40 Fun Facts About Connecticut Colony

By legend, where did colonists hide Connecticut's royal charter in 1687 when Sir Edmund Andros came to seize it?

In a hollow oak tree, the story goes, after the candles went out mid-meeting and the parchment vanished. The tree stood in Hartford until a storm felled it in 1856, and its wood became the governor's desk.

In 1647 Connecticut Colony hanged Alse Young in the American colonies' first recorded execution for which crime?

Witchcraft sent Alse Young to the gallows 45 years before anyone was accused at Salem. Her daughter was accused of the same crime some thirty years later but was not hanged.

Connecticut's 1662 royal charter set the colony's western boundary at which body of water?

The Pacific Ocean, which the charter called the South Sea, lay across a continent no colonist had crossed. Connecticut gave up most of that sea-to-sea claim in 1786.

Which minister led about a hundred settlers and their cattle overland from Massachusetts in 1636 to found Hartford?

Thomas Hooker is now called the Father of Connecticut. His 1638 sermon arguing that the people should choose their own magistrates inspired the colony's first frame of government.

Which 1639 document, often called the first written constitution, united Connecticut's three river towns?

The Fundamental Orders never mention the king or the Crown, placing all authority in an elected general court. They are why Connecticut calls itself the Constitution State.

Connecticut Colony's Collegiate School, founded in 1701, was renamed in 1718 for which merchant donor?

Elihu Yale made his fortune in Madras with the East India Company and sent nine bales of goods that sold for more than £560. Cotton Mather suggested naming the college after him.

In 1773 Connecticut Colony opened New-Gate Prison inside which kind of failed mine in the town of Simsbury?

Copper had been dug there since 1707, but the mine never paid. Its only way in or out was a forty-foot ladder, yet the first convict escaped after eighteen days, climbing a rope lowered down a well shaft.

New Haven sheltered Edward Whalley and William Goffe, fugitives who had signed the death warrant of which king?

Charles I was beheaded in 1649, and when his son regained the throne the two judges fled across the Atlantic. They hid on West Rock in a spot still known as Judges Cave.

Which European power's traders built a fort called the House of Hope where Hartford now stands, in 1633?

The Dutch built it as a fortified trading house with a pair of cannons. English settlers soon hemmed it in, and Connecticut seized the post in 1653.

Which Connecticut schoolteacher, born in Coventry in 1755, was hanged by the British as a spy at age 21?

Nathan Hale was the only volunteer when Washington called for a spy behind enemy lines in 1776. Connecticut named him its official state hero in 1985.

Which Norwich-born son of Connecticut Colony trained as an apothecary before turning traitor in the Revolution?

Benedict Arnold set up as a pharmacist and bookseller in New Haven in 1762 and grew rich on trading ships. In 1780 he plotted to surrender the fort at West Point to the British.

Connecticut Colony's founders belonged to which religious group that also governed neighboring Massachusetts Bay?

Puritans left Massachusetts Bay for the Connecticut River valley in the 1630s largely because the older colony had grown so fast that there was no longer enough land to go round.

Which preacher, born in Connecticut Colony in 1703, delivered the 1741 sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God?

Jonathan Edwards preached it at Enfield at the height of the Great Awakening. He died from a smallpox inoculation shortly after becoming president of the college at Princeton.

Which term for strict Sunday rules first appeared in print in 1755, in a reference to Connecticut's old statutes?

Blue laws won wider fame from Samuel Peters's 1781 history of Connecticut, an unreliable account that was probably written to satirize the rules it listed.

In the 1700s, which colony besides Connecticut let its own voters rather than London choose the governor?

Rhode Island won the same right in its 1663 charter, a year after Connecticut's. In the other colonies the governor was appointed in London.

Connecticut kept a strip of its old western land claim, called the Western Reserve, in which present-day state?

Ohio's northeast corner stayed Connecticut's until 1800. A surveyor sent by the Connecticut Land Company, Moses Cleaveland, founded the lakeside city that still carries his name, minus one letter.

Which tribe, led by the sachem Uncas, fought beside Connecticut's colonists against the Pequot in 1637?

The Mohegan sachem's name, Uncas, means Fox. His alliance with the English made his people the leading tribe of lower Connecticut.

Connecticut forces and their Native allies burned a fortified Pequot village in May 1637 beside which river?

The Mystic gave its name to the dawn attack, in which between 400 and 700 Pequot were killed. Captain John Mason led the colony's ninety men.

Connecticut Colony's farms increasingly produced for export, especially to British colonies in which region?

The Caribbean was the colony's main distant market by the 1700s. To balance its trade with Britain, the colonial government also tried to promote hemp, potash and lumber as exports.

Connecticut settlers of the Susquehanna Company fought from 1769 over the Wyoming Valley, now in which state?

Pennsylvania and Connecticut each said its charter covered the valley, and their settlers fought three small wars over it. A court of Congress gave Pennsylvania jurisdiction in 1782.

