Colebrook, the last town in colonial Connecticut to be settled, was named after a town in Devonshire, England, for a reason now unknown. In 1765 Benjamin Horton led a trickle of settlers into the virgin forests, and Samuel Rockwell, among those who soon followed, built one of the outpost's first houses two years later; before long, Colebrook's first child was born there, a boy fittingly named Alpha. Iron forges soon developed, with ore drawn by oxen from Salisbury and smelted with plentiful local wood, and cannon for use in the Revolution were made and hauled where needed; a story links one of these to the piece on exhibit in Quebec labeled "Taken by the British at Bunker Hill." Historic structures long defined the center, including the Samuel Rockwell House of 1767, the Colebrook Store of 1812, the former Colebrook Tavern built in 1816 to serve travelers on the old New Haven Turnpike, the Martin Rockwell House of 1793, and the church, whose measurements are precisely like one attributed to Charles Bullfinch, an architect of the United States Capitol. Together they form what has been declared the best-preserved example of a small post-Revolutionary village center surviving in Connecticut, and perhaps in all New England. The town's population and commercial importance peaked just before the Civil War, marked by mills, a scythe factory, tanneries, and woolen and wooden-ware works, and today its cool, airy climate and rural quiet attract a sizeable summer colony each year.