Lt. Thomas Leffingwell
Nothing certain is known of Thomas Leffingwell's birth or parents. He was about ninety two when he died in 1714, which puts his birth about 1622, in England. The family carried three traditions of where. One made him a native of "Croxall" or "Coxwell," who came to New England at fourteen and went home at twenty one to marry Mary White and bring her back. Following that hint, the family's genealogist Mr. Huntington "searched the records for the baptism of a Thomas Leffingwell both in Croxall, County Derby, and Coxall in Essex, but without result." A second tradition named "Croxhall in Yorkshire," where there is no such place. The third, which the Leffingwell Record of 1897 itself preferred, points to a Thomas, son of Thomas and Alice Leppingwell, baptised at White Colne in Essex in March 1624. The book called the evidence for it "significant, but not conclusive." A date of 10 March 1622 at Croxall, given in some accounts, is the first tradition with a day attached, and no baptism record stands behind it.
He was at Saybrook, the fort and settlement at the mouth of the Connecticut river, by the 1640s, and was an ensign there. In 1645 he did the thing he is remembered for. Uncas, the sachem of the Mohegans, was besieged in his fort on the Thames by the Narragansetts and sent word to Saybrook. Leffingwell loaded a canoe with beef, corn and pease, paddled it under cover of darkness from Saybrook into the Thames, and got the whole cargo into the fort. The besiegers saw that Uncas had been supplied and gave up the siege.
His children were born at Saybrook from 1648. The earliest record of him in the colony's own books is dated 20 March 1649/50, when "Matthew Griswold and Tho. Leppingwell" brought the General Court a "petition from the inhabitants of Saybrook," complaining of the court's earlier action against the town.
In 1659 and 1660 he was one of the company that moved up from Saybrook with Major John Mason and the Rev. James Fitch to found Norwich. By Trumbull's account Uncas had already given him a deed of a great part of the town for the relief of 1645. In June 1659 Uncas and his two sons, Owaneco and Attawanhood, made over the whole township of Norwich, about nine miles square, to Leffingwell, Mason, Fitch and the rest of thirty five proprietors. A monument to Mason in the Founders' Cemetery at Norwich carries the founders' names, and "Sergt Thos Leffingwell" is the first of them, followed by Richard Wallis, Thomas Adgate, John Olmstead, Stephen Backus, Thomas Bliss, John Reynolds, Josiah Reed, Richard Hendys and Christopher Huntington.
He sat for Norwich in the General Court at fifty three sessions between 1662 and 1700, and served as a lieutenant in King Philip's War. In a petition of May 1667 he recalled the relief in his own words. In 1705 he served as one of Queen Anne's commissioners on the Mohegan land claims, and testified that "in the year 1637, he was well acquainted with Uncas."
His wife was Mary, whose surname is not known. Their children were Rachel, Thomas, Jonathan, Joseph, Mary, Nathaniel and Samuel. In 1672 and 1673 his son Thomas and his daughter Mary married a sister and brother, Mary and Joseph Bushnell, the stepchildren of his fellow founder Thomas Adgate. His son Thomas kept the town's ordinary, its licensed inn, from 1700. His wife died on 6 February 1710/11, entered by the Norwich clerk as "Mary Leffingwell, the Wife of Liut Thomas Leffingwell."
In September 1714 he deeded his home lot to his grandson Samuel "in consideration of my comfortable maintainance during my naturall Life." He died soon after, about ninety two years old.
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Cite: Heirology, "Lt. Thomas Leffingwell (1622-1714)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/lt-thomas-leffingwell-1622-1714-792dc2.