Nine Squares in a Wilderness

While the ship Hector was sailing across the Atlantic in the spring of 1637, the English settlers of New England were conducting a genocidal war against the Pequot. In the month of May, English soldiers burned the Pequot fort near New London and massacred many hundreds of Pequot men, women and children. The few who escaped fled westward along the shore of Long Island Sound. 

As the soldiers pursued the Pequot along the shore, they stopped several days at a place called Quinnipiac (or Long-water-land), because they thought some of the Pequot were hidden there. The English liked the place very much, and reported back to Boston that Quinnipiac showed great potential for a settlement. They described a fine harbor with rivers emptying into it and broad rich meadows on all sides.

Source: https://rogershermanhouse.com/2020/01/15/the-landing-at-quinnipiac-by-ernest-hickock-baldwin/

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Seven men huddled inside a dirt cellar carved into the frozen banks of Quinnipiac, surviving a bitter winter by trapping beaver and waiting for the rest of their company to arrive. The earth around them was rigid with frost. The wind coming off the harbor carried a wet, bone deep chill that no fire could fully hold a bay. They had no real houses. Some of them lived in tents that had been hauled off a ship, fabric snapping and shuddering in the coastal gales. Others had built crude huts, or even adapted the style of wigwams used by the indigenous tribes of the area, but the most desperate among them had literally dug their way into the sides of the creek bank. When the skies were clear, these subterranean shelters held on to the warmth of the fires, but when it rained, the water seeped through the root choked soil, turning their cramped homes into damp, unhealthy caverns. They were entirely alone in a vast wilderness. No lighthouses guided sailors into the bay, no breakwaters sheltered the harbor from the surge of the Atlantic, no bridges spanned the rivers, it was just an unbroken expanse of ancient woods, salt marshes, and tidal flats. And yet this miserable freezing advance party, led by a man named Joshua Atwater, held the key to one of the most ambitious colonial projects ever conceived. The men in that freezing cellar were not exiles or desperate criminals. They were the vanguard of a wealthy, highly organized, and intensely devout group of English Puritans who had decided that the existing settlements in the New World were simply not good enough. They wanted a commercial empire, they wanted a perfect religious utopia, and they had sent Atwater and his men to hold this specific patch of land through the winter, waiting for the spring pha when the rest of their people would sail down the coast and build a city. This is the story of how that city came to be. It is the story of the landing at Quinnipiac, drawn from the historical accounts of Ernest Hickcock Baldwin. It is a story of religious persecution, of incredibly wealthy merchants risking everything they had, of brutal wars with indigenous tribes, and of the sheer stubborn will required to carve a new society out of the New England wilderness. To understand why Joshua Atwater and his men were freezing in a dirt cellar in the New World, you have to look back across the Atlantic Ocean to the chaotic and dangerous political climate in England in the early 16th century. In the year 1633, King Charles I elevated a man named William Laud to the position of Archbishop of Canterbury. This was not a minor administrative appointment. The Archbishop of Canterbury was the highest officer in the English Church, answering only to the king himself. It was Laud's explicit business to ensure that the laws of the church were obeyed across the entire realm, and Laud took this responsibility with a terrifying, absolute seriousness. William Laud despised the Puritans. The Puritans believed the Church of England remained too close to Catholicism, too bogged down in elaborate rituals, hierarchical power structures, and unbiblical traditions. They wanted to purify the church, stripping it back to what they saw as its original, austere, scriptural foundations. Laud viewed this desire for purification as a direct threat to the authority of the church and, by extension, the authority of the crown. He launched a campaign of intense persecution against them. Puritan ministers were removed from their pulpits, they were heavily fined, some were imprisoned. In the most severe cases, those who openly defied the archbishop faced brutal physical punishments, including public whippings and facial mutilation. It was an environment of intense fear and surveillance. In the midst of this religious crackdown lived a man named John Davenport. Davenport was a prominent and highly respected minister in London, serving as the vicar of St. Stephen's Church on Coleman Street. He was an eloquent preacher, a graduate of Oxford, and a man of significant intellectual power. For a time, Davenport managed to escape Laud's notice largely because he kept his Puritan leanings relatively quiet. He walked a fine