and six miles from the Stratford meeting house, which included all the territory in the lower third of Trumbull. The division of the common land in Trumbull took until 1800 to complete entirely. Subsections Woodbury In the 1660s, Lt. Joseph Judson had a disagreement with the majority of elders in Stratford as he tried to introduce the Half-Way Covenant, and this led to a major rift which lasted for many years and split the town. In 1671, Judson received permission from then-Governor John Winthrop, Jr. to create a new town called Woodbury inland. Judson and Reverend Walker left Stratford with a dozen other families and moved to the newly created town, abandoning their farms in the Trumbull area of Stratford. Judson and Walker died in Woodbury in 1690 and 1699 respectively. Joseph Judson and many others had established their farms in Trumbull decades before leaving for Woodbury in 1671. These farms were not sold initially, but were just physically abandoned and were referred to in the land records as Old Farms. Some of the other families to remove to Woodbury, abandoning their farms in Trumbull, were Caleb Nichols, Abraham's father, who removed to Woodbury and died there in 1690, and John Curtiss, who gifted his entire farm in the woods on "Misha [sic] Hill" (Trumbull) to his son Benjamin in 1688 and removed to Woodbury. In a deed recorded at Stratford in 1710, Sgt. John Curtiss, "of Woodbury", sold to Abraham Nichols that was located "near the place called and known by the name of Lt. Joseph Judson's Farm." Nichols It is not known exactly when the first settlers began to clear land and establish farms in the area, due to the fact that the first volume of Stratford's land records was destroyed around 1650. The first settlements were doubtless made soon after the settlement of the mother-town of Stratford in 1639. By 1658, Lt. Joseph Judson, Jeremiah Judson and Joseph Curtiss became freemen by the court of the Colony of Connecticut and established farms there. A freeman had to own real property in their own name before they could be elected as freemen. The area now called Nichols, located in southeastern Trumbull, was first called Mischa Hill in the land records for the Native American who lived there. In the late 1660s, it was commonly called Lt. Joseph Judson's Farm, or Judson's Farm, after the owner of the largest