Early Arrivals

The first eight families arrived here in 1685, beginning a settlement that soon grew in a newly born colony. Before the American Revolution, most of Danbury’s inhabitants were descendants of the first wave of Puritan immigrants who came to Connecticut during the mid-1600s, though growing prosperity also attracted a small steady stream of newcomers, including the Vidito family and Scottish-born merchant and major landowner John McLean, who headed the Continental Commissary here during the Revolution. Peter O’Brien, regarded as Danbury’s first Irishman, married a local woman in the 1820s and settled with her in the Stony Hill district, where their mud and turf shanty with a barrel chimney drew curious locals. In 1756, 18 of the town’s 1,527 residents were black, and by 1774 the number had risen to 50; before and after the Civil War, southern blacks came north to put down roots. In 1832, Lyman Homer Peters of Newtown married Nancy Kerr, a former slave from Maryland; Peters, the town barber, opened Danbury’s first ice cream parlor, owned three houses, and served as the informal leader of Danbury’s small black community. When he died in 1881, the Danbury News praised him as “a man of large, good nature and considerable wit, he was as well liked as he was well known.” Danbury’s population reached 5,964 in 1850, and the arrival of the railroad in 1853 brought many changes, including the development of hat manufacturing machinery, as the town stood on the verge of greater immigration.

Danbury, Connecticut · United States