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Northrop Genealogy ~~~ Southport, Connecticut
Connecticut Geography

Connecticut takes its name from its principal geographic feature, the broad “Quinnetukut” or “long tidal river” that traverses the state from north to south. Easily navigable from its mouth 45 miles north to the rapids of present-day Windsor Locks, the Connecticut River from colonial times has provided a broad highway to the interior and a convenient means of exporting surplus crops and goods.

Equally important to the development of the state has been its irregular “drowned” coastline with its many sheltered harbors. Typical is New London where, as one colonial observer marveled, “A ship of 500 tunn may go up to the towne and cum so near the shore that they may toss a biskit ashoare.” Similar ports in New Haven and Bridgeport and small harbors at Guilford, Milford, Stratford, Norwalk and Stamford encouraged the growth of the maritime trades in the 17th and 18th centuries and facilitated a vigorous commercial life that continues to the present.

Water, however, has been virtually the state’s only natural resource. With the exception of iron deposits in Salisbury, copper veins in East Granby and Bris­tol, and brownstone quarries in Portland, Connecticut has virtually no mineral wealth, and but for the rich bottomland of the Connecticut River Valley little fertile farmland. Rising in both the northeastern and northwestern corners of the state into rugged boulder-strewn highlands, more prominent for their scenery than their agricultural potential, Connecticut’s flinty soil long ago prompted the wry colonial adage “Buy meat, get bone. Buy land, get stone.” Virtually from the first, the people of Connecticut learned that their success would depend on gifts of imagination, character and craftsmanship, not on the bounty of nature.


The Connecticut the first Europeans saw was hardly a trackless, unpopulated wilderness. For centuries the region had been inhabited by perhaps as many as 30,000 Indians whose seasonal migrations and practice of setting great fires to burn off forest underbrush left Connecticut crisscrossed with trails and often parklike in appearance.

While the village rather than the tribe was the real center of Indian life, at least 16 separate tribes existed in the region in 1620. The Paugussetts and Siwanogs occupied present-day Fairfield county; the Quinnipiacs, the area around New Haven; the Tunxis, Podunk and Poquinock Indians the Hartford region; the Nipmuks and Mohegans the northeast uplands; and the Pequots the coastal area east of the Thames River.

All these tribes shared a common culture and generally similar languages. Indian life in New England was inextricably bound to the rhythms of the seasons; the size and location of their settlements changing in response to the cycles of nature. Unlike their northern counterparts, southern New England Indians were skilled farmers, and their dependence on agriculture made them less nomadic than the tribes of Maine and New Hampshire. Still, villages regularly shifted from one location to another as the availability of natural food resources changed. In the spring, Connecticut’s Indians gathered together in large villages. Women planted fields of corn and beans while men fished the massive spring spawning runs of shad, salmon and alewives. In the summer, as crops ripened, the Indians depended primarily on game for food, particularly the white-tailed deer. Men often embarked on extended fishing and hunting expeditions to the interior and to the shore while women and children remained behind to till and protect the fields. The arrival of fall saw the village collected again to harvest crops and to gather acorns, chestnuts and other wild plants. This was a time of extensive festivals where hundreds of people gathered in dense settlements to feast and celebrate the plenty of the season. It was also the preferred season for war, when food stores of both attacker and attacked would be at their greatest.

Once the harvest celebrations were over, however, Connecticut’s Indians dispersed into small bands to conduct the fall hunt when deer and bear were at their fattest. By late December, when the snows had come at last, the village was reassembled in heavily wooded valleys, protected from winter winds and convenient to essential supplies of firewood. There the Indians rode out the winter, often enduring long stretches of hunger as supplies of corn dwindled and the hunt grew more difficult.

The society produced by this nomadic life had no room for advanced technology or elaborate political arrangements. Since everything had to be trans­portable, the Indians’ tools and weapons were quite simple, their possessions often disposable. Their political organization was similarly uncluttered. Connecticut’s Indians had no real notion of “the state”: their loyalties were to individuals and to relatives, a situation not conducive to strong leadership or concerted action. As one early missionary noted,


Their Sachems have not their men in such subjection, but that very frequently their men will leave them upon distaste or harsh dealing, and go and live among other Sachems that can protect them; so that their princes endeavor to carry it obligingly and lovingly unto their people, lest they should desert them....

Given their vastly different cultures and their sharply divergent visions of land use and property, it was inevitable that Europeans and Indians would eventually come into conflict in Connecticut. Given the great differences between them in technological and political sophistication, it was also inevitably a conflict the Indians would eventually lose.

The first blow fell from an invisible hand. In 1633, before the first Europeans arrived, a great epidemic of smallpox, transmitted from European settlers to the Indians of Massachusetts and Maine, swept south, killing hundreds of Indians across Connecticut, depopulating whole villages. Confined by culture and weakened by disease, Connecticut’s first inhabitants could do little to resist the waves of English that would arrive in the next thirty years.

from http://www.ctheritage.org/encyclopedia/ctto1763/overviewctto1763.htm

 

This home on Pequot Avenue, Southport, Connecticut is a recently restored example of the Northrop Brothers fine carpentry and building in the Southport-Greeens Farms area.

Image Courtesy of David Parker Associates