Connecticut Colony
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40 free Connecticut Colony trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Connecticut Colony began in the 1630s, when families from Massachusetts Bay walked west to the fertile valley of the Connecticut River. Within a few years they had written their own rules for governing themselves, fought a brutal war, and started absorbing the smaller settlements around them. This quiz covers the fun facts and the basics: who founded the colony and why, the legend of the hidden charter, the colony's oversized land claims, its strict Sunday rules and its courts, and the soldiers, preachers and rebels born there before 1776. Every answer comes with a short explanation. It is pitched for students working on a thirteen colonies project, teachers who need a ready-made review, and anyone curious about how one small river colony shaped American self-government.
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Q 01By legend, where did colonists hide Connecticut's royal charter in 1687 when Sir Edmund Andros came to seize it?
In a hollow oak tree
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.
Q 02In 1647 Connecticut Colony hanged Alse Young in the American colonies' first recorded execution for which crime?
Witchcraft
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.
Q 03Connecticut's 1662 royal charter set the colony's western boundary at which body of water?
The Pacific Ocean
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.
Q 04Which minister led about a hundred settlers and their cattle overland from Massachusetts in 1636 to found Hartford?
Thomas Hooker
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.
Q 05Which 1639 document, often called the first written constitution, united Connecticut's three river towns?
The Fundamental Orders
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.
Q 06Connecticut Colony's Collegiate School, founded in 1701, was renamed in 1718 for which merchant donor?
Elihu Yale
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.
Q 07In 1773 Connecticut Colony opened New-Gate Prison inside which kind of failed mine in the town of Simsbury?
Copper
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.
Q 08New Haven sheltered Edward Whalley and William Goffe, fugitives who had signed the death warrant of which king?
Charles I
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.
Q 09Which European power's traders built a fort called the House of Hope where Hartford now stands, in 1633?
The Dutch
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.
Q 10Which Connecticut schoolteacher, born in Coventry in 1755, was hanged by the British as a spy at age 21?
Nathan Hale
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.
Q 11Which Norwich-born son of Connecticut Colony trained as an apothecary before turning traitor in the Revolution?
Benedict Arnold
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.
Q 12Connecticut Colony's founders belonged to which religious group that also governed neighboring Massachusetts Bay?
Puritans
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.
Q 13Which preacher, born in Connecticut Colony in 1703, delivered the 1741 sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God?
Jonathan Edwards
Q 21Which Connecticut governor was the only colonial governor to take the Patriot side when the Revolution began?
Jonathan Trumbull
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.
Q 22Which Connecticut farmer, famed for crawling into a wolf's den with a musket, later fought at Bunker Hill?
Israel Putnam
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.
Q 23Which Connecticut shoemaker turned statesman is the only person to sign all four great American state papers?
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.
Q 14Which term for strict Sunday rules first appeared in print in 1755, in a reference to Connecticut's old statutes?
Blue laws
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.
Q 15In the 1700s, which colony besides Connecticut let its own voters rather than London choose the governor?
Rhode Island
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.
Q 16Connecticut kept a strip of its old western land claim, called the Western Reserve, in which present-day state?
Ohio
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.
Q 17Which tribe, led by the sachem Uncas, fought beside Connecticut's colonists against the Pequot in 1637?
The Mohegan
The Mohegan sachem's name, Uncas, means Fox. His alliance with the English made his people the leading tribe of lower Connecticut.
Q 18Connecticut forces and their Native allies burned a fortified Pequot village in May 1637 beside which river?
The Mystic
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.
Q 19Connecticut Colony's farms increasingly produced for export, especially to British colonies in which region?
The Caribbean
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.
Q 20Connecticut settlers of the Susquehanna Company fought from 1769 over the Wyoming Valley, now in which state?
Pennsylvania
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.
Roger Sherman
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.
Q 24Which weekly, launched in Hartford in 1764, is the oldest continuously published newspaper in the United States?
The Connecticut Courant
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.
Q 25Before its 1637 renaming, what did the first English settlers call the settlement that became Hartford, Connecticut?
Newtown
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.
Q 26Which Connecticut town began in 1633 as a trading post built by William Holmes's party from Plymouth Colony?
Windsor
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.
Q 27Which colony at the Connecticut River's mouth, named for two English lords, was sold to Connecticut in 1644?
Saybrook
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.
Q 28Which Connecticut governor, a physician and alchemist, crossed the Atlantic to win the colony's 1662 royal charter?
John Winthrop Jr.
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.
Q 29New Haven Colony agreed to join Connecticut in 1664 rather than fall under which other English province?
New York
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.
Q 30Connecticut's seal, which descends from a colonial seal brought from England in 1639, shows three of which plant?
Grapevines
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.