History of Hartford

Before European colonization, the Hartford area was inhabited by a variety of American Indian tribes, most notably the Podunks, who had journeyed to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early 1630s and attempted to attract colonists to their region so that they might assist them in conquering the Pequot Indians. In search of better land and the opportunity to erect a truly Protestant 'city on a hill', English colonists moved to the area a few years later, and an anti-Pequot alliance indeed quashed the Pequots by 1637. The leader of Hartford's original settlers, who had come from what is now Cambridge, Massachusetts, was Pastor Thomas Hooker. He delivered a sermon that inspired the writing of the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, a document (ratified January 14, 1639) investing the people with the authority to govern, rather than ceding such authority to a higher power. Hooker's conception of self-rule embodied in the Fundamental Orders went on to inspire the Connecticut Constitution, and ultimately the U.S. Constitution. Today, one of Connecticut's nicknames is the "Constitution State."

On December 15, 1814, delegations from throughout New England gathered at the Hartford Convention to discuss possible secession from the United States. Later in the century, Hartford was a center of abolitionist activity. Harriet Beecher Stowe, daughter of Lyman Beecher and author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, lived in Nook Farm, part of the Asylum Hill section of the city. In 1950, the Census Bureau reported Hartford's population as 7.1% black and 92.8% white. In 1987, Carrie Saxon Perry was elected mayor of Hartford, the first female African-American mayor of a major American city.

On the week of April 12, 1909, the Connecticut River reached a then-record flood stage of 24½ feet above the low water mark