New London, Connecticut: The Town That Turned Down "Fair Harbor"

In 1649, Connecticut’s General Court suggested the settlers at Pequot harbor call their town Fair Harbour. They wanted London, and in 1658 they got it. On March 24 of that year, the colony named the place New London “in honor to that famous city.”

“Faire Harbour,” politely declined

The town started around 1646 at Pequot harbor, at the mouth of the river that’s now the Thames, and John Winthrop was put in charge of its affairs. At its May 1649 session, Connecticut’s General Court passed a list of rules for the new plantation, and one of them read: “The Courte commends the name of Faire Harbour to them for to bee the name of theire Towne.”

They didn’t take it. Frances Manwaring Caulkins, who wrote the town’s history in 1852 and quoted its early records at length, says the first settlers wanted their new home to “bear the name of London.” The court “hesitated in regard to this name, and proposed Fair Harbor, as a more appropriate term. But the inhabitants declined the proposition, and resolved to adhere to the old Indian name, until they could obtain the one of their choice.”

Nameaug, Pequot, and a name on hold

So for years the town ran on other names. Benjamin Trumbull’s 1818 Complete History of Connecticut says “the Indian name of the place was Nameaug, alias Towawog,” and that in 1654 the whole tract that’s now New London and Groton was called Pequot, “from the name of the harbour and original inhabitants.” The clerks used them together. One deed from 1653 that Caulkins copied says “the towne of Pequott otherwise called Nameeg or Tawaw-wag.”

Those Native names have their own meanings, and the experts don’t fully agree on them. For Nameaug, J. Hammond Trumbull’s 1881 book on Connecticut’s Native place names gives name-auk, “fishing place,” and Caulkins wrote that it was “supposed to mean a fishing place.” For Towawog, they split. Caulkins thought it was “probable” that it also had to do with fish, maybe from a word for blackfish. Trumbull explained it another way. After the Nameaug people were moved off part of the town plot around 1649, he wrote, the old men who had lived there before Winthrop came would speak of the place they’d given up as “the old land” or “abandoned land.”

“In memory of the city of London”

The colony finally gave in. Trumbull prints the act of March 24, 1658, and it’s worth reading, because it explains itself. Settlers all over New England, it says, had named their towns after places in England, “as Boston, Hartford, Windsor, York, Ipswich, Braintree, Exeter,” but “there hath yet no place in any of the colonies been named in memory of the city of London.” So the court, wanting to “leave to posterity” the memory of “that renowned city of London, from whence we had our transportation,” chose “in honor to that famous city, to call the said plantation New-London.”

That’s where it gets interesting. Trumbull adds that “the name of the river was also changed and called the Thames.” Caulkins wasn’t so sure. She wrote that when the river got the name Thames “is uncertain,” and that neither the colony’s records nor the town’s let you pin down the date. The English had also called it the Pequot, the river of Mohegan, or simply the Great River.

A dropped “New” and a Wisconsin namesake

The “New” didn’t always stick. Caulkins found that the name “sometimes appears in old records without the prefix of New,” including a 1659 grant from the legislature that mentions “the plantation of London.” And if you ever drive through New London, Wisconsin, you’re in a namesake of a namesake: Henry Gannett’s 1905 list of place-name origins for the U.S. Geological Survey says that city was “named from New London, Connecticut, by an early settler.”

Sources & further reading

• Frances Manwaring Caulkins, History of New London, Connecticut (1852), pp. 63–65, 118–119. The May 1649 rules for Pequot, including “The Courte commends the name of Faire Harbour” (pp. 63–64); the 1653 and 1654 deeds with Pequot, Nameeg and Tawaw-wag; the settlers’ wish for London, the refusal of Fair Harbor, the act of 1658, the uncertain date of the name Thames, and the 1659 “plantation of London” (pp. 118–119).
• Benjamin Trumbull, A Complete History of Connecticut, vol. 1 (1818), pp. 169–170. “Nameaug, alias Towawog”; the name Pequot from 1654; the full act of March 24, 1658; the river “called the Thames.”
• J. Hammond Trumbull, Indian Names of Places, etc., in and on the Borders of Connecticut (1881), pp. 34, 72. Nameock or Nameaug, name-auk, “fishing place” (p. 34); Tawawog as “the old land” or “abandoned land” (p. 72).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), pp. 223–224. New London “named from London in England,” and New London, Wisconsin, named for the Connecticut town.
• GNIS feature 209237 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for New London.