East Hartford, Hartford County, Connecticut in the 1770s

Work

Meadows, mills, and war powder

The ordinary base of work was farming: fertile, rock-free river land¹ and meadow pasture. At Pitkin Falls, the Hockanum powered a fulling mill, powder mill, foundry, and forges¹, so some labor followed water, iron, cloth, and war supply rather than fields.

Faith

A parish before a town

This was an ecclesiastical community before it was a civil town: the east side had its own Third Ecclesiastical Society of Hartford¹ long before incorporation. Congregational life also shaped public obligations, because church, taxation, parish boundaries, and the calendar were still intertwined in Connecticut.

Law & power

Hartford ruled across the river

Local people were still under Hartford’s town government because East Hartford was not incorporated until 1783^1,4. Their long campaign for separation began because crossing the Connecticut River for public business was a hardship¹.

In the air

Separation and revolution

Two public arguments mattered here: whether the east side should break from Hartford, and whether Britain could still command the colonies. The Revolution was not distant politics; forty-nine local officers and men marched to Roxbury² in 1775.

What people feared

Flood, powder, and war

Settlement clustered on high ground because the town center was safe from periodic Connecticut River flooding¹. The powder mill added wartime usefulness and danger, as gunpowder was being made in East Hartford in 1775⁵.

Home & table

Farmhouses near a burying ground

The old center held the community’s burying ground, where eighteenth-century markers showed skulls, winged soul effigies, and carved borders¹. Details of ordinary farmhouse interiors are a gap: no local online source found here describes them.

Who lived here

Two thousand east of Hartford

By 1774, the east side held about 2,000 of Hartford’s 5,000 residents¹. Power was unequal: the Pitkin family held exceptional local influence^1,6, while the burial record also shows African Americans in the community¹.

Roads & news

Ferry, highway, Hartford

News, lawsuits, officials, printed papers, and strangers came by the ferry to Hartford¹ and along the King’s Highway¹. There was no bridge yet, so the river remained both a road and a barrier.

Year by year

1. 1770East-side Hartford residents entered the decade still outside town incorporation, despite petitions that had begun decades earlier. here¹
2. 1774About 2,000 of Hartford’s 5,000 residents lived east of the Connecticut River. here¹
3. 1775A company of forty-nine East Hartford officers and men marched to Roxbury after Lexington and Concord. here²
4. 1775A Pitkin powder mill in East Hartford began making gunpowder for the Revolutionary struggle. here⁵
5. 1776The Declaration of Independence turned the imperial crisis into a formal war for independence. the country
6. 1777British forces surrendered at Saratoga in New York, a victory people in Connecticut would have heard discussed as a turning point. nearby
7. 1778France entered the war as an American ally, making French troops and money part of the world that later reached East Hartford. the world²
8. 1781Rochambeau’s French army stopped in East Hartford and camped north of Silver Lane on the way toward Washington’s army. here²

Pictures from the time

What the sources say

• East Hartford was not yet incorporated in the 1770s; it remained the east-side part of Hartford until the General Assembly incorporated East Hartford in October 1783. from the sources^1,4
• By 1774, about 2,000 of Hartford’s 5,000 residents lived east of the Connecticut River. from the sources¹
• Travel between the east side and Hartford used a ferry until the first bridge was built in 1808. from the sources¹
• Present-day Main Street had been laid out in 1670 as the King’s Highway. from the sources¹
• The old town center stood on the first terrace of high ground east of the Connecticut River meadows, safe from periodic flooding. from the sources¹
• The Connecticut River floodplain here had fertile, rock-free soil suited to cultivation, and the riverside meadows served as natural pasture. from the sources¹
• By the late 1770s, four dams on the Hockanum River at Pitkin Falls powered a fulling mill, powder mill, foundry for mill screws and castings, and forges making nails and iron bars. from the sources¹
• Cultivation of the rich soil was East Hartford’s chief economic activity for more than 200 years after settlement. from the sources¹
• Center Cemetery’s eighteenth-century stones included brown or reddish sandstone, granitic schist, and designs such as skulls, winged soul effigies, and vine-like borders. from the sources¹
• The Third Ecclesiastical Society of Hartford, serving inhabitants east of the Connecticut River, had been established by the General Assembly in 1694. from the sources¹
• East-side residents had petitioned for separation from Hartford beginning in 1726, citing the hardship of crossing the Connecticut River for public business. from the sources¹
• In 1775, a company of forty-nine officers and men from East Hartford marched to Roxbury under Lieutenant-Colonel George Pitkin. from the sources²
• Colonel George Pitkin was commandant of the Fourth Regiment of minute-men in 1775 and marched with it to Roxbury during the siege of Boston. from the sources³
• Colonel William Pitkin, a son of Governor William Pitkin, served on Connecticut’s Council of Safety during much of the Revolutionary War. from the sources³
• A powder mill erected by Colonel Pitkin in East Hartford in 1775 supplied war material, though later scholarship says it was not the first powder mill in the colonies. from the sources⁵
• In 1781, Rochambeau’s French army stopped at East Hartford and camped on a field north of Silver Lane while moving from Newport toward Washington’s army. from the sources²
• The French army stopped again in East Hartford on its return east in 1782. from the sources²
• The Pitkin family held exceptional local power through mills, commerce, militia command, and colonial offices; Governor William Pitkin had served as Connecticut governor until his death in 1769. from the sources^1,6
• The east-side community included African Americans; Center Cemetery contains several African-American burials, including Pomp Equality, who lived from 1759 to 1824. from the sources¹
• No local online source found in this session gives ordinary East Hartford wage rates or household food prices for the 1770s. not known
• No local online source found in this session describes the interiors of ordinary East Hartford farmhouses in the 1770s. not known
• As across Connecticut, the established Congregational church shaped taxation, parish boundaries, meetinghouse attendance, and the public calendar before disestablishment in 1818. inferred

Sources

1. Central Avenue-Center Cemetery Historic District. LivingPlaces, adapted from National Register nomination, 1993
2. Historic Towns of the Connecticut River Valley, Part 18. LDSGenealogy, reprint, 1906
3. The Memorial History of Hartford County, Connecticut, 1633-1884. Edward L. Osgood, 1886
4. Connecticut Towns in the Order of their Establishment. Connecticut Secretary of the State
5. History of the American Powder Mills. Columbia University Press preview
6. William Pitkin. Museum of Connecticut History

Nearby, about the same time