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An Empire of the Mind
New Haven's earlies settlers dared to dream great dreams-but in the end were ill-equipped to lay the foundation of a viable commercial empire in the New World
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Business New Haven
9/15/2003
By: Priscilla Searles
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In commemoration of Business New Haven’s tenth anniversary, we bring
you the first in a four-part series on the history of commerce and industry
over the course of New Haven’s 365-year history. Parts II through IV will be published in subsequent editions of Business New Haven.
Religion and economics were the motivating factors in the founding of New Haven more than three and a half centuries ago.
On April 24, 1638 a group of English merchants and 500 followers, led by John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton, arrived on the banks of the Quinnipiac River after sailing west across Long Island Sound.
Who were these first settlers, and how did they end up in New Haven? Davenport, a Congregational (read: Puritan) clergyman, and Eaton, a prosperous London merchant, had been childhood playmates. Because Puritans were not popular with the officially sanctioned Church of England, Davenport left London in 1633, for a time making his home in the Netherlands.
Accounts of the new land known as New England intrigued Davenport, and he returned to London where he gained Eaton’s support. The two organized a company of parishioners from several churches and sailed for Boston, but challenges to Puritan orthodoxy by the general community and a growing sense that there was a lack of commercial opportunity forced the two to look for a new location.
While in Boston Davenport and Eaton had learned of the "rich and goodly" meadows of the Quinnipiac, an Algonkian word meaning "Long Water Land." Excited about the prospects of a splendid harbor, in August of 1637 Eaton and a handful of men set sail to the south to examine the territory. Eaton was reportedly delighted with what he found: a harbor, rich meadows and a promising source of beaver pelts and other furs.
The goal of the group was to establish a Christian community and lay the foundation for a viable commercial enterprise. Eaton became governor of the new colony, while Davenport was installed as minister of the New Haven church.
New Haven’s first settlers were considered the wealthiest group of merchants yet to settle in New England. Unlike the Pilgrims who settled in Plymouth, Mass. with money borrowed from investors in England, New Haven’s first settlers invested their own funds in the new settlement.
The first settlers had no authority to settle on the new land but because it fell within a grant made by Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick, to friends of Davenport and Eaton, the two were confident that they could acquire the territory.
They soon negotiated treaties with the local Indians, the Quinnipiacs, who gave up the area for "twelve coats of English trucking cloath, twelve alcumy spoons, twelve hatchets, twelve hoes, two dozen of knives, etc." The treaties, dated November and December 1638 and May 1645, gave the settlers what is now New Haven, East Haven, Branford, North Branford, North Haven, Wallingford, Cheshire and parts of Orange, Woodbridge, Bethany, Prospect and Meriden.
The Quinnipiacs, weakened by disease before the first settlers arrived and distressed by raiding bands of Pequots and Mohawks, had welcomed the English as military allies. The Quinnipiacs had ample reason to fear the Pequots, a powerful, warlike tribe that resided in southeastern Connecticut. But a year before the first settlers arrived in New Haven, the Pequots had gone to war against the English.
On May 26, 1637 a combine Connecticut/Massachusetts militia attacked a Pequot village at Mystic, killing hundreds of children, adults and elders. It was from this massacre that the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation was born, eventually settling in what is now North Stonington. The Mohawks, who occupied territory in Vermont, were also a warlike tribe accustom to sending raiding parties into Connecticut. The peaceful Quinnipiac were no match for either tribe.
At the time of Davenport’s and Eaton’s arrival, barely 250 to 300 Quinnipiac survivors remained on 300 square miles of what is now New Haven County. The eastern side of the harbor was designated a reservation of the Momauguin band and ownership of the remaining lands was transferred to the English. The reservation, reportedly the first of its kind in the colonies, was located from just west of what is now the Pearl Harbor Memorial (Q) Bridge to Fort Nathan Hale.
During the early years of New Haven the Quinnipiacs traded deer meat to the colonists, served as guides and messengers, traded canoes, killed wolves that preyed on precious livestock and taught the settlers how to fish and clam.
