Colonial period
Dutchman Adriaen Block was the first European explorer in Connecticut. He explored the region in 1614. Dutch fur traders then sailed up the Connecticut River, calling it Versche Rivier ("Fresh River") and building a fort at Dutch Point in Hartford, which they named "House of Hope" (Dutch: Huis van Hoop).
The Connecticut Colony originally consisted of several smaller settlements in Windsor, Wethersfield, Saybrook, Hartford, and New Haven. The first English settlers came in 1633 and settled at Windsor, then at Wethersfield the following year. John Winthrop the Younger of Massachusetts received a commission to create Saybrook Colony at the mouth of the Connecticut River in 1635.
A large group of Puritans arrived in 1636 from Massachusetts Bay Colony, led by Thomas Hooker, who established the Connecticut Colony at Hartford. The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut were adopted in January 1639, and have been described as the first constitutional document in America.
The Quinnipiack Colony was established by John Davenport, Theophilus Eaton, and others at New Haven in March 1638. The New Haven Colony had its own constitution called "The Fundamental Agreement of the New Haven Colony", signed on June 4, 1639.
Each settlement was an independent political entity, established without official sanction of the English Crown. In 1662, Winthrop traveled to England and obtained a charter from Charles II which united the settlements of Connecticut. Historically significant colonial settlements included Windsor (1633), Wethersfield (1634), Saybrook (1635), Hartford (1636), New Haven (1638), Fairfield (1639), Guilford (1639), Milford (1639), Stratford (1639), Farmington (1640), Stamford (1641), and New London (1646).
The Pequot War marked the first significant clash between colonists and Native Americans in New England. The Pequot had been aggressively extending their area of control at the expense of the Wampanoag to the north, Narragansett (east), Connecticut River Valley Algonquian tribes and the Mohegan (west), and Lenape Algonquian people (south). Meanwhile, the Pequot had been reacting with increasing aggression to colonial territorial expansion. In response to the 1636 murder of an English privateer and his crew, followed by the murder of a trader, colonists raided a Pequot village on Block Island. The Pequots laid siege to Saybrook Colony's garrison that autumn, then raided Wethersfield in the spring of 1637. Organizing a band of militia and allies from the Mohegan and Narragansett tribes, colonists declared war and attacked a Pequot village on the Mystic River. Death toll estimates range between 300 and 700 Pequots. After suffering another major loss at a battle in Fairfield, the Pequots sued for peace.
The Mashantucket Pequot Nation, descendants of the Pequot people of southern New England, experienced significant population loss due to violence and disease in the early seventeenth century. In the aftermath, Pequot leaders sued for peace, resulting in the Treaty of Hartford, which divided the surviving Pequots among the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes and forbade them from being called "Pequot" or returning to their homeland. The Pequots and Mohegan tribes assimilated to many European cultural practices. This erased generations of knowledge and tradition. Not until 1651 were the Pequots able to gather the rights to resettle on 500 acres of their original ancestral land.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, the Pequots and Mohegans were forcefully removed from ancestral lands. The societal structures of these Native Nations dictate their relationship with land. As Vanessa Watts says, they believe that their "land is alive and thinking, humans and nonhumans derive agency through extension of these thoughts". The displacement of Native Americans from their land severed these relationships, which undermines their systems of knowledge, identity, and ultimately their culture.
In more recent years, the restoration of Mohegan lands and cultural practices has faced legal and historical challenges. This is due to the Mohegan Land case, where colonists argued that colonial land could not be given back to native tribes because it was already 'colonial in nature', and would be turned back to 'wilderness', if put in native possession again. As reflected in disputes over the 1681 treaty, colonial officials asserted full ownership of lands while simultaneously documenting them as part of Native territory, enabling the continued sale and settlement of those lands without consent from the Mohegan Tribe. While the Pequot Tribe sought to maintain and regain their land, colonial and later American legal frameworks often created obstacles to the full recovery of ancestral territories.