line, preaching his beliefs without openly antagonizing the church hierarchy. But as Laud's power grew, the net began to tighten. William Laud eventually discovered Davenport's true theological allegiance even before taking the seat of archbishop. Davenport realized immediately that his position was completely untenable. It was no longer a matter of if he would be arrested, but when. Before the authorities could seize him, Davenport made the agonizing decision to flee his home country. He slipped out of England and crossed the English Channel to Holland, seeking refuge in Amsterdam. Holland was known for its religious tolerance, and Amsterdam offered a safe haven for many English dissidents. Davenport lived there for several years, preaching to congregations of fellow exiles. But he was fundamentally unhappy. He missed his home. He missed his congregation in London. He felt isolated and disconnected from the people he cared about most. Right around this time of deep personal crisis, a letter arrived in Amsterdam. It was from the Reverend John Cotton, a fellow Puritan minister, who had already made the perilous journey across the Atlantic and settled in Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Cotton's letter was an urgent, passionate plea. He urged Davenport to leave Europe entirely and bring his followers to the New England wilderness. Cotton painted a picture of a place where Puritans could build a society according to their exact scriptural interpretation, free from the terrifying reach of Archbishop Laud and the King. The letter struck a deep chord with Davenport. It offered a vision not just of safety, but of purpose. Davenport decided to return to England. This was an incredibly dangerous move. If he were caught, he would almost certainly be imprisoned and possibly executed. In 1636, disguising himself as a common country gentleman to evade law's spies, Davenport slipped back into London. His goal was not to stay, but to recruit his closest friends and the wealthiest members of his former congregation for a massive organized migration to the New World. At the very top of his list was a man named Theophilus Eaton. Eaton was a childhood friend of Davenport's. They'd grown up together, attended school together, and maintained a close bond into adulthood. But while Davenport had pursued a life of the mind and the spirit, Eaton had pursued commerce. He had become a tremendously successful London merchant. He was a wealthy, influential man with connections in high society and extensive experience in international trade. He had even served as the deputy governor of the Eastland Company, representing English commercial interests abroad. Like Davenport, Eaton was a devout Puritan. And like Davenport, Eaton was feeling the crushing pressure of Archbishop Laud's regime. In fact, Eaton's own brother, a Puritan minister named Samuel Eaton, had recently been arrested and thrown into prison by the Court of High Commission. For Theophilus Eaton, the situation had become deeply personal. He realized that his wealth and social standing could no longer protect him or his family from the religious tyranny gripping England. When Davenport approached him with the plan to charter a ship and leave for New England, Eaton did not hesitate. He immediately threw his considerable financial resources and logistical expertise behind the project. The expedition they organized was unlike almost any other that had set sail for the colonies. This was not a desperate band of impoverished refugees. This was a highly capitalized, carefully planned venture funded by a group of incredibly wealthy London merchants. They intended to transplant an entire functioning community, complete with its financial capital, its religious leadership, and its social hierarchy, directly into the wilderness. To make the journey, they chartered a massive new vessel called the Hector. The ship was capable of carrying hundreds of tons of cargo and hundreds of passengers, but leaving England was not a simple matter of buying a ticket and boarding a boat. The English government, increasingly suspicious of the massive outflow of Puritan wealth and manpower, was actively trying to prevent these departures. Before the Hector could sail, the crown actually impressed the ship, seizing it for royal service. The owners of the vessel had to petition the government intensely, leveraging all their political connections to secure its release. Finally, in the spring of 1637, the Hector broke free from the bureaucratic entanglement and set sail across the Atlantic Ocean. The journey was long and grueling, a testament to the physical endurance required simply to reach the New World. The passengers lived in cramped, unsanitary conditions for weeks on end, battling seasickness, rationing their food and water, and praying constantly for safe passage. Finally, on june twenty sixth, sixteen thirty seven, the Hector sailed into Boston Harbor. For Davenport Eaton and their followers, the arrival in Massachusetts should have been a moment of profound relief and triumph. They had survived the crossing. They had escaped Archbishop