Lordship is a small, waterfront neighborhood in Stratford, Connecticut. The neighborhood extends onto a peninsula on Long Island Sound and is bounded from the rest of Stratford by Sikorsky Memorial Airport to the north and Short Beach to the north east. Lordship is accessible by only two roads, both parts of Route 113.
Lordship is home to the Stratford Point Light.
The first inhabitants of Lordship were the Paugussetts who had a large village at Fresh Pond and smaller encampments at Stratford Point and at Indian Well (areas in Lordship). Indian Well was a fresh water pond where the old trolley line crossed Duck Neck Creek just north of the rotary near the firehouse. When the first settlers arrived in 1639, they found that Indians were using this area to plant corn, so there was little clearing necessary. Originally Lordship, called Great Neck, was a “Common Field” worked and owned by settlers who returned home to the safety of the palisade fort at Academy Hill at night. Richard Mills was the first to build a farmhouse in Great Neck in the western end near present day Second Avenue. He sold his estate to Joseph Hawley (Captain) in 1650 and moved. It is in connection with his name that the term Lordship is first found, as applied to a meadow on what is still known as the Lordship farm. It is said in deeds of land - 1650 to 1660 – several times, Mill’s Lordship and the Lordship Meadow. Richard Beach came to Stratford with a family and in 1662, he purchased one of five acres on west point of the Neck, butted south upon the meadow called Mill’s Lordship.[1]
Gustave Whitehead is reported to have used the windswept sandy areas of Lordship during some of his early powered flight trials in the early 1900s.[2]