This land was known to the Indians as Wonggumbaug, or “crooked pond,” for the curved shape of the large body of water within the present town limits. It was set off in 1706 to be divided by deedholders from the legatees of Joshua, third son of the Mohegan sachem Uncas. The area was settled in 1709, named in 1711 from the City of Coventry in England, and incorporated the following year. Coventry was the birthplace of the martyred patriot Captain Nathan Hale, Yale College 1773, whose last words on the British gallows were, “I only regret that I but one life to lose for my country.” During the Revolutionary War, Jeremiah Ripley, Continental Commissary, maintained a military provisioning depot at his homestead on Ripley Hill. The town became an important stop-over on the Hartford-Boston turnpike opened in 1798 and the starting point of the Windham Turnpike to Norwich in 1820. It was home to Joseph Meacham, John Potwine, Daniel Burnap, Joseph Badger, Jesse Root, Lorenzo Dow, John Turner, and Henry Mason, and was noted for early manufactures of paper, wool, silk, cotton, woven hats, commemorative glass flasks and inkwells, ammunition, wagons, and cardboard boxes. From the Civil War until the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, the mills of South Coventry prospered, as did the North Parish family farms. A trolley line opened in 1909, connecting at Willimantic to Norwich and beyond, and nationally known stars of vaudeville and early radio founded the Lakes Actors Colony in the late 1920s.