Population Growth and Migration

It was hard just to feed, clothe, and shelter a family in seventeenth-cen­tury Connecticut, and knowing where you were and how good your chances were of going to heaven gave everyone enough to worry about. Nobody stopped to count how many there were. It’s not surprising, then, that we don’t really know how many people lived in Connecticut in the colonial era. There are some censuses for the eighteenth century, though, and Jackson Turner Main has said that Connecticut has the best archival sources for demographic analysis of all the English colonies in America.

For general surveys of the topic, see

Cassedy, James H. Demography in Early America: The Beginnings of the Statistical Mind, 1600-1800. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968.

Greven, Philip J., Jr. “Historical Demography and Colonial America.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series 24(July, 1967)3:438-54.

Smith, Daniel Scott. “The Demographic History of Colonial New England.” Journal of Economic History 32(1972): 165-83.

Swedlund, A., et al. “Population Studies in the Connecticut Valley: A Prospectus.” Journal of Human Evolution 5(January, 1976): 75-94.

Temkin-Greener, H., and Swedlund, A. C. “Fertility Transition in the Connec­ticut Valley: 1740-1850.” Population Studies 32(1978).

See also Wells, cited immediately below.

From time to time the Board of Trade in London asked all colonial gov­ernments to submit reports on their local laws, economy, and population. Connecticut, always insecure about its liberal charter and afraid that its self-government might be curtailed, tried to keep a low profile by minimizing its economic activity and its population. The official figures sent in by dissembling governors can be found in Evarts B. Greene and

Virginia D. Harrington, American Population before the Federal Census of  1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932; repr. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1966); and Robert Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America Before 1776: A Survey of Census Data (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).

Historians have long distrusted these official figures, and recently Bruce Daniels, in Chapter 2 of The Connecticut Town (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), developed convincing demographic data that supports historians’ skepticism. His system proves fairly accurate: a census report of which he was unaware shows his interpolated figure for 1760 to be less than 1 percent below the actual figure for 1762. For an alternate method of figuring colonial populations, see Dennis G. Wright, “Demographic Techniques for Small Human Populations: An Examina­tion of Several Communities from Early Connecticut, 1633-1848.” (Doc­toral dissertation. University of Connecticut, 1980) Wright focuses on Windsor, Litchfield, Mansfield, and New London in the period before 1850 and works with fertility and mortality rates. “Reproductive potential and biological state were lowest in New London. Mansfield had the lowest depletion of potential fertility. Selection intensity was highest in New London .... An inverse relation was noted for the indicies of biological state and selection intensity.” (from the abstract)  If you don’t understand that any better than we do, maybe you will be interested to know, at least, that most marriages occurred in the late fall and early winter and that most children were born in February, March, and April.

For the period before 1790 there were four censuses that historians consider reliable. Three of them—those for 1756, 1774, and 1782—are published in Greene and in Wells, both cited above, and, of course, in the Public Records of the Colony. The fourth, that for 1762, was discovered in 1977 and published with commentary by Christopher P. Bickford as “The Lost Connecticut Census of 1762 Found,” in CHS Bulletin 44(April, 1979)2:33-43.

Other sources of population data for the period before the first Federal census:

Friis, Herman R. “A Series of Population Maps of the Colonies and the United States, 1625-1790.” Geographical Review 30(July, 1940):463-70.

McManis, Douglas R. Colonial New England: A Historical Geography. New York: Ox­ford University Press, 1975.

Olson, Albert Lavern. Agricultural Economy and the Population in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut. Tercentenary pamphlet XL.

Thompson, Warren S., and Whelpton, P. K. Population Trends in the United States. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933. Puts Connecticut since its founding in an American context.

Town-by-town population figures since 1790 are printed in the annual editions of the Connecticut State Register and Manual, annotated else­where. Two or three years after each dicennial tally the United States Bu­reau of the Census publishes a volume, Detailed Characteristics, for each state. It is a huge tome, full of information not only about population but also about economic, ethnic, educational, occupational, and other charac­teristics of the people of the state. The first federal census was a crude matter compared with recent ones, but it did list the name of every head-of-household, with the race, sex, and age by categories of the household members. The volume for Connecticut has been published as Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1790 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1966). The federal censuses for 1800 to 1850 have been indexed by heads of families in Connecticut Census Index, Ronald R. Jackson and Gary R. Teeples, compilers (Salt Lake City: Excellorated Index Service, 1977). There is a separate volume for each of the dicennial reports.

The Connecticut Development Commission published A Demographic Analysis of Connecticut, 1790-2000 as Technical Report no. 131 (November, 1962), a highly technical study focused on the twentieth cen­tury. Ronald LaVoie, Peter Judd, and Robert Silva compiled A Graphic Presentation of Population Data, State of Connecticut by County and Town, 1790-1970 (Hartford: Northeast Utilities Service Co., 1976). This work consists of bar graphs—no maps—showing the population increase for every town at ten-year intervals. It also shows densities, but fails to explain that new towns were often set off from old towns, so that some very odd changes appear to have occurred. The Storrs Agricultural Experiment Station has published numerous population studies of the recent de­cades, such as W. H. Groff and J. C. Reiser, “The Population of Connec­ticut: A Decade of Change, 1960-1970,” Bulletin no. 422 (1973). Students of the very recent past will want to look these up. Try your card catalog in the author section under “Storrs” or “Connecticut” or the subject sec­tion under “Connecticut Population.”

See also

Allen, Irving L.; Culfax, J. David; and Stetler, Henry G. “Metropolitan Connec­ticut: A Demographic Profile.” Connecticut Urban Research Reports No. 8. Storrs:

Institute of Urban Research, 1965. See Lowe, below.

Bidwell, Percy Wells. “Population Growth in Southern New England, 1810-1860.” Quarterly Publications of the American Statistical Society 13(December, 1917) :813-39. Includes charts showing relative increases by states.

Crandall, Ralph J. “New England’s Second Great Migration: The First Three Generations of Settlement, 1630-1700.” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 129(October, 1925).

Fuller, Grace Pierpont. An Introduction to the History of Connecticut as a Manufactur­ing State. Smith College Studies in History. Northampton, Mass.: Smith Col­lege, 1915. Fuller develops population figures relevant to the demonstration of Connecticut’s nineteenth-century urbanization.

Holbrook, Stewart H. The Yankee Exodus: An Account of Migration From New Eng­land. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1950.

Lowe, Robert A. “Metropolitan Connecticut: A 1970 Demographic Profile.” Con­necticut Urban Research Report No. 23. Storrs: Institute of Urban Research, 1973. A revision of the 1965 work and of a similar work done by Lowe in 1960. The focus is on SMAS’s and analyses of United States Census data. Mostly ta­bles.

Matthews, Lois K. Expansion of New England. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1909.

Morrow, Rising Lake. Connecticut Influences in Western Massachusetts and Vermont. Tercentenary pamphlet XLIII (1935). Morrow wrote a dissertation (Harvard, 1932) on which this work was based.

Rosenberry, Lois K. M. Migrations from Connecticut Prior to 1800. Tercentenary pamphlet XXVIII (1934)