Hartford, Connecticut, and the English Town Spelled Hertford

The English town that gave Hartford, Connecticut, its name spells it Hertford, with an e, and an 1886 history says people there more often pronounce it Harford. The English settlers on the Connecticut River had been calling their spot Newtown, and in February 1637 the colony’s court gave it the English name.

First it was Newtown

The settlers brought their first name with them. John Warner Barber’s Connecticut Historical Collections (1836) says the first English settlement at Hartford began in 1635, with John Steel and his associates from Newtown, “now Cambridge,” in Massachusetts. The main group, led by the Rev. Thomas Hooker, came the next year. Barber quotes Benjamin Trumbull on that trip: about a hundred men, women and children traveled “more than a hundred miles,” driving “a hundred and sixty head of cattle,” and spent “nearly a fortnight on their journey.”

For a while the new plantation went by Newtown too. Then, on February 21, 1637, the court met there and, in Trumbull’s words, “decreed, that the plantation called Newtown, should be named Hartford.” At the same court, Watertown became Wethersfield, and soon after Dorchester became Windsor. The 1886 Memorial History of Hartford County gives the same day, writing the year the old way, 1636-7, and says Newtown became “Hartford Towne.”

Samuel Stone’s hometown

Trumbull’s Complete History of Connecticut (1818) is short and sure about the reason: “Hartford was named in honor to Mr. Stone, who was born at Hartford, in England.” Samuel Stone was the minister Hooker brought over as his assistant in 1633, and the Newtown church made him its teacher, Trumbull says, while Hooker was its pastor.

Sherman W. Adams, who wrote the chapter on the town’s settlement in the Memorial History, is a bit more careful. He says the name “was borrowed from the township of Hertford, on the river Lea, in Hertfordshire, England,” and that the choice “is probably due to the fact that it was the birthplace of the Rev. Samuel Stone, who was the first grantee named in the Indian deed of 1636.” The same book says Stone was born at Hertford and baptized at All Saints’ Church on July 30, 1602. Adams adds that the settlers sometimes wrote the name Hertford themselves. So the English town is certain, and Stone is the best explanation for why that one.

A hart, a ford, or something else

As it turns out, nobody’s sure what the English name meant in the first place. Adams runs through the guesses. Bede, who died in 735, sometimes wrote it Herudford, which some read as “Red Ford.” Other writers saw the Anglo-Saxon word for a hart. Hertford’s coat of arms shows a hart in a ford, though Adams warns that the picture doesn’t prove anyone believed that’s where the name came from. One more writer thought it was a worn-down form of Hereford, “an army ford.”

J. Hammond Trumbull used the same example in 1881 to make a point about all place names: Hartford “has ceased to be either ‘the ford of harts,’ or ‘the red ford’ which its name once indicated.” By the time it reached Connecticut, it was just a name from home.

Before the English name: Suckiaug

The land had a name long before 1637. Barber says the Native name of Hartford was Suckiag, and that a sachem he calls Sunckquasson gave a deed about 1636 to Samuel Stone and William Goodwin, and the two appear to have acted for the first settlers.

J. Hammond Trumbull’s 1881 book on Connecticut’s Native place names spells it Suckiaug and says it was the name of “the Hartford meadows.” He reads it as suckiauke, “black (or, dark-colored) earth.” The Dutch wrote it Sickajoock and described “a flat extending about one league down along the river.” An agreement of 1670 still used both names side by side: “Suckiage, alias Hartford.”

A name that kept traveling

The name didn’t stop in Connecticut. Henry Gannett’s 1905 government bulletin on American place names says Hartford City, Indiana, was “named from the city in Connecticut.” So if you pass through there, you’re on the third stop of a name that started on the river Lea. And if you walk down to the meadows along the Connecticut River in Hartford, you’re on ground that had a Native name, one Trumbull read as dark earth, long before it had an English one.

Sources & further reading

• Benjamin Trumbull, A Complete History of Connecticut, vol. 1 (1818), pp. 26, 77. Hooker’s arrival in 1633 with Stone as his assistant, and Stone as teacher of the Newtown church (p. 26); the court of February 21, 1637, that renamed Newtown as Hartford, Watertown as Wethersfield and Dorchester as Windsor, and named Hartford “in honor to Mr. Stone.”
• Sherman W. Adams, “Settlement of the Town,” in The Memorial History of Hartford County, vol. 1 (1886), pp. 222–223, 278. “Hartford Towne,” the township of Hertford on the river Lea, the pronunciation Harford, the guesses about the English name, and Stone’s birth and baptism at Hertford.
• John Warner Barber, Connecticut Historical Collections (1836; 2nd ed. cited), p. 31. The settlers from Newtown in Massachusetts, the journey with Hooker, and the Native name Suckiag with the deed of about 1636.
• J. Hammond Trumbull, Indian Names of Places, etc., in and on the Borders of Connecticut (1881), preface and p. 69. “The ford of harts” and “the red ford”; Suckiaug, “the Hartford meadows,” read as “black (or, dark-colored) earth.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 151. Hartford’s name “transferred from England,” and Hartford City, Indiana, named for the Connecticut city.
• GNIS feature 213160 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Hartford, “Capital of State of Connecticut.”