Wyllys, Samuel, 1632 - 1709

Samuel Wyllys (Harvard 1653) was the son of George Wyllys and Mary Wyllys of Fenny Compton, England.  He immigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony with his some of his family in the early 1630s and removed to Hartford in 1638, where in 1639 his father, George, was elected to the Court of Assistants and in 1642 appointed governor of the colony.  A year after his graduation from Harvard College, Samuel became husband of Ruth Haynes, daughter of Connecticut’s first governor, John Haynes.  For 34 years, Wyllys served as a magistrate of the Upper House of the Connecticut legislature and represented Connecticut as a commissioner of the United Colonies.  During King Philip’s War he, with Thomas Stanton and Major John Winthrop were commissioned to negotiate terms of peace with the Indians.  Wyllys made several purchases of Indian land, including tracts at Haddam, Plum Island (which he bought of Wyandanch, the Montauk sachem).  David D. Field, A History of the Towns of Haddam and East Haddam (Middletown, Loomis and Richards, 1814), 4.  William S. Pelletreau, A History of Long Island, From its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, vol. 2 (New York: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1905), 438.