January 9, 1788 – Connecticut Joins the Union as the Fifth State

The area that became the U.S. state of Connecticut began as three distinct settlements of Puritans from Massachusetts and England; they combined under a single royal charter in 1663. The word “Connecticut” is a French corruption of the Native American word quinetucket, which means “beside the long, tidal river.”

Unfortunately for the Pequot Indian tribe, they were in the way of colonial development. As summarized on the website of The Society of Colonial Wars in the State of Connecticut:

In 1633 the English Puritan settlements at Plimoth [sic] and Massachusetts Bay Colonies had begun expanding into the rich Connecticut River Valley to accommodate the steady stream of new emigrants from England. Other than the hardship of the journey and the difficulty of building homes in what the Puritans consider a wilderness, only one major obstacle threatened the security of the expanding settlements: the Pequots.”

Tribal territories of Southern New England tribes about 1600

The Pequot tribe had already been weakened by smallpox brought by the English settlers, and by internecine conflict between those who were pro-English and those who were pro-Dutch. Matters were made much worse when the Pequots killed a dishonest trader, John Oldham, in July of 1636. The settlers demanded retribution. Massachusetts raised a military force under the command of John Endicott. This troop landed on Block Island, killed 14 natives and burned the village and crops. They then moved on to Saybrook and burned that village as well. But they were not done yet.

On May 1, 1637, leaders of Connecticut Colony’s river towns each sent delegates to the first General Court held at the meeting house in Hartford. They pooled their militia under the command of John Mason of Windsor, and declared war on the Pequots.

On May 26, 1637, a military force under Puritans John Mason and John Underhill attacked the Pequot settlement near New Haven, Connecticut, destroying the village, consisting mostly of women, children, and the elderly, and killing over 500. The only Pequot survivors were warriors who had been with their leader Sassacus in a raiding party outside the village. Sassacus and many of his followers were surrounded in a swamp near a Mattabesic village called Sasqua and nearly 180 warriors were killed. Sassacus was eventually killed by the Mohawk, who sent his scalp to the English as a symbol of friendship. Surviving captives were sold in the West Indies as slaves. The few Pequots who were able to escape the English fled to surrounding Indian tribes, were assimilated, or were sold into slavery to the West Indies. The Pequot nation was destroyed. (Survivors did remain, however, and in the late 20th Century their descendants gained federal recognition as a tribe and were granted reserves of land along the Thames and Mystic rivers in southeastern Connecticut.)

A 19th-century engraving depicting the Pequot War

Captain Mason later wrote that they wouldn’t have killed so many Pequots if they [the Pequots] could have would have agreed to be “servants” but “they could not endure that Yoke.” Thus did the Lord, Mason writes, “scatter his Enemies with his strong Arm!:

Let the whole Earth be filled with his Glory! Thus the LORD was pleased to smite our Enemies in the hinder Parts, and to give us their Land for an Inheritance.”

(You can read the entire text of Mason’s joyous account of the Pequot massacres here.)

In 1639, the first constitution was adopted, called “”Fundamental Orders of Connecticut,” establishing representative government.

In 1662, the Connecticut Colony succeeded in gaining a Royal Charter that embodied and confirmed the self-government that they had created with the Fundamental Orders. This charter granted it all the land to the “South Sea” (i.e. the Pacific Ocean). Needless to say, territorial disputes followed, involving litigation, actual bloodshed, and land sales. It ended up being the nation’s third-smallest state.

Connecticut is home to the first successful copper mining by Europeans in what is now the United States. A copper deposit was discovered in the present town of East Granby, Connecticut in 1705, and German metallurgists from Hanover were imported to reduce the ore to copper metal. The mine was shut down in 1725.

Historian Holger Hoock relates in his history of the Revolutionary War, Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth, that one of the worst places to be punished for Loyalist leanings was in Connecticut. The former copper mine became “Newgate Prison” from 1773 to 1897. The accused were put in “this hell on earth” (or in earth, as it was 60-80 feet underground), which was dark, damp, squalid, with limited air circulation, and exceedingly unsanitary. Prisoners could not stand upright, and the political prisoners were mixed in with dangerous felons. Many of them went mad. As Hoock observes: “Psychological torment and physical violence played a far greater role in suppressing dissent during America’s first civil war than is commonly acknowledged.”

Connecticut’s notorious Newgate Prison

Starting in the 1830s, and accelerating when Connecticut abolished slavery entirely in 1848, African Americans began relocating to urban centers for employment and opportunity, forming new neighborhoods such as Bridgeport’s Little Liberia. In 1832, Quaker schoolteacher Prudence Crandall created the first integrated schoolhouse in the United States by admitting Sarah Harris, the daughter of a free African American farmer in the local community, to her boarding school in Canterbury. Many prominent townspeople objected and pressured to have Harris dismissed from the school, but Crandall refused. Families of the current students removed their daughters. Consequently, Crandall ceased teaching white girls altogether and opened up her school strictly to African American girls. In 1995, the Connecticut General Assembly designated Prudence Crandall as the state’s official heroine.

Portrait of Prudence Crandall

Much later, Connecticut factories in Bridgeport, New Haven, Waterbury and Hartford attracted European immigrants, bringing mostly Catholic unskilled laborers to this traditionally Protestant state. By 1910, Connecticut’s population was almost 30% foreign-born. Nativists in the 1920s opposed the new immigrants as a threat to the state’s traditional social and political values. The Ku Klux Klan had a small anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant following in Connecticut in the 1920s, reaching about 15,000 members before its collapse nationwide in 1926 following scandals involving top leaders. Today, Connecticut is over 80% white, and 35.93% of the population identify as Catholic.

Connecticut is known for having the the oldest newspaper in continuous publication (The Hartford Current), the first law school, and the first state house, inter alia.

In 1919, Connecticut and Rhode Island were the only two states that didn’t ratify the Constitution’s 18th amendment, which banned “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors … within the United States” and launched Prohibition. A Durham, CT newspaper reported of that time:

The Connecticut state senate had defeated ratification of the 18th Amendment by a vote of 20-14, prompting the New Haven Journal Courier to say: ‘Connecticut is alone entitled to raise the flag of freedom in her hands and wave it aloft.’ The Hartford Courant called the 18th Amendment a ‘highly dangerous invasion of the rights of individual states.’”

Connecticut is the American home of Pez. The candy was invented in Austria, but in 1952, PEZ began to be imported to the United States. In 1973, PEZ built the first American candy manufacturing facility in Orange, CT. In 2011, PEZ opened the PEZ Visitor Center!

You may want to know that PEZ started adding three-dimensional character heads to dispensers in 1957, with the first being a Halloween witch. The following year, Popeye was the first licensed character used.

Connecticut is also home to the American Clock & Watch Museum, which holds one of the largest displays of American clocks and watches in the world, over 5,500! As visitors travel through the museum’s eight galleries, these timekeeping devices chime and strike upon the hour.

Perhaps in a tribute to its religious origins, the praying mantis officially became the State Insect on October 1, 1977. This insect isn’t even native to North America, but can be found throughout the state from early May or June until the cold weather sets in, when they die rapidly.

Praying mantis with wings spread as she allows them to dry.

According to one 2016 study, Connecticut has the second-largest number of millionaires per capita in the U.S., with 7.4 percent of all households in Connecticut qualifying as millionaire households.