Sudogda

Sudogda stands on the river of the same name in the forest country between Vladimir and Murom. Recorded as a postal settlement in 1552, it lay on the route joining those towns. In the seventeenth century the Sudogda settlement belonged to the state clerk Ivan Gryazev and, after his death in 1640, to Moscow's Simonov Monastery. Catherine II made it a district town in 1778. Its district status was briefly withdrawn in 1796 and restored in 1803, while the road and river continued to shape the settlement.