Schuylkill River
The Schuylkill River is an important river running northwest to southeast in eastern Pennsylvania, improved by navigations into the Schuylkill Canal. Several of its tributaries drain major parts of the center-southern and easternmost Coal Regions in the state. Originating from waters in the Anthracite Coal Region, millions of tons of coal enabling the iron and steel based industries of America's largest city of the day used the waterway to supply some of the growing American energy needs, it flows for 135 miles to Philadelphia, where it joins the Delaware River as one of its largest tributaries. In 1682 William Penn chose the left bank of the confluence upon which he founded the planned city of Philadelphia on lands purchased from the native Delaware nation, it is a designated Pennsylvania Scenic River, its whole length was once part of the Delaware people's southern territories. The river's watershed of about 2,000 sq mi lies within the state of Pennsylvania, the upper portions in the Ridge-and-valley Appalachian Mountains where the folding of the mountain ridges metamorphically modified bituminous into widespread anthracite deposits located north of the Blue Mountain barrier ridge.
The source of its eastern branch is in lands now mined situated one ridgeline south of Tuscarora Lake along a drainage divide from the Little Schuylkill about a mile east of the village of Tuscarora and about a mile west of Tamaqua, at Tuscarora Springs in Schuylkill County. Tuscarora Lake is one source of the Little Schuylkill River tributary; the West Branch starts near Minersville and joins the eastern branch at the town of Schuylkill Haven. It combines with the Little Schuylkill River downstream in the town of Port Clinton; the Tulpehocken Creek joins it at the western edge of Reading. Wissahickon Creek joins it in northwest Philadelphia. Other major tributaries include: Maiden Creek, Manatawny Creek, French Creek, Perkiomen Creek; the Schuylkill joins the Delaware at the site of the former Philadelphia Navy Yard, now the Philadelphia Naval Business Center, just northeast of Philadelphia International Airport. The Leni Lenape were the original inhabitants of the area around this river, which they called Tool-pay Hanna or Tool-pay Hok Ing.
The river was discovered by European explorers from the Netherlands and England. It was through historical documents called various names, including Manayunk, Manajungh and Lenni Bikbi; the Swedish explorer called it Menejackse alternately Skiar kill or the Linde River. The headwaters of the river, up near Reading, was called "Tulpehocken" by the English; the river was given the Dutch name Schuylkill. As kil means "creek" and schuylen means "to hide, skulk" or "to take refuge, shelter", one explanation given for this name is that it translates to "hidden river", "skulking river" or "sheltered creek" and refers to the river's confluence with the Delaware River at League Island, nearly hidden by dense vegetation. Another explanation is that the name properly translates to "hideout creek" in one of the Algonquian languages spoken by a Leni Lenape in their confederation; the mighty Susquehannock confederation claimed the area along the Schuylkill as a hunting ground, as they did to the lands down along the Chesapeake Bay to the left bank Potomac River, across from the Powhatan Confederacy when traders first stopped in the Delaware and settlers arrived in the first decade of the 1600s.
With ample tributary streams, the Schuylkill was ground zero during the early years of the Beaver Wars, during which the Delaware peoples became tributary to the victorious Susquehannocks, an Iroquoian people often in contention with their relatives, both the Erie people west and northwest through the gaps of the Allegheny in Eastern Ohio and Northwestern Pennsylvania (between the upper Allegheny River and Lake Erie, the Five Nations of the Iroquois, another Amerindian confederation eastwards from the right bank Genessee River through the finger lakes region of upper New York down the Saint Lawrence. The Lenape had settlements on the river, including Nittabakonck, a village on the east bank just south of the confluence of the Wissahickon Creek, the Passyunk site, on the west bank where the Schuylkill meets the Delaware River. Patriot paper maker Frederick Bicking owned a fishery on the river prior to the Revolution, Thomas Paine tried in vain to interest the citizens in funding an iron bridge over this river, before abandoning "pontifical works" on account of the French Revolution.
