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The nineteenth century was farms, limekilns and one factory. In 1818 Benjamin Gilbert began weaving horsehair sieves in his cellar at Georgetown, on the town's southwest corner. The firm that became Gilbert & Bennett moved from hair to wire, and when the Civil War cut off its Southern customers it painted its surplus wire cloth and sold it for windows — the firm is credited with the first woven-wire insect screening. The railroad came through in 1852, with stations at West Redding, Topstone and Georgetown. The wire mill ran until the end of the twentieth century.
The town began as a gap on the map. The country between Fairfield and Danbury was common land when John Read, a Fairfield-born lawyer, settled a tract he called Lonetown; his deed from the sachem Chickens is dated 1714. Farms and mills gathered around it, the settlement became a parish of Fairfield in 1729, and in 1767 it was incorporated as a town of fewer than a thousand people and named for Read. The spelling settled into Redding, the way it had always been said.
Why People Visit Redding
People come to Redding for what is not here: no highway, no strip, no crowd. They come for a Revolutionary War camp you can walk alone on a winter morning, for sixty miles of trails, and for the hills that drew Mark Twain, Charles Ives and Edward Steichen out of New York.
