History of New Haven

ts and British regulars under General William Tryon, governor of New York, raided the 3,500-person town in July 1779, but did not torch it as they had with Danbury in 1777, or Fairfield and Norwalk a week after the New Haven raid, leaving many of the town's colonial features preserved.

New Haven was incorporated as a city in 1784, and Roger Sherman, one of the signers of the Constitution and author of the "Connecticut Compromise", became the new city's first mayor.

The city struck fortune in the late 18th century with the inventions and industrial activity of Eli Whitney, a Yale graduate who remained in New Haven to develop the cotton gin and establish a gun-manufacturing factory in the northern part of the city near the Hamden town line. That area is still known as Whitneyville, and the main road through both towns is known as Whitney Avenue. The factory is now the Eli Whitney Museum, which has a particular emphasis on activities for children and exhibits pertaining to the A. C. Gilbert Company. His factory, along with that of Simeon North, and the lively clock-making and brass hardware sectors, contributed to making early Connecticut a powerful manufacturing economy; so many arms manufacturers sprang up that the state became known as "The Arsenal of America". It was in Whitney's gun-manufacturing plant that Samuel Colt invented the automatic revolver in 1836.

The Farmington Canal, created in the early 19th century, was a short-lived transporter of goods into the interior regions of Connecticut and Massachusetts, and ran from New Haven to Northampton, Massachusetts.

New Haven was home to one of the important early events in the burgeoning anti-slavery movement when, in 1839, the trial of mutineering Mende tribesmen being transported as slaves on the Spanish slaveship Amistad was held in New Haven's United States District Court. There is a statue of