The Founding of Connecticut

By Bruce P. Stark

Connecticut was founded by a group of persons who represented just a small fraction of the great stream of Puritan migration to New England in the decade or so before the Puritan Revolution of 1642.

Prior to the great migration of the 1630s, the Connecticut River had been explored by Dutch mariner Adriaen Block in 1614. Nineteen years later, the Dutch established a trading post at the site of Hartford, and shortly thereafter a group of traders from Plymouth constructed a stockade at Windsor. True settlement of the three mother towns of Connecticut took place shortly afterwards. A group of about seventy dissatisfied inhabitants of Dorchester, led by Roger Ludlow (b. 1590), moved to Windsor in the summer and fall of 1635. They settled close to the Plymouth group and bought them out in 1637. Wethersfield was founded in 1635-36 by a group of some thirty families from Watertown led by two ministers, Richard Denton and John Sherman. The last, and most famous, of the migrations to the Connecticut River Valley occurred in June 1636, when Thomas Hooker's (c. 1586-1647) contingent of one hundred went overland from Newtown to the site of Hartford. Similar motives prompted all three groups of settlers: dissatisfaction with the religious and political leadership of Massachusetts Bay and the attractiveness of fertile farm land on a navigable river.

Saybrook, at the mouth of the Connecticut River, was established in November 1635 under terms of the Warwick Patent. Sponsors of the settlement included Lord Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke. The tiny colony's first governor was John Winthrop, Jr. (1605/6-1676), but its two real leaders were Lion Gardiner (1599-1663), who constructed the fort at Saybrook, and George Fenwick (d. 1657), who ruled over the trading post and fort until it became part of Connecticut in 1644.

The defeat of the Pequot Indians in 1637 led to a closer examination of the shoreline of Long Island Sound and the large harbor at Quinnipiac (New Haven) was deemed particularly attractive. Ouinnipiac's proximity to New Amsterdam and the desire to exploit the local fur trade were also factors in persuading the Reverend John Davenport (1597-1669/70) and wealthy merchant Theophilus Eaton (1590-1657/58) to locate their biblical commonwealth on this spot in 1638.

Both colonies incorporated additional towns within their jurisdictions. The New Haven Colony eventually included the towns of Milford, Guilford, Stamford, Branford, and Southold, Long Island, while the larger Connecticut Colony came to include Farmington, Middletown, New London, Stonington, Norwich, Stratford, Fairfield, and Norwalk.

For Further Reading

Andrews, Charles M. The Rise and Fall of the New Haven Colony. New Haven, 1936.  Tercentenary Pamphlet XLVIII.

Pomfret, John E. with Shumway, Floyd M. Founding the American Colonies 1583-1660. New York, 1970. See chapters 11 and 12.

Van Dusen, Albert E. Connecticut. New York, 1961. See chapters 1-3.

* Entry under revision.