Originally part of Stamford, this area became Middlesex Parish in 1737 and was incorporated as the Town of Darien in 1820. Settlement had begun about 1700 when the first roads were cut in the woods. In 1703 a school district was set up in Noroton, and in 1708 Scofield’s Mill, afterward called Gorham’s Mill, was built on Good Wife’s River. By 1744 a meetinghouse was completed and the Reverend Moses Mather became first minister. During the American Revolution, Middlesex Parish was frequently raided by local Tories who had fled to Lloyd’s Neck on Long Island. On July 22, 1781, they disrupted services at the meetinghouse, captured Dr. Mather and forty-seven other men, and transported them across the Sound. Dr. Mather with twenty-six of his parishioners suffered five months in foul British prisons in New York City before those who survived their confinement were exchanged and returned to their homes. Until the advent of the railroad in 1848, Darien remained a small rural community of about one thousand farmers, shoemakers, fishermen, and merchants engaged in coastal trading. Population then increased gradually with the arrival of emigrants from Ireland and later from Italy. In 1864 during the Civil War, the first home in the United States for disabled veterans and for soldiers’ orphans was built at Noroton Heights and was named for its founder, Benjamin Fitch of Darien. Following the war, Darien became a popular resort for prosperous New Yorkers who built summer homes in Tokeneke, Long Neck Point, and Noroton. A few daily commuters to New York City were forerunners of the many who later settled there and changed Darien into a residential suburb of metropolitan New York.