In the next decades, pioneering industrialists Josiah White and protege & partner Erskine Hazard built iron industries at the Falls of the Schuylkill in Jefferson's administration, where White built a suspension bridge with cables made from their wire mill. During the war of 1812 the two took delivery of an ark of anthracite coal, notoriously difficult to combust reliably and experimented with ways to use it industrially, providing the knowledge to begin resolving the ongoing decades long energy crises around eastern cities; the two heavily backed the flagging effort to improve navigation on the Schuylkill, which efforts date back to legislation measures as early as 1762. Needing energy resources and by 1816 disenchanted with the lack of urgency found in other investors to accelerate the anemic construction rate of the Schuylkill Canal, the two jumped to option the mining rights of the Lehigh Coal Mine Company which disenchanted stockholders were giving up on waited until a charter to improved the Lehigh went delinquent, resulting in t
Charles II of England
Charles II was king of England and Ireland. He was king of Scotland from 1649 until his deposition in 1651, king of England and Ireland from the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 until his death. Charles II's father, Charles I, was executed at Whitehall on 30 January 1649, at the climax of the English Civil War. Although the Parliament of Scotland proclaimed Charles II king on 5 February 1649, England entered the period known as the English Interregnum or the English Commonwealth, the country was a de facto republic, led by Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell defeated Charles II at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651, Charles fled to mainland Europe. Cromwell became virtual dictator of England and Ireland. Charles spent the next nine years in exile in France, the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands. A political crisis that followed the death of Cromwell in 1658 resulted in the restoration of the monarchy, Charles was invited to return to Britain. On 29 May 1660, his 30th birthday, he was received in London to public acclaim.
After 1660, all legal documents were dated as if he had succeeded his father as king in 1649. Charles's English parliament enacted laws known as the Clarendon Code, designed to shore up the position of the re-established Church of England. Charles acquiesced to the Clarendon Code though he favoured a policy of religious tolerance; the major foreign policy issue of his early reign was the Second Anglo-Dutch War. In 1670, he entered into the Treaty of Dover, an alliance with his first cousin King Louis XIV of France. Louis agreed to aid him in the Third Anglo-Dutch War and pay him a pension, Charles secretly promised to convert to Catholicism at an unspecified future date. Charles attempted to introduce religious freedom for Catholics and Protestant dissenters with his 1672 Royal Declaration of Indulgence, but the English Parliament forced him to withdraw it. In 1679, Titus Oates's revelations of a supposed Popish Plot sparked the Exclusion Crisis when it was revealed that Charles's brother and heir, Duke of York, was a Catholic.
The crisis saw the birth of anti-exclusion Tory parties. Charles sided with the Tories, following the discovery of the Rye House Plot to murder Charles and James in 1683, some Whig leaders were executed or forced into exile. Charles dissolved the English Parliament in 1681, ruled alone until his death on 6 February 1685, he was received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed. Charles was one of the most popular and beloved kings of England, known as the Merry Monarch, in reference to both the liveliness and hedonism of his court and the general relief at the return to normality after over a decade of rule by Cromwell and the Puritans. Charles's wife, Catherine of Braganza, bore no live children, but Charles acknowledged at least twelve illegitimate children by various mistresses, he was succeeded by his brother James. Charles II was born at St James's Palace on 29 May 1630, his parents were Charles I, who ruled the three kingdoms of England and Ireland, Henrietta Maria, the sister of the French king Louis XIII.
Charles was their second child. Their first son died within a day. England and Ireland were predominantly Anglican and Catholic. Charles was baptised in the Chapel Royal, on 27 June, by the Anglican Bishop of London, William Laud, he was brought up in the care of the Protestant Countess of Dorset, though his godparents included his maternal uncle Louis XIII and his maternal grandmother, Marie de' Medici, the Dowager Queen of France, both of whom were Catholics. At birth, Charles automatically became Duke of Cornwall and Duke of Rothesay, along with several other associated titles. At or around his eighth birthday, he was designated Prince of Wales, though he was never formally invested. During the 1640s, when Charles was still young, his father fought Parliamentary and Puritan forces in the English Civil War. Charles accompanied his father during the Battle of Edgehill and, at the age of fourteen, participated in the campaigns of 1645, when he was made titular commander of the English forces in the West Country.