Which Connecticut governor was the only colonial governor to take the Patriot side when the Revolution began?

Jonathan Trumbull kept the army supplied with men and food, and Washington called him the first of the patriots. He stayed in office until 1784, governor of a colony and then of a state.

Which Connecticut farmer, famed for crawling into a wolf's den with a musket, later fought at Bunker Hill?

Israel Putnam reportedly went in with a torch and a rope tied to his feet so his neighbors could haul him back out. The 1743 hunt ended with a torch-lit parade through Pomfret.

Which Connecticut shoemaker turned statesman is the only person to sign all four great American state papers?

Roger Sherman signed the Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. He moved to New Milford in 1743 and opened a cobbler shop.

Which weekly, launched in Hartford in 1764, is the oldest continuously published newspaper in the United States?

The Connecticut Courant was founded by the printer Thomas Green and went daily in 1837. Its title later swapped the colony's name for its home city's.

Before its 1637 renaming, what did the first English settlers call the settlement that became Hartford, Connecticut?

Newtown was borrowed from the Massachusetts town the settlers had left, itself later renamed Cambridge. The new name honored Hertford, the English hometown of the minister Samuel Stone.

Which Connecticut town began in 1633 as a trading post built by William Holmes's party from Plymouth Colony?

Windsor calls itself the first English settlement in Connecticut. To reach the site Holmes had to sail past the rival fort at the House of Hope, ignoring its garrison's threats.

Which colony at the Connecticut River's mouth, named for two English lords, was sold to Connecticut in 1644?

Saybrook blends the names of two investors, Lord Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke. Their interest dried up during the English Civil War, so Governor George Fenwick negotiated the sale.

Which Connecticut governor, a physician and alchemist, crossed the Atlantic to win the colony's 1662 royal charter?

John Winthrop Jr. was the son of the founding governor of Massachusetts Bay. He founded New London in 1646 and, as a doctor, saw up to 12 patients a day on his rounds of the settlements.

New Haven Colony agreed to join Connecticut in 1664 rather than fall under which other English province?

New York had just been named for its new owner, the Duke of York, whose royal grant ran east to the Connecticut River and so took in New Haven. New Haven chose the neighbor it knew.

Connecticut's seal, which descends from a colonial seal brought from England in 1639, shows three of which plant?

Grapevines, three of them, may stand for the three colonies that merged to form Connecticut. The first seal carried more vines, and the number was cut when a new one was made in 1711.

Which Litchfield-born son of Connecticut Colony led the Green Mountain Boys in capturing Fort Ticonderoga in 1775?

Ethan Allen is best remembered as a founder of Vermont. A few months after taking the fort he tried to seize Montreal as well, and the British captured him.

New Haven Colony, governed strictly by the Bible, abolished which English legal custom that scripture never mentions?

Trial by jury was dropped, leaving a magistrate to sit in judgment alone. The first man chosen for that office was Theophilus Eaton, a merchant who had helped finance the migration.

The Great Awakening of the 1740s split Connecticut Colony's churches and politics into which two rival camps?

Old and New Lights fell out over the revivals, the New welcoming them and the Old distrusting them. The quarrel turned political when Old Light lawmakers passed a law against itinerant preachers.

Who became Connecticut Colony's first governor in 1639, having already served a term as governor of Massachusetts Bay?

John Haynes could not serve two years running, because the colony barred consecutive terms. He took turns as governor and deputy instead, and still managed eight terms in the top job.

Which lawyer, a chief framer of Connecticut's 1639 frame of government, went on to found Fairfield and Norwalk?

Roger Ludlow also served as the colony's first deputy governor. Often at odds with his peers, he later left for Virginia and then went back across the Atlantic for good.

Which town founded by William Pynchon broke away from Connecticut Colony to join Massachusetts Bay?

Springfield was first run alongside Hartford and its sister towns. In a hungry spring they sent Captain John Mason north for corn that Pynchon had failed to buy from local tribes, and after the quarrel the town broke away.

Which Connecticut governor, displaced by Andros in 1687, had earlier co-founded the settlement of Newark, New Jersey?

Robert Treat wanted to name the New Jersey settlement Milford, after his Connecticut home, but a minister's choice of New Ark won out. He returned as governor in 1689 and served until 1698.

Crowds forced Jared Ingersoll to resign in 1765 as Connecticut Colony's agent for which hated British tax law?

The Stamp Act made Ingersoll so unpopular that a crowd surrounded his New Haven house and demanded he quit. Benjamin Franklin had advised him to take the job.

Which lexicographer, born in Connecticut Colony in 1758, published An American Dictionary of the English Language?

Noah Webster was born in West Hartford and brought out his great dictionary in 1828. He also wrote the spelling books that taught generations of American children to read.

Which church was Connecticut's official, tax-supported church from colonial days until 1818?

Congregational worship was backed by law. Everyone in a town had to attend Sunday services and pay taxes for the church, unless they could prove they supported another Protestant one.