Laud. They were finally in a land governed by their fellow Puritans. The leadership of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, including Governor John Winthrop, was thrilled to see them. This was exactly the kind of immigration they wanted. The Davenport Eaton Company represented an enormous influx of wealth, prestige, and intellectual firepower. The Boston authorities immediately began offering them prime tracts of land, hoping to convince them to settle permanently within the boundaries of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But almost immediately, John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton realized that Boston was not the promised land they had envisioned. The political and religious climate of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was deeply unstable. When the Hector arrived, Boston was in the grip of the antinomian controversy. A woman named Anne Hutchinson had begun holding theological meetings in her home, preaching doctrines that radically challenged the authority of the established Puritan ministers. She argued that true salvation came from an inner experience of grace rather than outward obedience to the law. And she accused many of the colony's leading ministers of preaching a false covenant of works. The colony was entirely consumed by this dispute. It was tearing congregations apart and threatening to fracture the entire social order. John Davenport, drawing on his immense theological authority, actually stepped in and played a significant role in trying to mediate the conflict and quiet the excitement. But the damage was done. Both Davenport and Eton looked at the chaos in Boston and decided they wanted absolutely no part of it. They feared that if they settled in Massachusetts, their own congregation would inevitably become entangled in these bitter, destructive religious disputes. Furthermore, they had entirely different ambitions for their settlement. Davenport wanted absolute religious control. He wanted to establish a colony where the laws of the church and the laws of the state were exactly the same thing, entirely free from the oversight of the Massachusetts authorities. He had also heard rumors that King Charles was preparing to send a royal governor to take control of Massachusetts, and Davenport had not fled across an ocean only to find himself back under the thumb of the king's administrators. Theophilus Eaton, for his part, had commercial ambitions that Boston could not satisfy. He wanted to found a great mercantile city, a hub of international trade that could rival anything in Europe. If they stayed in Massachusetts, they would always be overshadowed by the established merchants of Boston. They needed their own harbor, they needed their own territory, they needed a blank slate. While the Hector had been sailing across the Atlantic that spring, the English settlers of New England had been engaged in a brutal, horrific conflict known as the Pequot War. The Puritan colonies had allied themselves with the Mohegan and Narragansett tribes to utterly destroy the Pequot Nation, which had controlled the regional fur trade and resisted English expansion. In May of 1637, Puritan soldiers had surrounded a major Pequot fortified village near Mystic, set it on fire, and massacred hundreds of men, women, and children as they tried to escape the flames. The surviving Pequots fled westward, moving along the coast of the Long Island Sound, desperately trying to evade the advancing English forces. The soldiers from Massachusetts and the other colonies pursued them relentlessly. During this pursuit, the English forces stopped for several days at a coastal location the indigenous people called Quinnepeac, which translated roughly to Long Water Land. The soldiers were searching the area, believing that some of the fleeing Pequots might be hiding in the thick woods and salt marshes. What the soldiers found at Quinnepeak was not a hidden enemy, but an extraordinary piece of geography. Captain Stoughton, one of the commanders of the Massachusetts forces, was absolutely captivated by the location. He saw a deep, protected harbor formed by the confluence of several rivers. He saw broad, rich meadows stretching out from the water, flanked by striking geological formations, huge basalt cliffs that rose dramatically above the tree line. Captain Stoughton immediately recognized the immense potential of the site. He wrote a letter back to the authorities in Boston, stating unequivocally that Quinnipiac was the absolute best place for a new settlement that he had seen anywhere in his travels. When Captain Stoughton returned to Boston from the war in August of 1637, he sought out Theophilus Eaton. Stoughton described the harbor in vivid detail. He talked about the deep water, the protective geography, the abundance of timber, and the rich agricultural land. Eaton listened intently. This was exactly what he had been looking for. It was a location that could support a major commercial port, completely independent from Boston, situated along a coastline that had just been forcibly cleared of its most powerful indigenous