But all did not go well for the Quinnipiacs. Forbidden to plant crops outside the reservation, the tribe attempted to buy back a track of land at Oyster Point for agriculture. The town rejected the request. Fever hit the Quinnipiacs hard and in 1731 there was an attempt to move the natives to a new reservation in Waterbury. By the 1760s the last of the Quinnipiacs migrated to join the Tunxis Indians in Farmington. In 1773 the last remaining Indian land on the East Shore was sold.
By the outbreak of the American Revolution the Quinnipiacs as a tribe had disappeared from New Haven. A few descendents of the original Quinnipiacs returned as late as the 1840s to fish, clam, sell baskets and do agricultural work.
With Indian treaties in hand, the founders began to actively pursue their goal to establish a commercial empire controlling all of Long Island Sound and much of the coastline to the south. Believing that it was essential to establish subsidiary towns that would supply agricultural and forest products for trade with other ports, they acquired additional land in the area.
The New Haven Jurisdiction, also known as the New Haven Colony, was formed on October 27, 1643 to administer the expanding territory, which now encompassed six towns: New Haven, Branford, Milford, Guilford, Stamford and Southold on Long Island.
While the New Haven settlement struggled to carve a foothold on the shores of the harbor in 1639, a settlement was established in what is now known as Bridgeport on land purchased from the Paugusett Indians. It was called Pequonnock, or "broken ground," because of the nearby rolling hills.
In 1640 Quinnipiac was renamed Newhaven and a comprehensive government was established. The new settlement exported furs, shingles and clapboards, lumber and wheat. That same year New Haven constructed its first meetinghouse in the marketplace, a 50-foot square building with a tower and a turret. By the following year the growing community had a population of 350 households, 250 children and 200 servants.
New Haven’s town plan was based on a grid of 11 squares, nine of these divided from a half-mile square rectangle and two (called "suburbs") extended from the rectangle to the waterfront.
Those who had invested the original £36,000 stake in the association, known as proprietors, lived within the 11 squares, those who hadn’t invested lived outside the parcel.
The central square, now the New Haven Green, was designated a public common. At various times the Green has served as a marketplace, a drill ground for exercises by the militia (known as the Train Band), the site of stocks to punish those who violated the strict Puritan roles, public wells, a burial ground and the site of various public buildings.
In spite of its initial objectives of creating a commercial empire, New Haven’s growth soon began to slow down as trade shifted to Boston. In hopes of opening direct trade with England, on January 15, 1646 residents of New Haven filled a "Great Shippe" with local wares and valuable. The ship set sail from New Haven Harbor carrying one-fifth of the colony’s wealth and 70 of its citizens. It was never to be seen again.
In June 1648, a vision of the "Great Shippe" is said to have appeared in the clouds over New Haven Harbor, convincing residents that the ship was gone forever.
The loss of the ship and its cargo was a severe economic blow to the colony. Direct trade with England had proved beyond the capabilities of New Haven’s early settlers. The colony became satellite of New Amsterdam (later New York) and Boston, dependent mainly upon agriculture for regular sustenance.
Citizens of the Colony began to speak out against the leadership of Eaton and Davenport as New Haven Colony continued to struggle until January 7,1665, when it surrendered its status as an autonomous colony, joining the Connecticut Colony. New Haven Colony had lasted a short 27 years.
For Davenport it marked the end of his dream for an "Independent Kingdom of Christ." He had unsuccessfully opposed the absorption of New Haven into Connecticut, as prescribed by the Charter of 1662. With the battle lost, Davenport felt that his life’s work had failed and in 1667 he accepted the pastorate of the First Church in Boston.
Unpopular in Boston, Davenport returned to England in 1670, leaving his New World dreams behind.
Still, commercial prosperity continued to elude New Haven. Dutch and Swedish setters already living on the Delaware River to the south usurped New Haven’s efforts to establish a fur trading post. When the colony was absorbed, New Haven was left as a small farming community with a commercial fleet of just five ships.
As New Haven struggled for survival, another Connecticut town was being born. In 1665, 31 families from Farmington founded the Mattatuck Plantation, later to be known as Waterbury (and even later than that as the "center of the universe," in the words of one governor).
