the General Assembly of Connecticut appointed him first lieutenant in Captain Abel Pease's Company. He served under General Gates at Ticonderoga and vicinity from June to November 1776, was adjutant of Chester's Connecticut State Regiment from June to December 1776, was commissioned captain on January 1, 1777, and on February 1, 1777, the Council of Safety appointed him to Colonel Samuel Wyllys's Regiment in New York, where he held command until November 15, 1778. The meeting house that stood here, built in 1775 by Isaac Kibbe and now the town hall, succeeded an earlier church on the green one-third mile to the south, where Jonathan Edwards preached "Sinners in the hands of an angry God" on July 8, 1741.