Connecticut's original Charter in 1662 granted it all the land to the "South Sea"—that is, to the Pacific Ocean. The Hartford Treaty with the Dutch was signed on September 19, 1650, but never ratified by the British, stated the western boundary of Connecticut ran north from Greenwich Bay for a distance of 20 miles (32 km), "provided the said line come not within 10 miles [16 km] of Hudson River". This agreement was observed by both sides until war erupted between England and The Netherlands in 1652. Conflict continued concerning colonial limits until the Duke of York captured New Netherland in 1664.
Most Colonial royal grants were for long east–west strips. Connecticut took its grant seriously and established a ninth county between the Susquehanna River and Delaware River named Westmoreland County. This resulted in the brief Pennamite-Yankee Wars with Pennsylvania.
Yale College was established in 1701, providing Connecticut with an important institution to educate clergy and civil leaders. The Congregational church dominated religious life in the colony and, by extension, town affairs in many parts.
With more than 600 miles (970 km) of coastline including along its navigable rivers, Connecticut developed the antecedents of a maritime tradition during its colonial years that would later produce booms in shipbuilding, marine transport, naval support, seafood production, and leisure boating.
Historical records list the Tryall as the first vessel built in Connecticut Colony, in 1649 at a site on the Connecticut River in modern Wethersfield. In the two decades leading up to 1776 and the American Revolution, Connecticut boatyards launched about 100 sloops, schooners and brigs according to a database of U.S. customs records maintained online by the Mystic Seaport Museum, the largest being the 180-ton Patient Mary launched in New Haven in 1763. The New London Harbor Lighthouse was constructed in 1760 at the mouth of the Thames River as Connecticut's first lighthouse.
Connecticut designated four delegates to the Second Continental Congress who signed the Declaration of Independence: Samuel Huntington, Roger Sherman, William Williams, and Oliver Wolcott. Connecticut's legislature authorized the outfitting of six new regiments in 1775, in the wake of the clashes between British regulars and Massachusetts militia at Lexington and Concord. There were some 1,200 Connecticut troops on hand at the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775. In 1775, David Bushnell invented the Turtle which the following year launched the first submarine attack in history, unsuccessfully against a British warship at anchor in New York Harbor.
In 1777, the British got word of Continental Army supplies in Danbury, and they landed an expeditionary force of some 2,000 troops in Westport. This force marched to Danbury, then destroyed homes and much of the depot. Continental Army troops and militia led by General David Wooster and General Benedict Arnold engaged them on their return march at Ridgefield in 1777. For the winter of 1778–79, General George Washington decided to split the Continental Army into three divisions encircling New York City, where British General Sir Henry Clinton had taken up winter quarters. Major General Israel Putnam chose Redding as the winter encampment quarters for some 3,000 regulars and militia under his command. The Redding encampment allowed Putnam's soldiers to guard the replenished supply depot in Danbury and to support any operations along Long Island Sound and the Hudson River Valley. Some of the men were veterans of the winter encampment at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, the previous winter. Soldiers at the Redding camp endured supply shortages, cold temperatures, and significant snow, with some historians dubbing the encampment "Connecticut's Valley Forge".
The state was also the launching site for a number of raids against Long Island orchestrated by Samuel Holden Parsons and Benjamin Tallmadge, and provided soldiers and material for the war effort, especially to Washington's army outside New York City. General William Tryon raided the Connecticut coast in July 1779, focusing on New Haven, Norwalk, and Fairfield. New London and Groton Heights were raided in September 1781 by Benedict Arnold, who had turned traitor to the British.
At the outset of the American Revolution, the Continental Congress assigned Nathaniel Shaw Jr. of New London as its naval agent in charge of recruiting privateers to seize British vessels as opportunities presented, with nearly 50 operating out of the Thames River which eventually drew the reprisal from the British force led by Arnold.