defenders. Eaton decided he had to see it for himself. Later that summer he organized an expedition, gathering a number of trusted men from his company, and sailed south out of Boston Harbor. They followed the coastline, rounding Cape Cod, passing the mouth of the Connecticut River, and finally dropping anchor in the bay at Quinnipiac. The exact details of Eton's scouting mission are lost to history, but Ernest Hickok Baldwin's account paints a logical picture of what he must have done. He almost certainly tramped deep into the old growth forests, examining the oak and pine trees to determine if they were suitable for building houses and fashioning shipmasts. He would have looked out over the salt meadows, assessing their value for grazing livestock. He spent time navigating the harbor, dropping sounding lines to measure the depth of the water, ensuring that heavy merchant vessels like the Hector would be able to enter and anchor safely. He looked for fresh water springs and the best locations for constructing wharves. Crucially, he also made contact with the local indigenous population. The Quinnepeac tribe, led by a sachem named Mamugwin, inhabited the area. The Quinopeaks were relatively small in number, having been severely weakened by years of raids from the Mohawk and Pequot tribes, as well as by devastating waves of European diseases that had swept the coast prior to the colonists' arrival. Eaton needed to know if they were friendly, and he needed to gauge whether they would accept an English settlement on their land. Whatever Eaton saw during those late summer days at Quinnipia, it completely convinced him. He decided on the spot that this was the place where they would build their city. He was so confident in this decision that he resolved to leave a small advance party behind to physically claim the territory and prepare for the main migration. It was too late in the year to sail back to Massachusetts, pack up the entire company, and return before winter set in. Moving hundreds of people, along with their livestock, supplies, and building materials was a massive logistical undertaking. It made far more sense for the bulk of the company to spend the winter in the relative comfort of Boston and make the permanent move in the spring. So Eaton selected seven men, placed them under the leadership of Joshua Atwater, and left them on the shores of Quinnipiac. Eaton himself boarded his ship and sailed back to Boston to deliver the news. The decision was formalized quickly. Quinnipiac would be their new home. The entire Davenport Eaton Company spent the winter in Massachusetts, eagerly anticipating the spring thaw. Meanwhile, those seven men left behind at Quinnipiac endured the brutal reality of a New England winter. They built their small hut near what is now the corner of Congress Avenue and Meadow Street in modern day New Haven. They spent their days engaged in backbreaking labor. They cleared the dense underbrush that choked the land. They felled heavy timber, sawing the massive logs into rudimentary boards by hand. They constructed a few additional crude shelters, preparing for the hundreds of people who would arrive in a few months. They set traps along the frozen rivers, catching beaver and rabbits for food and fur. They established a basic trading relationship with the Quinipiac tribe, exchanging manufactured goods for animal pelts. It was a lonely, incredibly difficult existence, defined by the constant biting cold and the physical toll of sheer survival. Those dugout cellars in the creek bank were a testament to their desperation to escape the wind. Finally, in the spring of sixteen thirty eight, the long wait ended. On march thirtieth, John Davenport, the Ophelis Eaton, and their entire congregation set sail from Boston. The journey down the coast took about two weeks. They rounded the long peninsula of Cape Cod, navigated the sometimes treacherous waters of Long Island Sound, and finally approached the harbor at Quinnipia. The sight that greeted them was one of absolute terrifying wildness. As Ernest Hiccock Baldwin wrote, no lighthouses guided the sailors, no breakwater sheltered the bay, no bridges of steel span the rivers, it was just an endless expanse of wilderness bordering the water. As their vessels came slowly up the harbor, the settlers looked out eagerly at their new home. To the east they saw low lying hills covered with small oak trees. To the west they saw massive forests of pine. Tall rushes lined the shores on both sides of the deep channel. In the distance, rising dramatically against the sky were two massive red rock formations that would come to be known as East Rock and West Rock. Before the landscape was fundamentally altered by centuries of urban development, two prominent creeks emptied into the harbor. Over time, both of these creeks entirely disappeared. The bed of one eventually held the tracks of a great railroad, while the other was paved over to become a busy city street. Small vessels in that era could navigate the East Creek quite far inland, but the Puritan settlers steered their ships up the West Creek. That was where