The town of Weathersfield was named for Wethersfield, Connecticut, the home of some of its earliest settlers. The Connecticut town had taken its name, in turn, from Wethersfield, a village in the English county of Essex, the name of which derived from "wether", or in Old English "wither", meaning a castrated lamb. In England, wethers were trained to lead flocks of ewes to pasture. It was a supreme irony that the name of the Vermont town (with an 'a' inserted) would derive from a connection to sheep, the animal that would come to define Weathersfield's earliest antecedents and first put it on the map.