By spring 1646, his father was losing the war, Charles left England due to fears for his safety. Setting off from Falmouth after staying at Pendennis Castle, he went first to the Isles of Scilly to Jersey, to France, where his mother was living in exile and his first cousin, eight-year-old Louis XIV, was king. Charles I surrendered into captivity in May 1646. In 1648, during the Second English Civil War, Charles moved to The Hague, where his sister Mary and his brother-in-law William II, Prince of Orange, seemed more to provide substantial aid to the royalist cause than his mother's French relations. However, the royalist fleet that came under Charles's control was not used to any advantage, did not reach Scotland in time to join up with the royalist Engager army of the Duke of Hamilton before it was defeated at the Battle of Preston by the Parliamentarians. At The Hague, Charles had a brief affair with Lucy Walter, who falsely claimed that they had secretly married, her son, James Crofts, was one of Charles's many illegitimate children who became prominent in British society.
Despite his son's diplomatic efforts to save him, King Charles I was beheaded in January 1649, England became a republic. On 5 February, the Covenanter Parliament of Scotland proclaimed Charles II "King of Great Britain and Ireland" at the Mercat Cross, but refused to allow him to enter Scotland unless he accepted the imposition of Presbyterianism throughout Britain and Ireland; when negotiations with the Scot
Milford, Connecticut
Milford is a city within Coastal Connecticut and New Haven County, between Bridgeport and New Haven, United States. The population was estimated to be 52,536 in a July 2016 estimate; the city includes the borough of Woodmont. Milford is part of NY-NJ-CT-PA Combined Statistical Area; the land which today comprises Milford and West Haven was purchased on February 1, 1639 from Ansantawae, chief of the local Paugussets by English settlers affiliated with the contemporary New Haven Colony. The area was known as "Wepawaug", after the small river which runs through the town, which has given its name to several streets in both Milford and Orange. A grist mill was first built over the Wepawaug River in 1640. During the Revolutionary War the Milford section of the Boston Post Road, a vital route connecting Boston, New York and other major coastal cities, was blockaded by Continental forces, Fort Trumbull was constructed to protect the town; the site of the blockade is commemorated by the Liberty Rock monument.
By 1822, the town had grown large enough that residents in the northern and eastern sections of Milford chartered their own independent course as the town of Orange. During the next century and a half, the remaining section of Milford was known for shipbuilding and oystering, although a small subset of industrial facilities developed in town. During this time, Milford became known as a beach resort for residents of New Haven and Bridgeport. In 1899, the "Memorial Bridge" was built at the site of the last mill over the Wepawaug after it was closed in 1894. "The stone bridge is simple in design, its broad copings surmounted with rough hewn blocks of granite, bearing the names of the first settlers. There are ten blocks on twenty on the north coping. At each end of the former is a stone four feet wide by five and a half high." It is located. In 1903, the southeastern portion of the town was incorporated as the Borough of Woodmont. In 1959, the town of Milford including the Borough of Woodmont was incorporated as the City of Milford.
Milford was one of the early settlements in south central Connecticut and, over time, gave rise to several new towns that broke off and incorporated separately. The following is a list of towns created from parts of Milford. Woodbridge in 1784 Bethany, created from Woodbridge in 1832 Orange in 1822 West Haven, created from Orange in 1921 Starting in 1902, Quaker Oats oatmeal boxes came with a coupon redeemable for the legal deed to a tiny lot in Milford; the lots, sometimes as small as 10 feet by 10 feet, were carved out of a 15-acre tract in a never-built subdivision called "Liberty Park". A small number of children residents living near Milford, collected the deeds and started paying the small property taxes on the "oatmeal lots"; the developer of the prospective subdivision hoped the landowners would hire him to build homes on the lots, although several lots would need to be combined before building could start. Since the subdivision into small lots predated Milford's planning and zoning regulations, the deeds were legal, although they created a large amount of paperwork for town tax collectors, who couldn't find the property owners and received no tax revenue from the lots.
In the mid-1970s, when the town wanted to develop the area, town officials put an end to the oatmeal lots in a "general foreclosure" that avoided the enormous expense of individual foreclosures by condemning nearly all of the property in one legal filing. One of the streets in the Liberty Park subdivision plans, Shelland Street, was built in the late 1990s as an access road to the Milford Power Company; the site is home to the BIC Corporation's lighter factory at 565 Bic Drive. In a separate land giveaway in 1955 tied to the Sergeant Preston of the Yukon television show, Quaker Oats offered in its Puffed Wheat and Puffed Rice cereal boxes genuine deeds to land in the Klondike. In the post-World War II period, Milford—like many Connecticut towns—underwent significant suburbanization. Interstate 95 was routed through town, the Milford section was completed in 1958; the 1960s and 1970s witnessed the construction of the Connecticut Post Mall, one of the state's largest shopping malls, the extensive commercial development of the town's stretch of the Boston Post Road.
