Canterbury, Connecticut

Canterbury is a town in Windham County, Connecticut, United States. The population was 5,234 at the 2010 census.HistoryThe area was first settled in the 1680s as Peagscomsuck, consisting mainly of land north of Norwich, south of New Roxbury, Massachusetts and west of the Quinebaug River, Peagscomsuck Island and the Plainfield Settlement. In 1703 it was officially separated from Plainfield and named The Town of Canterbury.In 1832, Prudence Crandall, a schoolteacher raised as a Quaker, stirred controversy when she opened a school for black girls in town. The Connecticut General Assembly passed the "Black Law" which prohibited the education of black children from out of state, but Crandall persisted in teaching, and was briefly jailed in 1832. Mobs forced the closure of the school in 1834, and Crandall married the Reverend Calvin Philleo that same year and moved to Illinois. Connecticut repealed the Black Law in 1838, and later recognized Crandall with a small pension in 1886, four years before her death. In 1995, the Connecticut General Assembly designated Prudence Crandall as the state's official heroine because she opened the first Academy for young black women. The school still stands in Canterbury, and currently serves as the Prudence Crandall Museum and is a National Historic Landmark. In 2009 a life-size bronze statue of Prudence Crandall with one of her African American students was installed in the state capital.GeographyAccording to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 40.2sqmi, of which, 39.9sqmi of it is land and 0.2sqmi of it (0.62%) is water.