Early in 1663 the townsmen, at a public meeting, appointed Richard Yowles as constable, who went to Hartford and was duly qualified. John Budd was selected as the first deputy to the Connecticut general court, which body, on the 8th of October, 1663, designated him as commissioner for the Town of Hastings with " magistraticall power." The Island of Manussing, only one mile in length, was in the course of two or three years found inadequate for the growing requirements of the colonists, and they began to build up a new settlement on the mainland. This was probably in 1661. Meantime other colonists had joined them, including Thomas and Hachaliah Browne, George Lane, George Kniffen, Stephen Sherwood, and Timothy Knap. They called the new village Rye, " presumably," says Baird, " in honor of Thomas and Hachaliah Browne, the sons of Mr. Thomas Browne, a gentleman of good family, from Rye, in Sussex County, England, who settled at Cambridge, Mass., in 1632/' " The original division of Rye consisted of ten acres to each individual planter, besides a privilege in the undivided lands." The general court of Connecticut, on the 11th of May, 1665, ordered " that the villages of Hastings and Rye shall be for the future conjoyned and made one plantation, and that it shall be called by the appellation of Wye" Gradually the island was abandoned. The village of Rye became Avithin a few years a very respectable little settlement. It lay k" at the upper end of the Neck, along the eastern bank of Blind Brook, and the present Milton road was the village street, on either side of which the home-lots of the settlers were laid out. . . . The houses erected were not mere temporary structures, as on Manussing Island, but solid buildings of wood or stone, some of which have lasted until our own day.