One notable small business located on the Boston Post Road during the 1970s was SCELBI Computer Consulting, credited by many as being the world's first personal-computer manufacturer. Starting in 1975, the city began hosting the Milford Oyster Festival, which has since become established as an annual Milford tradition, held "rain or shine"; the city became host to several headquarters of multinational corporations, including the Schick Shaving company, Doctor's Associates, Inc. owners of the Subway chain of fast-food restaurants. The US operations of BIC were headquartered in Milford, but in March 2008 moved most of its operations to Shelton. Milford Hospital has developed into an important health care resource for the area, it has become home of smaller national corporations such as K-Mart and Orchid Medical. According to the 2010 US census Demographic Profile Data, there were 51,271 people living in 21,017 housing units of which 13,534 were counted as family households; the population density was 2,341/sq mi.
The average density of housing units was 1,017.7 per square mile. The racial makeup of Milford was 93.55% White, 1.91% African Ame
Pennamite–Yankee War
The Pennamite–Yankee Wars or Yankee–Pennamite Wars were a series of conflicts consisting of the First Pennamite War, the Second Pennamite War, the Third Pennamite War, in which the Wyoming Valley along the North Branch of the Susquehanna River was disputed between settlers from Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Claims on the Wyoming Valley were disputed from the start; the Dutch regarded the Susquehanna River as the border between New Netherland and the English colony of Virginia. King Charles II of England rejected all Dutch claims on North America and he granted the land to Connecticut in 1662, two years before his country's conquest of New Netherland and its subsequent conversion into the Province of New York. In 1681, Charles II included the same land in the grant to William Penn; the charter of each colony assigned the territory to the colony so that overlapping land claims existed. In the 17th century, fierce resistance by the Susquehannock rendered the debate academic, but by the mid-18th century, the double grant became problematic.
Thomas Paine mentioned the conflict in his pro-independence pamphlet Common Sense as evidence that "Continental matters" could be sensibly regulated only by a Continental government. Both colonies purchased the same land by treaties with the Indians. Connecticut sent settlers to the area in 1754. Yankee settlers from Connecticut founded the town of Wilkes-Barre in 1769. Armed bands of Pennsylvanian Pennamites tried to expel them without success from 1769–70, starting the First Pennamite War; this was followed by the Second Pennamite War in 1775, by the Third Pennamite War in 1784. The "wars" were not bloody. Connecticut's claim was confirmed by King George III in 1771. In 1773, more settlers from Connecticut erected a new town; the Pennsylvanians refused to leave, the militia of Northumberland County, made an abortive attack on a Connecticut settlement in December 1775. Conflicts continued between the two claimants at the end of the American Revolution, the Continental Congress overturned the king's ruling in 1782 and upheld Pennsylvania's claim to the area.
As such, it remains the only interstate dispute settled by Congress under the Articles of Confederation. But the state of Pennsylvania sought to force the Yankees from the land in 1784, which began the Third Pennamite War, with Connecticut and Vermont sending men to help the settlers. Umbrage remained until the Pennsylvania Legislature confirmed the various land titles in 1788; the controversy ended in 1799, with the Wyoming Valley becoming part of Pennsylvania and the Yankee settlers becoming Pennsylvanians with legal claims to their land. On July 3, 1778, the infamous Battle of Wyoming occurred, an episodic event within the Pennamite–Yankee War period, but was part of the American Revolution. Ousterhout, Anne M. "Frontier Vengeance: Connecticut Yankees vs. Pennamites in the Wyoming Valley," Pennsylvania History, Summer 1995, Vol. 62 Issue 3, pp 330–363 Smith, Story of Wyoming Valley, The following printed resources are in the collection of the Connecticut State Library Boyd, J. P; the Susquehannah Company, 1753–1803.
