Wethersfield: Onion Town, Witch Town, and the First Connecticut Settlement
Near Hartford, Connecticut
Wethersfield sits just south of Hartford on the Connecticut River, and it has a legitimate claim to being the first permanent English settlement in what became Connecticut. John Oldham and nine companions from Watertown, Massachusetts, arrived here in sixteen thirty-four, before Hartford, before New Haven, and began farming the wide, flat meadows along the riverbank.
For generations, those meadows grew onions. Red onions, specifically, of a variety that thrived in the Connecticut River clay and kept well enough to ship long distances by boat. Wethersfield's red onions went to ports up and down the Atlantic coast and across to the West Indies, and the trade made the town prosperous. It also made the town famous in a different way: the smell. The saying went that you could smell Wethersfield before you could see it, and residents earned the nickname Onion Townspeople. By the late seventeen hundreds, onions were the dominant industry, and the export warehouses along the waterfront were busy with it.
But Wethersfield also holds a darker distinction. The town's Puritan settlers held witch trials in the sixteen forties and sixteen fifties, more than forty years before the more famous proceedings in Salem. Between sixteen forty-eight and sixteen sixty-eight, Wethersfield documented nine witchcraft accusations and carried out three executions. In sixteen forty-eight, a woman named Mary Johnson became the first person in the English American colonies to confess to witchcraft under interrogation. Her confession came in Wethersfield.
A nineteen fifty-eight children's novel called The Witch of Blackbird Pond wove together the witches and the onions and the Puritan community into a single story. It won the Newbery Medal and has been required reading in American schools ever since, introducing generations of young readers to this particular river town.
The Wethersfield Historic District is now the largest in Connecticut, a stretch of colonial and early Federal architecture that survives almost intact along the old main street, two blocks from the river where the onion boats once loaded.
