William was born in England, near the beginning of the seventeenth century, of respectable parents of the middle class. Tradition, based on accounts from various branches of his descendants, holds that he probably served for a time as one of the little corps of sixteen sergeants-at-arms who were in attendance on Charles I; that he became a Puritan, and emigrated to New England in company with one brother who went to Long Island.

In May, 1637, William was one of the seventy-seven soldiers who attacked and all but exterminated the Pequot Indians in their fort at Mystic, Connecticut. He settled in Hartford very soon after the Pequot expedition. Though an early settler, he was not one of the original proprietors of Hartford. He removed before March 5, 1648, from the village of Hartford to the east side of the Connecticut River at Hocanum. In 1650 or 1651, he removed with the first settlers to Middletown, fifteen miles below Hartford on the Connecticut River. There his house lot of five acres, with ten acres on the opposite side of the street, was in the center of the village, “Lower Houses,” “near ye landing place, by ye spring,” at the southwest corner of the junction formed by the highway leading up from the river and the highway running north and south, which corresponds to the corner of the present Main and Washington streets.¹

William had a total of nine hundred and three acres recorded to him by 1657. In 1666 he received a grant of land in East Hartford of twenty-four acres in a general division. This may have been given him as a veteran of the Pequot War, but it is more likely that he received it as a citizen of Hartford, his rights in which he may have retained. He deeded various tracts of his land to his sons before his death, and bequeathed the remainder of his property to his wife and children in his will.¹