William Goodwin

June 22, 1632: Departed from England on the Lyon sailed by Captain Prence with his wife, his brother Ozias’s family and the family of John White (15563). He married November 7, 1616, in Shalford, Essex, England and worked as hartford church elder. He died March 11, 1673, in Farmington, Connecticut.

From Braintree to the Bay Colony

William Goodwin was a churchwarden in Braintree, Essex, England, before he and his brother Ozias emigrated to New England in 1632 as followers of the Reverend Thomas Hooker, part of the so-called Braintree Company. He settled first in Newtown (Cambridge), Massachusetts, where he became the church elder and, in 1634, one of the town's deputies to the General Court, before following Hooker's congregation to found Hartford, Connecticut, in 1636. There he served as Hartford's church elder for years and, with his neighbor John Crow, built the first sawmill and gristmill on the falls at Burnside, East Hartford, on a 766-acre parcel the two men owned jointly.

Executor, Trustee, and Dissenter

William was a close confidant of Reverend Hooker, and when Hooker died in 1647, William and Edward Hopkins were named his executors, charged with managing his children's affairs and deciding which of his manuscripts should be published — the two men helped bring Hooker's Summe of Church-Discipline to print the following year. When Connecticut's governor Edward Hopkins died in 1657, William was named a trustee of the substantial educational fund Hopkins's will established for the colony, and after two of his co-trustees died, William carried the fund's administration largely on his own with Reverend John Davenport, ultimately using it to found the Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven, the Old Grammar School in Hartford, a grammar school in Hadley, and a gift to Harvard College. William's Hartford years were also marked by a long, bitter dispute with Reverend Samuel Stone, Hooker's successor, over the church's governance; after years of conflict William led around sixty dissenting families in petitioning to leave Connecticut altogether, and in 1659 he became the first ruling elder of a new church the group founded in Hadley, Massachusetts. He died in Farmington, Connecticut, on March 11, 1673, having moved there in his final years, likely to be near the Hooker family.