Thomas Hooker and the Long Walk to Hartford

The city you are driving through grew from a two-week walk. In June of sixteen thirty-six, the Reverend Thomas Hooker led roughly one hundred men, women, and children out of New Towne, Massachusetts, the place now called Cambridge, and through one hundred miles of wilderness to the banks of the Connecticut River. They drove well over one hundred head of cattle along with other livestock.

They slept on the ground. They forded streams with no bridges. When they arrived, they settled the place they would call Hartford, naming it after the English market town of Hertford, the birthplace of Hooker's associate Samuel Stone.

Hooker was one of the most prominent Puritan ministers in the colonies, but he had grown restless in Massachusetts. He disagreed with the narrow limits placed on who could vote and hold power. He believed, and preached, that government rested on the free consent of the people, not on the will of the most godly few.

That conviction traveled with him down the Connecticut River valley and would take root here. The settlement that Hooker founded in sixteen thirty-six would become, three years later, the seat of one of the most radical experiments in self-government the colonial world had yet seen. The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, drafted in Hartford in January of sixteen thirty-nine, would draw on exactly the principles Hooker carried through the wilderness.

A statue of Thomas Hooker now stands in front of the Old State House, a short walk from the river he first reached almost four centuries ago. He died in Hartford in sixteen forty-seven, during an epidemic, never having seen how far his ideas would travel.