Connecticut Architecture. Christopher Wigren
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of Europeans comes to us in fragmentary form through the oral traditions of Native Americans and the discoveries made by archaeologists. Humans arrived here more than ten thousand years ago, and for millennia they moved from place to place by season in search of food. With the introduction of agriculture, particularly the growing of maize, as early as 1000 CE, longer-term settlements began to appear, but Connecticut’s Native Americans remained seminomadic.
The oldest structures for which there is physical evidence were rock shelters or pit dwellings dug into hillsides, some dating from as much as ninety-five hundred to ten thousand years ago. For the most part, Connecticut’s native inhabitants built light, impermanent shelters of bent saplings covered with slabs of bark. Called weetoos or wigwams, these structures lasted only a few seasons before returning to the earth (figure 11). However, evidence of their design remains in the archaeological record, in Native American cultural traditions, and in drawings or descriptions made by European settlers.
FIGURE 11. Wigwam, in a display at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center
In addition to these structures, Native Americans shaped the land itself. They cleared fields for crops, burned out underbrush to ease hunting, and constructed weirs to aid fishing. The geographical historian William Cronon quotes seventeenth-century Europeans who marveled at the parklike landscape they found. They believed this to be natural, but it was in fact the product of Native American practices. One other way Native Americans shaped the land was by blazing footpaths, some of which were taken over for colonial roads and in turn became the transportation corridors that underlie modern development. Although drawn in 1930, the map shown in figure 12 is still considered accurate.8 Many of the routes it shows are used by modern roadways, such as the Quinnipiac-Sucklauk Path connecting the sites that would become New Haven and Hartford along present-day Interstate 91, or the Old Connecticut Path, now Interstate 84.
FIGURE 12. Map of Connecticut circa 1625: Indian Trails, Villages, Sachemdoms. Compiled by Matthias Spiess, drawn by Hayden L. Griswold, issued by Connecticut Society of the Colonial Dames of America, 1930. The Connecticut Historical Society
As European settlers gained dominance, Native American building practices faded into obscurity. Interest in these practices reemerged at the end of the twentieth century, when a resurgence of tribal pride and political action led to federal recognition of tribal nations, and subsequent economic prosperity has made possible a burst of new construction for casinos, museums, and tribal facilities (see place 94, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center).
The first European settlement in Connecticut was a Dutch trading post built in 1633 at the present-day site of Hartford. Within a few years, Puritan settlers from England and Massachusetts began establishing permanent settlements that pushed out the Dutch: Windsor, Wethersfield, and Hartford on the Connecticut River, and New Haven and Saybrook on the coast. These settlements soon coalesced into two colonies, Connecticut and New Haven, which were united by the Charter of 1662, obtained from King Charles II of England by John Winthrop Jr. From the fertile central valley and the navigable shoreline, settlers moved inland to less-choice upland areas; by the mid-eighteenth century the entire area that now is Connecticut was occupied.
The colonial settlers’ first task was ordering the land—imposing systems of ownership and governance on what they perceived as virgin wilderness. The basic unit of government was the town, a self-governing geographical division that in most cases was founded by a group of proprietors. These were essentially shareholders who jointly acquired rights to a tract in exchange for financing its settlement.9 The proprietors laid out roads and set aside parcels for public functions such as marketplaces, militia training grounds, and meetinghouses. They might also offer land as an inducement for people with desirable skills, such as a minister, a miller, or a blacksmith, to settle in the town. The remaining land they divided among themselves, to keep or sell to others. By the end of the eighteenth century, almost all commonly held lands had been distributed. Remnants of this system survive in two Connecticut communities, New Haven and Lebanon, where the town greens are still considered to belong to the heirs of the original proprietors. Adjoining property owners still make hay on the Lebanon green (figure 13), while ultimate decision-making power for New Haven’s green is vested in the Committee of the Proprietors of the Common and Undivided Lands, a body chartered by the Connecticut General Assembly in 1805 that legally represents those heirs (place 40).10
The earliest settlements were compact, with residents living close together and working dispersed fields, sometimes in common. Rather than a contiguous allotment, each proprietor might receive several disconnected parcels, providing some of each type of land in the town: a home lot in the central settlement, fields for crops, pastureland, a woodlot, even marshland for hay. Very quickly, the attraction of working one’s own land, and then of living on independent farmsteads, led inhabitants to consolidate their holdings and move out of central villages. Later towns were laid out in larger individual parcels from the start, creating scattered farmsteads, each supplying much of its inhabitants’ basic needs.
FIGURE 13. Town green, Lebanon. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation
Each town also had a church. The Puritans who settled Connecticut sought to create a society based on their ideal of a radically purified Christianity, through which God’s will permeated every aspect of life. All inhabitants were required by law to attend Sabbath worship. As populations grew and settlements expanded, differences over the location of the meetinghouse often caused disputes. Outlying residents sought permission to form separate religious parishes, or societies, which in many cases became the nuclei of separate villages and eventually split off as separate towns. However it was founded, each congregation functioned as an independent, self-governing entity, subject to no higher authority but God. This governance, by independent individual congregations, led the Puritans’ religious descendants to be called “Congregationalists.”
The political and religious system of organization devised by the first English settlers created a framework that still determines much of the present-day shape of Connecticut. The first towns are still occupied, and their boundaries, although subdivided, still can be traced on maps, along with early roads and land divisions, as in South Windsor (place 2).
Another legacy of early land planning is the town green found at the heart of many Connecticut communities (figure 14). Greens actually began as public spaces set aside for a variety of purposes: planned market places, lots for meetinghouses or schools, broad main streets, even leftover space at intersections (see Colebrook and New Haven, places 39 and 40). Whatever their origins, they have merged into a single category that has come to be considered uniquely characteristic of New England towns—landscaped spaces whose civic character distinguishes them from parks.11
In addition to these physical characteristics, another legacy of the colonial period is a persistent mind-set that continues to shape how Connecticut builds. Based on their origins as self-governing, primarily agricultural, and both secular and spiritual in nature, Connecticut towns in the colonial period were inward-focused and independent, and they remain so. No matter how small, nearly every town has its own town hall, its own library, and its own fire and rescue service. (More than a dozen regional school systems represent rare examples of inter-town cooperation, as economies of scale have overridden municipal independence.) Each town shapes its built environment through its own zoning and planning regulations and competes to attract (or avoid) commercial development. Reinforcing the small scale of the land, this multiplication of municipalities