In 1720 a party of eight men, originally from England, bought sixteen thousand acres in this region and called it Wellington. One of them, Roger Wolcott, subsequently became governor of Connecticut from 1750 to 1754. After a century of farming, the town gradually expanded industrially until by 1845 it boasted a thread mill, a cotton mill, three silk factories, a scythe factory, four comb factories, button mills, and a glassworks, operating from 1815 to 1871, that produced demijohns and flasks with varying designs. Persons of distinction born here included Jared Sparks, who lived from 1789 to 1866 and became a historian, biographer, and president of Harvard, and Elias Loomis, a Yale professor celebrated as a mathematician and astronomer.