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Founding of Lebanon

When European colonists first arrived to the area, the area now known as Lebanon was the territory of the Mohegans. At the time, it was known as Poquechaneed, according to records compiled by the late town historian Alicia Wayland.

The town of Lebanon was formed by the consolidation of a number of tracts of land when the town was incorporated by the General Assembly on October 10, 1700. The tracts of land included early land grants by the General Assembly, cessions by Mohegan Indians, and proprietary purchases by settlers from the Mohegans in the 1690s. The area encompassed nearly 80 square miles. It included the modern town of Columbia and a small section of the town of Andover.

In 1663, the General Court granted to Major John Mason of Norwich a tract of 500 acres of land for services to the colony. Mason selected a tract northwest of Norwich, in what is now the Goshen section of Lebanon, at a place along the Yantic River that the Indians called Pomocook. It was on the Hockanum Path, the Indian path from Norwich to the Connecticut River.

The tract officially confirmed and surveyed in 1664, was the first land grant in what would later become the town of Lebanon. It contained extensive stands of white cedar, valuable for shingles, clapboards and cooperage stock, and was called Cedar Swamp. In 1666, the colony granted the Rev. James Fitch, the minister in Norwich and Mason's son-in-law, a tract of l20 acres adjoining Major Mason's land.

Captain Mason's Mile, as it is first referred to in colony records, was a one-mile wide, seven-mile-long grant from Joshua, son of the Mohegan sachem Uncas, to Captain John Mason, Junior, in March 1675/76. This large tract was adjacent to the earlier Mason and Fitch grants.

Before he died in September 1676, John Mason, Junior, conveyed half the Mile to his father-in-law, the Rev. James Fitch. John Mason 111, as the heir to one half of the Mile, and his grandfather, James Fitch, surveyed the land in 1695 and distributed the land. The area is also called "Fitch's and Mason's Mile."