page_title: Connecticut River
section_title: 1614–1636: Dutch and Puritan settlement
hierarchical_section_title: Connecticut River / History / 1614–1636: Dutch and Puritan settlement
context_page_description: The Connecticut River is the longest river in the New England region of the United States, flowing roughly southward for 406 miles through four states. It rises at the U.S. border with Quebec, Canada, and discharges at Long Island Sound. Its watershed encompasses five U.S. states and one Canadian province, 11,260 square miles via 148 tributaries, 38 of which are major rivers. It produces 70% of Long Island Sound's fresh water, discharging at 18,400 cubic feet per second.
  The Connecticut River Valley is home to some of the northeastern United States' most productive farmland, as well as a metropolitan region of approximately two million people surrounding Springfield, Massachusetts and Hartford, Connecticut.
context_section_description: In 1614, Dutch explorer Adriaen Block became the first European to chart the Connecticut River, sailing as far north as Enfield Rapids. He called it the "Fresh River" and claimed it for the Netherlands as the northeastern border of the New Netherland colony. In 1623, Dutch traders constructed a fortified trading post at the site of Hartford, Connecticut called the Fort Huys de Hoop ("Fort House of Hope").
  Four separate Puritan-led groups also settled the fertile Connecticut River Valley, and they founded the two large cities that continue to dominate the Valley: Hartford (est. 1635) and Springfield (est. 1636). The first group of pioneers left the Plymouth Colony in 1632 and ultimately founded the village of Matianuck (which became Windsor, Connecticut) several miles north of the Dutch fort. A group left the Massachusetts Bay Colony from Watertown, seeking a site where they could practice their religion more freely. With this in mind, they founded Wethersfield, Connecticut in 1633, several miles south of the Dutch fort at Hartford.
  In 1635, Reverend Thomas Hooker led settlers from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he had feuded with Reverend John Cotton, to the site in Connecticut of the Dutch Fort House of Hope, where he founded Newtowne. Shortly after Hooker's arrival, Newtowne annexed Matianuck based on laws articulated in Connecticut's settlement charter, the Warwick Patent of 1631. The patent, however, had been physically lost, and the annexation was almost certainly illegal.
  The fourth English settlement along the Connecticut River came out of a 1635 scouting party commissioned by William Pynchon to find the most advantageous site for commerce and agriculture, hoping to found a city there. His scouts located the Pocumtuc village of Agawam, where the Bay Path trade route crossed the Connecticut River at two of its major tributaries—the Chicopee River to the east and Westfield River to the west—and just north of Enfield Falls, the river's first unnavigable waterfall. Pynchon surmised that traders using any of these routes would have to dock and change ships at his site, thereby granting the settlement a commercial advantage. It was initially named Agawam Plantation and was allied with the settlements to the south that became the state of Connecticut, but it switched allegiances in 1641 and was renamed Springfield in honor of Pynchon's native town in England.
  Of these settlements, Hartford and Springfield quickly emerged as powers. In 1641, Springfield splintered off from the Hartford-based Connecticut Colony, allying itself with the Massachusetts Bay Colony. For decades, Springfield remained the Massachusetts Bay Colony's westernmost settlement, on the northern border of the Connecticut Colony. By 1654, however, the success of these English settlements rendered the Dutch position untenable on the Connecticut River. A treaty moved the boundary westward between the Connecticut Colony and New Netherland Colony to a point near Greenwich, Connecticut. The treaty allowed the Dutch to maintain their trading post at Fort Huys de Hoop, which they did until the 1664 British takeover of New Netherland.
caption: View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow (1836) by Thomas Cole
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