Cromwell, Connecticut: Two Centuries as Upper Houses
Near Hartford, Connecticut
Cromwell spent most of its history as someone else's northern edge. In the years after Middletown was founded in sixteen fifty-one, a cluster of colonists built homes along the Connecticut River just above the Sebethe River and called their settlement Middletown Upper Houses, a practical name that told you exactly where you were relative to the main town downstream. For two centuries the Upper Houses remained part of Middletown, farming tobacco and corn along the river flats, trading on the Connecticut.
The name Cromwell finally arrived in eighteen fifty-one, about two centuries after Middletown was founded, when residents incorporated as their own town. The name honors Oliver Cromwell, the seventeenth-century English military and political leader, though some historians note the town may also have had in mind the privateer ship Oliver Cromwell that fought for American independence. Either way, a farming village that waited two centuries to stand on its own chose to mark the moment with a name that cut clean from England's past.