Joshua Atwater And his six companions, who had survived that long, brutal winter, were waiting for them. The ships made their landing near what is now the intersection of George and College streets. It is likely that the advance party had managed to construct a crude wooden wharf to receive the vessels. Historical tradition holds that the lead ship actually dropped anchor in the creek on a Friday, but the settlers, exhausted from the journey and adhering to strict religious observance, did not actually disembark and make their formal landing until the following day, Saturday. As soon as they stepped off the boats, the reality of their situation hit them. They were hundreds of miles from any established civilization, and they had an enormous amount of work to do. The very first priority was shelter. The weather in mid April was still raw and cold and snow still occasionally dusted the ground. The few huts built by Etwater's men were nowhere near enough to house the hundreds of new arrivals. It was a scene of chaotic, desperate industry. Tents were dragged ashore and erected. More rude huts were hastily framed out. Some families even adopted the indigenous building techniques, constructing wigwams to protect themselves from the wind, and just as the advance party had done, many families resorted to digging cellars directly into the steep banks of the creek, covering them with whatever timber and brush they could find. But before they could truly begin building their city, they had to attend to the fundamental purpose of their journey. The day after they landed was Sunday, the Sabbath. On that first Sunday, april fifteenth, sixteen thirty eight, the entire company gathered under the spreading branches of a massive ancient oak tree. This was the moment they had crossed an ocean to achieve. John Davenport stood before his congregation, surrounded by the raw, untamed wilderness. The people had brought their children here, escaping the tyranny of Archbishop Laud specifically so they could worship in exactly this manner without fear of persecution or compromise. Davenport delivered his first sermon in their new home. The core of his message was a stern, uncompromising warning. He knew exactly what dangers lay ahead. He told them that in this new, strange country they would be subjected to intense temptations. The desperate need to build houses, clear land, and secure food would tempt them to neglect their rigorous religious duties. The isolation of the wilderness might tempt them to abandon the strict moral codes they had maintained in London. He warned them against the temptation to cheat or mistreat the local indigenous people and their trading interactions. Davenport's sermon was designed to bind the community together to remind them that their survival depended not just on their physical labor, but on their absolute spiritual purity. In the afternoon, another minister in the company, Peter Prudin, delivered a second sermon. The entire first full day in Quinnipiac was spent in intense collective worship. No labor was performed. The foundation of the colony was laid in theology, not in timber. In the months that followed, Theophilus Eaton negotiated a formal treaty with Mo Maugan, the Sachem of the Quinnipiac tribe. The English purchased a massive tract of land in exchange for an assortment of coats, hatchets, hose, knives, porringer bulls, and a promise to protect the Quinipiac people from the raiding Mohawk and Pequot warriors. With the land secured, the settlers set about designing their city. They did not build randomly or organically, they laid out a meticulous geometric grid. They designed a city of nine perfect squares, a physical manifestation of their desire for order, rationality, and divine proportion. The central square was reserved as a public marketplace and a common green, a space that remains the geographical and spiritual heart of New Haven to this day. Around this central green, the wealthiest members of the company, including Eton and Davenport, built large, imposing homes that reflected their immense financial resources and their unshakable belief in the permanence of their endeavor. They had arrived at a desolate freezing creek bank, but they were building a capital. The landing at Quinnipiac was an extraordinary gamble. It was an attempt to construct a perfect society from scratch, funded by immense wealth, driven by fierce religious conviction, and executed in an environment of absolute physical hardship. The men shivering in those dirt cellars during the winter of sixteen thirty seven could not have fully imagined the sprawling modern city that would eventually rise over their crude shelters. They were simply trying to survive the night, holding the ground for a vision that would permanently alter the landscape of the New World. It is a profound piece of history, an epic narrative of human ambition and endurance hidden beneath the pavement of modern New Haven. If you found this deep dive into the founding of New Haven compelling, please share this episode with someone who appreciates the raw, unvarnished history of how early America was actually built.