The political situation in England had a major impact on the colonists. In 1649, King Charles I of England was accused of treason and tyranny and beheaded by supporters of Oliver Cromwell. At the time of the Restoration 11 years later his son, Charles II, became king and sought vengeance against the men who had signed his father’s death warrant.
Two of them, Colonel Edward Whalley and his son-in-law Colonel William Goffe, fled to America. In 1661, barely a step ahead of their pursuers, Whalley and Goffe were hidden by John Davenport in a cave atop New Haven’s West Rock. They were later joined by a third regicide, John Dixwell.
Because the British attempted to suppress colonial manufacturing, early New Haven had few manufacturing industries. But some creative residents were able to develop home-based operations.
One of the first commercial enterprises in New Haven was a water-powered gristmill that supplied the colonists with flour. Later, in 1655, John Winthrop Jr. established an iron forge and foundry. It refined iron from bog-iron extracted from the ground in North Haven and remained in operation until 1679. A 1730 water-powered sawmill operated in Hamden. (It was converted to a distillery in 1786.)
But the first real industry in New Haven was a bell foundry, established by Abel Parmalee in 1736, and thought to be the first in the colonies.
One of New Haven’s earliest entrepreneurs was Isaac Doolittle, who opened a brass shop on Chapel Street in the 1740s. One of the first shops of its kind in Connecticut, it was in this shop that Doolittle constructed the first printing press in America.
By 1701, New Haven had grown into the village center of a mainly agricultural township and became co-capital — with Hartford — of Connecticut. A battle ensued for decades for the right to become Connecticut’s sole capital but in the end New Haven finished second to its northern neighbor.
Among other factors, Hartford had the political backing and the money for a new capitol building. In 1873 New Haven lost its status as co-capital, forced to hand over that distinction to Hartford.
Education was a central concern of the first settlers, and the New Haven community was quick to establish schools. In 1642 the proprietors established a free school ("free," that is, to all who could afford to pay tuition). By 1656 New Haven required all parents and masters to provide schooling for children and apprentices.
A new school was formed shortly thereafter thanks to a bequest from Edward Hopkins, seven-time governor of the Connecticut Colony, who gave a portion of his estate to the American colonies to found schools dedicated to "the breeding up of hopeful youths...for the publique service of the country in future tymes."
In 1660 a portion of that bequest was used to found Hopkins Grammar School, now the fifth-oldest educational institution in the country. The school began in a one-room schoolhouse on the New Haven Green. The school settled in its present 104-acre location on a hill overlooking the city in 1926.
Higher education was not to be overlooked, either. New Haven had been sending its most promising young men of means off to Harvard, founded two years before the first settlers arrived in Quinnipiac. But the desire to have a college in New Haven was critical to the Colony’s mission.
In 1701, Yale was founded by ten Congregational ministers as the Collegiate School in the Killingworth home of Abraham Pierson, its first rector.
The Puritan school was to serve as a place where young men could be schooled in the arts and sciences. Its first graduating class consisted of one student. The original curriculum, designed to prepare young men for a life of public service, consisted of logic, rhetoric, grammar (Greek, Latin and Hebrew), arithmetic, astronomy and geometry — six of the seven liberal arts inherited from ancient European tradition.
Seeking a permanent home, the school relocated several times. New Haven took full advantage of the situation. It began a campaign to raise the necessary funds, pledging 2,000 English pounds.
In 1716 the Collegiate School moved to New Haven and, with a generous gift from Elihu Yale, the college’s first building was erected. In 1718, in honor of its benefactor, the name of the school was changed to Yale College.
To this day most people know little of Elihu Yale or the extent of his donation to the school. Specifically, it was nine bales of goods, 417 books and a portrait and arms of King George I that helped launch what would become a world-renowned university. As to the man himself, Yale rarely lived in America, never attended college and was not a trustee of the original Collegiate School. But it seems safe to observe that his name is forever secure in the pantheon of American higher education.
Transportation by land remained a major obstacle for all New England residents. Most of Connecticut’s roads were primitive — when they were even recognizable as roads — and followed Indian trails. Shore towns such as New Haven relied on transportation via water for their economic viability.
