Leffingwell, Thomas, 1624 - 1713

The ancestry of Thomas Leffingwell is uncertain.  Some believe he was a son of Thomas and Alice Leffingwell of White Colne, Essex, England.  He appears at the Saybrook Colony by 1637, where, by 1648, he had begun to raise a family.  In 1645 he was sent by John Mason to relieve the Mohegans with provisions during the siege of Fort Shantock by the Narragansetts, an endeavor that was rewarded by a gift of land by Uncas.  One of the titleholders of the Mohegan sachems’ nine square mile grant in 1659, Leffingwell removed from Saybrook to the Sentry Hill section of the new town of Norwich the following year.  In 1667, he petitioned the General Court to confirm Uncas’ land gift to him and subsequently received two hundred acres outside the limits of Norwich on the east side of the Shetucket River.  Leffingwell served as a Norwich selectman (1677-1684), deputy to the Connecticut General Court (1661-1700), and surveyor.  From, at least, 1667 to 1683 he laid out land in various parts of Connecticut and Rhode Island Indian Country.  Leffingwell also held several military positions.  In Norwich’s train band, he was sergeant (1659-1672), ensign (1672-1676), and lieutenant (1676-1713).  During King Philip’s War, he commanded an expedition against the Narragansett that captured Canonochet, the son of Miantonomo.  With Captain George Denison, he was responsible to organizing volunteers to range the woods for Indians and to prohibit any Indian from settling in the Narragansett Country.  After the war, he continued his surveying business.  Authorities hired him in 1676 to locate the bounds of Herman Garrett’s land in Stonington, and seven years later, he served on a committee with James Fitch and James Avery to lay out a suitable tract of planting grounds for Pequots under Mamoho.  In 1696, he and other veterans of King Philip’s War petitioned the government for a grant of land for their service.  Four years later, they were granted a six-mile square in the Narragansett Country.  Because of his familiarity with the Mohegan tribe and his knowledge of the landscape, Leffingwell was appointed by Queen Ann in 1704 to be a commissioner in the first round of court hearings in the Mohegan Case.  Samuel Gardner Drake, Biography and History of the Indians of North America, 5th ed. (Boston: Antiquarian Institute, 1837), 92-93.  Albert Tracy Leffingwell and Charles Wesley Leffingwell, 1637-1897: The Leffingwell Record (Aurora, NY: Leffingwell Publishing Company, 1897), 11-25.  Caulkins, History of Norwich, 43, 44, 84.