Originally called Kibbe's Village, Kenyonville dates to 1843, when Joseph Kenyon bought the Valley Woolen Mill from Chauncey Kibbe for $950. Born in Huddersfield, England, in 1805, Kenyon had studied woolen manufacturing, came to America in 1840 seeking a weaving business, and prospered enough to bring his parents and siblings to join him. The family came to own many acres along the Still River and Crystal Pond, employed 20 to 25 people, and built several workers' houses along Kenyonville Road. After Joseph died in 1870, his son Albert, a Civil War veteran, ran the mill, which had been renamed Kenyon and Son after the war and had produced cloth for uniforms and blankets during the Civil War. Its former scale is still reflected in cellar-holes, stonework, sluiceways, and the remains of a dam that collapsed in the 1980s, while the 5-acre mill pond had supplied both mill power and the community's yearly ice before refrigeration. The mill remained productive until 1888, when competition from textile mills nearer railroad transportation overcame it, and it burned a few years later. In the 1890s, Joseph's other surviving son, Winfield Scott Kenyon, established a saw mill and box factory upriver, powered by water and steam and supported by local pine forests that supplied wood for shipping boxes before cardboard. His sons Amos Winfield "Winnie" and Ferdinand, the latter a U.S. Navy veteran of World War I, later ran the Still River Box Shop, which burned in 1932. The nearby area known to the family as the big field was used for agriculture, and in 2009 Jeanne Kenyon DeBell, Ferdinand's daughter and the last of the line to bear the Kenyon name, donated more than 20 acres of adjacent woodland to the New Roxbury Land Trust, preserving Kenyon Woods as protected open space. Across generations, the Kenyon family included entrepreneurs, laborers, farmers, blacksmiths, teachers, artists, engineers, nurses, and a veterinarian; several served in wartime, Susan Gray Kenyon became one of Connecticut's first female state police officers after being widowed at 38 and lived on this land until the 1990s, several generations are buried in Barlow Cemetery, and the family's roots and work became deeply woven into the history of this place.