American administrator, born in Windsor, CT, on the 4th of January 1679, the son of Simon Wolcott (d. 1687). He was a grandson of Henry Wolcott (1578–1655) of Galdon Manor, Tolland, Somerset, who emigrated to New England in 1628, assisted John Mason and others to found Windsor, CT, in 1635, and was a member of the first General Assembly of Connecticut in 1637 and of the House of Magistrates from 1643 to his death. 1 Roger Wolcott was early apprenticed to a weaver and throve at this trade; he was a member of the Connecticut General Assembly in 1709, one of the Bench of Justices in 1710, commissary of the Connecticut forces in the expedition of 1711 against Canada, a member of the Council in 1714, judge of the county court in 1721 and of the superior court in 1732, and deputy-governor and chief-justice of the superior court in 1741. He was second in command to Sir William Pepperrell, with rank of major-general in the expedition (1745) against Louisbourg, and was governor of Connecticut in 1751–1754. He died in what is now East Windsor, on the 17th of May 1767.
He wrote Poetical Meditations (1725), an epic on The Agency of the Honourable John Winthrop in the Court of King Charles the Second (printed in pp. 262–298 of vol. iv., series 1, Collections of Massachusetts Historical Society), and a pamphlet to prove that “the New England Congregational churches are and always have been consociated churches.” His Journal at the Siege of Louisbourg is printed in pp. 131–161 of vol. i. (1860) of the Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society.