Henry, William. Documents Relating to the Connecticut Settlement in the Wyoming Valley. Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, Inc. 1990. Joyce, Mary Hinchcliffe. Pioneer Days in the Wyoming Valley. Philadelphia: 1928. Smith, William. An Examination of the Connecticut Claim to Lands in Pennsylvania: With an Appendix, Containing Extracts and Copies Taken from Original Papers. Philadelphia: Joseph Crukshank, 1774. Stark, S. Judson; the Wyoming Valley: Probate Records... Wilkes-Barre, PA: Wyoming Historical and Geological Society, 1923. Warfle, Richard Thomas. Connecticut's Western Colony. Hartford, CT: American Revolutionary Bicentennial Commission of Connecticut, 1979. Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Wilkes-Barre, PA: The Committee on Souvenir and Program, 1906. Connecticut's "Susquehannah Settlers" Story of the wars between Connecticut and Pennsylvania
Yale University
Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the "Collegiate School" was established by clergy to educate Congregational ministers, it moved to New Haven in 1716 and shortly after was renamed Yale College in recognition of a gift from British East India Company governor Elihu Yale. Restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first Ph. D. in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Its faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research. Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools.
While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school's faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven and forest and nature preserves throughout New England; the university's assets include an endowment valued at $29.4 billion as of October 2018, the second largest endowment of any educational institution in the world. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Yale College undergraduates follow a liberal arts curriculum with departmental majors and are organized into a social system of residential colleges. All members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—and some members of other faculties—teach undergraduate courses, more than 2,000 of which are offered annually. Students compete intercollegiately as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.
As of October 2018, 61 Nobel laureates, 5 Fields Medalists and 3 Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U. S. Presidents, 19 U. S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U. S. diplomats, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 247 Rhodes Scholars and 119 Marshall Scholars have been affiliated with the university. Its wealth and influence have led to Yale being reported as amoungst the most prestigious universities in the United States. Yale traces its beginnings to "An Act for Liberty to Erect a Collegiate School", passed by the General Court of the Colony of Connecticut on October 9, 1701, while meeting in New Haven; the Act was an effort to create an institution to train ministers and lay leadership for Connecticut. Soon thereafter, a group of ten Congregational ministers, Samuel Andrew, Thomas Buckingham, Israel Chauncy, Samuel Mather, Rev. James Noyes II, James Pierpont, Abraham Pierson, Noadiah Russell, Joseph Webb, Timothy Woodbridge, all alumni of Harvard, met in the study of Reverend Samuel Russell in Branford, Connecticut, to pool their books to form the school's library.
The group, led by James Pierpont, is now known as "The Founders". Known as the "Collegiate School", the institution opened in the home of its first rector, Abraham Pierson, today considered the first president of Yale. Pierson lived in Killingworth; the school moved to Saybrook and Wethersfield. In 1716, it moved to Connecticut. Meanwhile, there was a rift forming at Harvard between its sixth president, Increase Mather, the rest of the Harvard clergy, whom Mather viewed as liberal, ecclesiastically lax, overly broad in Church polity; the feud caused the Mathers to champion the success of the Collegiate School in the hope that it would maintain the Puritan religious orthodoxy in a way that Harvard had not. In 1718, at the behest of either Rector Samuel Andrew or the colony's Governor Gurdon Saltonstall, Cotton Mather contacted the successful Boston born businessman Elihu Yale to ask him for financial help in constructing a new building for the college. Through the persuasion of Jeremiah Dummer, Elihu "Eli" Yale, who had made a fortune through trade while living in Madras as a representative of the East India Company, donated nine bales of goods, which were sold for more than £560, a substantial sum at the time.
Cotton Mather suggested that the school change its name to "Yale College".. Meanwhile, a Harvard graduate working in England convinced some 180 prominent intellectuals that they should donate books to Yale; the 1714 shipment of 500 books represented the best of modern English literature, science and theology. It had a profound effect on intellectuals at Yale. Undergraduate Jonathan Edwards discovered John Locke's works and developed his original theology known as the "new divinity". In 1722 the Rector and six of his friends, who had a study group to discuss the new ideas, announced that they had given up Calvinism, become Arminians and joined the Church of England, they were returned to the colonies as missionaries for the Anglican faith. Thomas Clapp became president in 1745 and struggled to return the college to Calvinist orthodoxy, but he did not close the library. Other students found Deist books in the library. Yale was swept up by the great intellectual movements of the peri
Pequot War
The Pequot War was an armed conflict that took place between 1636 and 1638 in New England between the Pequot tribe and an alliance of the colonists of the Massachusetts Bay and Saybrook colonies and their allies from the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes. The war concluded with the decisive defeat of the Pequots. At the end, about 700 Pequots had been taken into captivity. Hundreds of prisoners were sold into slavery to the West Indies; the result was the elimination of the Pequot tribe as a viable polity in Southern New England, the colonial authorities classified them as extinct. Survivors were absorbed into other local tribes. In the late 20th century, people claiming to be descended from the Pequot tribe gained federal recognition as a modern-day tribe and were given reserves of land along the Thames and Mystic rivers in southeastern Connecticut; the name Pequot is a Mohegan term, the meaning of, disputed among Algonquian-language specialists. Most recent sources claim that "Pequot" comes from Paquatauoq, relying on the theories of Frank Speck, an early 20th-century anthropologist and specialist of the Pequot-Mohegan language in the 1920s–1930s.