On January 22, 1673 a rider left New York on horseback carrying mail and traveling through New Haven, Hartford and Springfield en route to Boston. The trip took approximately 14 days. The route traveled soon became known as the King’s Highway or the Great Road — the first post road on the North American continent. There were in fact three Boston Post Roads leading from Boston to New Haven, merging in the Elm City to become a single thoroughfare to New York City. It would be 1785 before the first government mail contract was awarded to a stage line.
The state’s first newspaper, the Connecticut Gazette, was published initially in 1755 in New Haven. James Parker of New York owned and published it. His business partner was Benjamin Franklin.
Publication of the Gazette was suspended in 1764 as the French-Indian Wars ware winding down. A year later Benjamin Mecom, nephew of Benjamin Franklin, resumed publication. But Mecom was not a savvy businessman and the paper lasted only until February 1768.
Meanwhile, Thomas Green and Samuel Green founded the Connecticut Journal (later the New Haven Journal-Courier) in New Haven in 1767. Publication of this newspaper continued well into the 20th century. In 1987 the Journal-Courier was finally absorbed by the New Haven Register, which itself had been established in 1812.
In 1775 David Bushnell invented the forerunner of the modern submarine during his senior year at Yale. Called the Turtle, the one-man wooden barrel-like craft was the first submersible to be used for military purposes.
Employed during the Revolution against British warships, the vessel was powered by a hand-turned screw. It was able to approach ships partially submerged and attach an explosive charge to the target’s hull with an external screw-like device. The craft itself functioned as designed, but the armament device proved unsuccessful. A year later Bushnell came up with the idea of floating mines, which he called a "squadron of kegs."
Like the rest of the colonies, New Haven felt the keen pressures of war with England. In 1765 England had imposed the Stamp Act as a form of colony taxation, clearly unpopular with the colonists. On July 4, 1776 New Havener Roger Sherman became one of four persons from Connecticut to sign the Declaration of Independence. Sherman is the only American to sign four important historical documents: The Continental Association of 1774, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the federal Constitution.
As a crafter of the Connecticut Compromise, Sherman envisioned two legislative bodies. Representation in the lower house would be based on population, while each state would have equal representation in the upper chamber. Today we know these two deliberative bodies at the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Sherman, a successful merchant, became New Haven’s first mayor after its incorporation as a city in 1784, and later a U.S. Senator.
As did other towns and cities in the breakaway colony, New Haven sent its men off to war. One month after becoming a member of the Governor’s Second Company of Foot Guards, Captain Benedict Arnold on April 22, 1775 paraded his troops on the New Haven Green, demanded the keys to the powder house and when the keys were handed over, marched off to war with his troops.
A successful businessman and owner of several ships, Arnold had rented a store on Chapel Street in 1762. The sign that hung above his store read, "B. Arnold Druggist Bookseller &co. From London Sibi Totique." The Latin motto translated, "For Himself and for Everyone." Later Arnold would become New Haven’s — and the nation’s — most infamous traitor.
New Haven came perilously close to being burned to the ground during the American Revolution.
On July 5, 1779, the day following the third anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, 1,500 British troops landed at Savin Rock and another 1,500 on New Haven’s East Shore. Nineteen men on duty at Fort Nathan Hale at the mouth of the New Haven Harbor attempted to defend the city against naval bombardment. Unable to stop the British troops, the two groups of "Red Coats" met on the New Haven Green, withdrawing two days later to sail to Fairfield.
Some say that the British decided not to burn New Haven because it was so beautiful but a more likely explanation is that many of them were extremely drunk, having consumed great quantities of rum purloined from warehouses on the wharf.
New Haven’s earliest years did not exactly set the stage for the utopia envisioned by Davenport and Eaton. The community was inhabited by a disproportionate number of wealthy international merchants who lacked the skills to farm effectively and produce real goods.
In its earliest years the settlement relied on new arrivals who brought lots of cash, purchasing seed corn and other essentials. Residents used the income to purchase manufactured goods from England.
New Haven’s early economy was based on a steady flow of immigrants, a pyramid-scheme precursor that was predestined to fail. It would be more than a century before New Haven began to
produce creative, innovative thinkers that would energize the city’s economy. By the dawn of the American Revolution, New Haven had grown to a community of 3,500.
Part II of this series will be published in the September 29 Business New Haven.
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