The wonderful mosaic of historical scenes at Acton Library,
Old Saybrook, was funded by a summer resident from New York City. Reading the
mosaic, I learn:
Connecticut became the fifth state in 1788.
The coat of arms on the state flag, adopted in 1897, is an
adaptation from the original seal of the Saybrook Colony. The image is supposed
to have come from a signet ring worn by the plantation governor Fenwick. The
seal’s grapevines represent the fifteen patentees who settled the original
Saybrook plantation under English colonial law. It was in 1620 that Lord “Seye,
and Sele” of Brougton Castle in Banbury, Oxfordshire, decided to establish a
Puritan plantation settlement. He received in 1631 a patent from the Earl of
Warwick, a patent shared with Lord Robert Brooke.
The two lordly names were combined in “Seye-Brook”, the name
of the plantation. Its settlers arrived in 1635 on the ship Blessing, out of the Massachussetts Bay
Colony. Seye-Brook was established on the mouth of the Connecticut River, a
good harbor that had been explored recently by the Dutch. In 1614, Adriaen
Block (of Block Island, RI), became the first European to explore the
Connecticut River. He named it “Fresh River”. He was hired to scout for natives
to trade with.
The land had been inhabited perhaps since the beginning of
terrestrial life.
‘Noah’s Raven’- The three-toed dinosaur footprints in the
Connecticut River Valley, discovered 1802. This was the first fossil evidence
of dinosaurs in the New World. Dilophosaurus, a medium-sized carnivore with an
odd double crest on its skull.
‘Connecticut’ in Pequot means
“LAND ALONG THE LONG TIDAL RIVER”.
1636-7 was the first Indian war in New England, fought
against the Pequots at Saybrook.
At the mouth of the river (which flows from Canada), there’s
a shallow estuary about a mile wide full of shifting sandbars. Because
deep-draft ships can’t navigate here, the Connecticut is one of the longest US
rivers without an urban center at its mouth.
December, 1718: “The Battle of the Books”
In 1701, the Connecticut Colony founded a ‘Collegiate
School’, with forty folio volumes
donated by ministers. In 1714 the school got its big endowment, a donation of
seven hundred books, including an autographed edition of Newton’s Principia. In 1716, the school was moved
from Saybrook to the bustling commercial center of New Haven, some thirty-five
miles west, where it would become Yale University. Residents of Saybrook
rebelled against the move and attacked the carts transporting the library’s
collection, destroying some 250 volumes.
New Haven had been founded as a Puritan colony in 1638. In
1665 Charles II forced the town to unify with the Connecticut Colony.