He had doubts about this etymology, believing that another term seemed more plausible, after translation relating to the "shallowness of a body of water". The Pequot people and their traditional enemies the Mohegans were at one time a single sociopolitical entity. Anthropologists and historians contend that they split into the two competing groups sometime before contact with the Puritan English colonists; the earliest historians of the Pequot War speculated that the Pequot people migrated from the upper Hudson River Valley toward central and eastern Connecticut sometime around 1500. These claims are disputed by the evidence of modern archaeology and anthropology finds. In the 1630s, the Connecticut River Valley was in turmoil; the Pequots aggressively extended their area of control at the expense of the Wampanoags to the north, the Narragansetts to the east, the Connecticut River Valley Algonquians and Mohegans to the west, the Lenape Algonquian people of Long Island to the south. The tribes contended for political control of the European fur trade.
A series of epidemics over the course of the previous three decades had reduced the Indian populations, there was a power vacuum in the area as a result. The Dutch and the English from Western Europe were striving to extend the reach of their trade into the North American interior to achieve dominance in the lush, fertile region; the colonies were new at the original settlements having been founded in the 1620s. By 1636, the Dutch had fortified their trading post, the English had built a trading fort at Saybrook. English Puritans from the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies settled at the four established river towns of Windsor, Wethersfield and Springfield Pequot: Sachem Sassacus Eastern Niantic Western Niantic: Sachem Sassious Mohigg: Sachem Uncas Niantic Sagamore Wequash Narragansett: Sachem Miantonomo Montauk or Massachusetts Bay Colony: Governors Henry Vane and John Winthrop, Captains John Underhill and John Endecott Plymouth Colony: Governors Edward Winslow and William Bradford, Captain Myles Standish Connecticut Colony: Thomas Hooker, Captain John Mason, Robert Seeley, Lt. William Pratt Saybrook Colony: Lion Gardiner Beginning in the early 1630s, a series of contributing factors increased the tensions between English colonists and the tribes of Southeastern New England.
Efforts to control fur trade access resulted in a series of escalating incidents and attacks that increased tensions on both sides. Political divisions widened between the Pequots and Mohegans as they aligned with different trade sources, the Mohegans with the English colonists and the Pequots with the Dutch colonists; the peace ended between the Dutch and Pequots when the Pequots assaulted a tribe of Indians who had tried to trade in the area of Hartford. Tensions grew as the Massachusetts Bay Colony became a stronghold for wampum production, which the Narragansetts and Pequots had controlled up until the mid-1630s. Adding to the tensions, John Stone and about seven of his crew were murdered in 1634 by the Niantics, Western tributary clients of the Pequots. According to the Pequots' explanations, they murdered him in reprisal for the Dutch murdering the principal Pequot sachem Tatobem, they claimed to be unaware that Stone was English and not Dutch. In the earlier incident, Tatobem had boarded a Dutch vessel to trade.
