CTConnecticut History

Quinnetukut, the long tidal river

The state's name is an English mangling of an Algonquian word for the place of the long tidal river, and the river did the organising long before any colony existed. Pequot and Mohegan communities held the southeast, Quinnipiac the harbour at New Haven, Podunk and Tunxis the central valley, Nipmuc the northeast hills. Adriaen Block sailed upriver for the Dutch in 1614 and a Dutch trading post called the House of Hope went up on the site of Hartford in 1633. English Puritans overtook them almost at once, walking overland from the Massachusetts Bay towns with their cattle to found Windsor, Wethersfield and Hartford between 1633 and 1636, the largest party led by Thomas Hooker. Competition over furs and the river became the Pequot War. On May 26, 1637 a force under John Mason burned the fortified village at Mystic, killing several hundred people, and the Treaty of Hartford in 1638 declared the nation dissolved and banned survivors from using the name. The Mashantucket Pequot and Eastern Pequot are recognized today, which shows how well that decree held.

The Fundamental Orders and the oak that swallowed a charter

In January 1639 the freemen of the three river towns adopted the Fundamental Orders, eleven short paragraphs creating a governor, a court of deputies and annual elections with no mention anywhere of the king of England. Whether that counts as the first written constitution establishing a government is an argument historians still enjoy; the legislature settled it locally in 1959 by making Constitution State the official nickname. A stricter separate colony planted at New Haven in 1638 by John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton, which used no juries because it could find none in scripture, was folded in by 1665. John Winthrop Jr. had meanwhile persuaded Charles II to grant a charter in 1662 that left the colony electing its own governor. When James II sent Sir Edmund Andros to Hartford in October 1687 to collect it, the candles went out during the argument and the parchment vanished into a hollow white oak. That tree stood until a storm took it down in August 1856.

The Provisions State and the compromise that built the Senate

Jonathan Trumbull was the only colonial governor to back the rebellion and keep his office, running supply out of a converted store in Lebanon and feeding the Continental Army well enough to earn the state the name Provisions State. Nathan Hale of Coventry was hanged as a spy in September 1776, and Benedict Arnold, born in Norwich, came back in a British uniform on September 6, 1781 and burned New London. At Philadelphia in 1787, Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth broke the deadlock between large and small states with proportional House seats and two senators each, still taught as the Connecticut Compromise. Ratification came on January 9, 1788, fifth in line, after which the state governed itself under its 1662 royal charter for another thirty years, until the constitution of 1818 cut the Congregational church loose from the treasury.

Guns, clocks, brass, hats and insurance

Connecticut industrialised on precision rather than scale. Eli Whitney took a federal contract in 1798 for 10,000 muskets and built an armory at Mill Rock in Hamden around interchangeable parts, an idea he oversold and delivered late but which the valley then perfected. Samuel Colt opened his Hartford armory under a blue onion dome in 1855 and Winchester set up in New Haven after the Civil War. Eli Terry and Seth Thomas began turning out wooden clock movements in the Naugatuck Valley from about 1807 and collapsed the price of a household clock. Waterbury rolled enough sheet metal to become the Brass City, Danbury made hats, Meriden made silverware. Hartford's other export was risk: local underwriters made their reputation by paying in full after the New York fire of 1835 and again after Chicago burned in 1871, which is why an inland river town became the insurance capital of the country.

Nuclear submarines, a hurricane nobody saw coming, and after

The twentieth century here ran on federal contracts. Electric Boat at Groton launched the USS Nautilus on January 21, 1954, the first nuclear powered vessel of any kind. Pratt and Whitney Aircraft was founded in Hartford in 1925, and Igor Sikorsky flew the VS-300 at Stratford in September 1939, the first practical American helicopter. On September 21, 1938 a hurricane arrived with almost no warning, drowning hundreds across New England and flooding downtown Hartford, which is why the river now runs behind dikes. Ella Grasso won the governorship in 1974 and became the first woman in the country elected governor without succeeding a husband. Lowell Weicker forced through the first broad state income tax in 1991. Under the federal gaming act of 1988 the Mashantucket Pequot opened Foxwoods in 1992 and the Mohegan opened Mohegan Sun in 1996.

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Neighbouring states and their histories

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