The Quinnipiac and the Nine-Square City

Before any street was laid, before any church was raised, this harbor belonged to the Quinnipiac. Their name is usually translated as something close to long water, a name tied to the river that threads south through this valley to the Sound. The Quinnipiac fished these waters, farmed maize on the floodplain, and built their settlements where the tidal marsh gave way to higher ground. Their numbers, already thinned by epidemic diseases that arrived with European contact before settlers ever appeared in person, may have stood in the hundreds when the English ships entered the harbor in the spring of sixteen thirty-eight.

The Puritans who arrived that April under the merchant Theophilus Eaton and the minister John Davenport were not wilderness pioneers scratching at the earth. Eaton was a wealthy London businessman. Davenport had been vicar of a prominent church before leaving England after clashing with the church authorities of Archbishop Laud. They came prepared, with roughly five hundred colonists and a vision of the city they meant to build.

What they built was unlike any other colonial settlement in America. Surveyors laid out a precise nine-square grid, eight streets forming a three-by-three pattern of blocks, with a large central square at the heart. Every block had a purpose assigned to it in advance. The central square became the Green. The blocks around it were designated for public buildings and residences. It was urban planning in the European Renaissance tradition, applied to the American wilderness in the late sixteen thirties.

The American Planning Association later recognized it as a National Planning Landmark. The grid is still intact. The Green is still there. The Quinnipiac are remembered by the name of the river.