Instead of conducting trade, the Dutch seized the sachem and appealed for a substantial amount of ransom for his safe return. The Pequots sent bushels of wampum, but received only Tatobem's dead body in return. Stone was from the West Indies and had been banished from Boston for malfeasance, including drunkenness and piracy, he had abducted two Western Niantic men. Soon after, he and his crew were killed by a larger group of Western Niantics; the initial reactions in Boston varied from indifference to outright joy at Stone's death, but the colonial officials still felt compelled to protest the killing. They did not accept the Pequots' excuses. Pequot sachem Sassacus sent some wampum to atone for the killing, but refused the colonists' demands that the warriors responsible for Stone's death be turned over to them for trial and punishment; the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635 placed a great deal of pressur
Hartford, Connecticut
Hartford is the capital city of Connecticut. It was the seat of Hartford County until Connecticut disbanded county government in 1960; the city is nicknamed the "Insurance Capital of the World", as it hosts many insurance company headquarters and is the region's major industry. It is the core city in the Greater Hartford area of Connecticut. Census estimates since the 2010 United States Census have indicated that Hartford is the fourth-largest city in Connecticut, behind the coastal cities of Bridgeport, New Haven, Stamford. Hartford is among the oldest cities in the United States, it is home to the nation's oldest public art museum, the oldest publicly funded park, the oldest continuously published newspaper, the second-oldest secondary school. It is home to the Mark Twain House, where the author wrote his most famous works and raised his family, among other significant sites. Mark Twain wrote in 1868, "Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see this is the chief." Hartford was the richest city in the United States for several decades following the American Civil War.
Today, it is one of the poorest cities in the nation, with 3 out of every 10 families living below the poverty threshold. In sharp contrast, the Greater Hartford metropolitan area is ranked 32nd of 318 metropolitan areas in total economic production and 8th out of 280 metropolitan statistical areas in per capita income. Hartford coordinates certain Hartford-Springfield regional development matters through the Knowledge Corridor economic partnership. Various tribes lived around Hartford, all part of the Algonquin people; these included the Podunks east of the Connecticut River. The first Europeans known to have explored the area were the Dutch under Adriaen Block, who sailed up the Connecticut in 1614. Dutch fur traders from New Amsterdam returned in 1623 with a mission to establish a trading post and fortify the area for the Dutch West India Company; the original site was located on the south bank of the Park River in the present-day Sheldon/Charter Oak neighborhood. This fort was called Fort Hoop or the "House of Hope."
In 1633, Jacob Van Curler formally bought the land around Fort Hoop from the Pequot chief for a small sum. It was home to a couple families and a few dozen soldiers; the fort was abandoned by 1654. The Dutch outpost and the tiny contingent of Dutch soldiers who were stationed there did little to check the English migration, the Dutch soon realized that they were vastly outnumbered; the House of Hope remained an outpost, but it was swallowed up by waves of English settlers. In 1650, Peter Stuyvesant met with English representatives to negotiate a permanent boundary between the Dutch and English colonies; the English began to arrive in 1636, settling upstream from Fort Hoop near the present-day Downtown and Sheldon/Charter Oak neighborhoods. Puritan pastors Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone, along with Governor John Haynes, led 100 settlers with 130 head of cattle in a trek from Newtown in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and started their settlement just north of the Dutch fort; the settlement was called Newtown, but it was changed to Hartford in 1637 in honor of Stone's hometown of Hertford, England.
The etymology of Hartford is the ford where harts cross, or "deer crossing." The Seal of the City of Hartford features a male deer. The fledgling colony along the Connecticut River was outside of the jurisdiction of the Massachusetts Bay Colony's charter and had to determine how it was to be governed. Therefore, Hooker delivered a sermon that inspired the writing of the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, a document ratified January 14, 1639 which invested the people with the authority to govern, rather than ceding such authority to a higher power. Historians suggest that Hooker's conception of self-rule embodied in the Fundamental Orders inspired the Connecticut Constitution, the U. S. Constitution. Today, one of Connecticut's nicknames is the "Constitution State."The original settlement area contained the site of the Charter Oak, an old white oak tree in which colonists hid Connecticut's Royal Charter of 1662 to protect it from confiscation by an English governor-general. The state adopted the oak tree as the emblem on the Connecticut state quarter.
The Charter Oak Monument is located at the corner of Charter Oak Place, a historic street, Charter Oak Avenue. Throughout the 19th century, Hartford's residential population, economic productivity, cultural influence, concentration of political power continued to grow; the advance of the Industrial Revolution in Hartford in the mid-1800s made this city by late century one of the wealthiest per capita in United States. On December 15, 1814, delegates from the five New England states gathered at the Hartford Convention to discuss New England's possible secession from the United States. During the early 19th century, the Hartford area was a center of abolitionist activity, the most famous abolitionist family was the Beechers; the Reverend Lyman Beecher was an important Congregational minister known for his anti-slavery sermons. His daughter Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin.
