New Haven, Connecticut: Five Words That Replaced Quinnipiac

The order that renamed New Haven, Connecticut, is five words long: “This towne now named Newhaven.” Before that, it was Quinnipiac, and the English settlers who had arrived in 1638 gave it the new name two years later.

A line between swords and garden paths

The order sits in the minutes of a general court held in 1640, printed in 1857 as the Records of the Colony and Plantation of New-Haven. It doesn’t get a speech or a reason. Just before it, the court grants the plantation of Totokett to Samuel Eaton and orders every man on watch duty to come to meeting “every Lords day” fully armed, with “all others also” bringing their swords. Just after it, the court sets aside an 8-foot path so the pastor can walk from his garden to the meetinghouse. Right in the middle: “This towne now named Newhaven.”

Benjamin Trumbull’s Complete History of Connecticut (1818) tells it the same way: “At this court it was decreed, that the plantation at Quinnipiack should be called New-Haven.”

Davenport, Eaton and a sermon under an oak

The people who chose the name had just come from England. Trumbull says the Rev. John Davenport, Theophilus Eaton, Samuel Eaton, Edward Hopkins and “many others of good characters and fortunes” landed at Boston on July 26, 1637. Massachusetts wanted to keep them. Charlestown made “large offers,” and Newbury offered to give them the whole town. They said no. They wanted “a distinct colony.”

In the fall of 1637, Eaton and a few others scouted the coast and “pitched upon Quinnipiack.” A handful of men spent the winter there in “a poor hut.” On March 30, 1638, the main company sailed from Boston, and about two weeks later they arrived. On April 18 they held their first Sabbath “under a large spreading oak,” where Davenport preached.

So why “New Haven”? Henry Gannett, writing for the U.S. Geological Survey in 1905, keeps it simple: the town was “settled by parties from Boston, who called it a ‘new haven.’” If you’re looking for a vote or a rival name, you won’t find one in these records. Here’s the thing, though: harbors were part of the pitch from the start. Trumbull says Eaton’s party went out “to explore the lands and harbours on the sea coast,” and that the shore was described to them as “happily situated for navigation and commerce.”

Quinnipiac, and the Dutch Red Mount

The old name didn’t vanish. John Warner Barber’s Connecticut Historical Collections (1836) says Quinnipiac was the name of the river on the town’s eastern edge, of the land around it, and of the Native people who lived there. In Barber’s day the river was “commonly called Wallingford river,” but his own list of New Haven County’s rivers still calls it the Quinnipiac.

What did it mean? J. Hammond Trumbull, the 19th-century scholar of Connecticut’s Native place names, wrote in 1881 that the name first belonged to “the land near the head of New Haven harbor and the estuary of Quinnipiac and Mill rivers.” He broke it down as quinni-pe-auke, “long-water land,” and said it was the same name as Kennebec. He also explained the jumble of spellings you’ll find in the old records: different nearby peoples said the first syllable as quin, quil or quir. The Dutch called the people Quiripeys, and an English captain in 1637 wrote Quillipeage. That quinni-, “long,” is the same piece Trumbull found in the name of Connecticut itself.

The Dutch had their own name for the place, too. Barber says they called it “Red Mount,” and that it was “doubtless so called from the appearance of the East and West Rocks near the place.” Trumbull gives “the Red Mount, and the Red Hills,” from the look of the rocks west and north of town. So the place has had a Dutch name for its rocks, an English one about a haven, and a Native one older than both that Trumbull read as long-water land. None of them is named for a person.

Sources & further reading

• Charles J. Hoadly, ed., Records of the Colony and Plantation of New-Haven, from 1638 to 1649 (Hartford, 1857), p. 40. The 1640 general court: Totokett granted to Samuel Eaton, the order to come armed on the Lord’s day, “This towne now named Newhaven,” and the pastor’s 8-foot path.
• Benjamin Trumbull, A Complete History of Connecticut, vol. 1 (1818), pp. 95–96, 120, 158. Davenport’s company at Boston in 1637, the offers from Massachusetts, the winter hut at Quinnipiack, the voyage of March 30, 1638, and the first Sabbath under an oak (pp. 95–96); the decree that Quinnipiack “should be called New-Haven” (p. 120); the Dutch names “the Red Mount, and the Red Hills” (p. 158, note).
• John Warner Barber, Connecticut Historical Collections (1836; 2nd ed. cited), pp. 133–134. Quinnipiac as the name of the river (“commonly called Wallingford river”), the land and the people; the Dutch “Red Mount” and the East and West Rocks; the Quinnipiac in the list of New Haven County’s rivers.
• J. Hammond Trumbull, Indian Names of Places, etc., in and on the Borders of Connecticut (1881), p. 61. Quinnipiac as quinni-pe-auke, “long-water land,” with its many spellings.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 223. “Settled by parties from Boston, who called it a ‘new haven.’”
• GNIS feature 209231 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for New Haven.