Hog River Journal: History Under Foot

By Kathy Hermes

Today, we often walk with our heads down. We’re looking at texts on our phones or—in my case—trying not to trip over our feet or a raised edge of the sidewalk. The downward gaze may also indicate that we are looking at nothing, lost in our thoughts. This issue invites you to look down for another reason: the history held there. Not “history from below,” which is a phrase historians use when looking at evidence from the perspective of ordinary people, but history on, or even below, the surface—the factory floor, the sidewalk cement that someone wrote on while it was wet, the cemetery lawn. We also invite you to feel what it was like to move in someone else’s shoes, walk by familiar places with hidden stories, or navigate streets and buildings when walking is difficult or impossible. Our photo essay engages with the sea, that surface holding up so much of our history in Connecticut.

Hartford in 1640. Map by William S. Porter

I love walking Connecticut’s cities and towns. Admittedly, I haven’t been to all of them—yet. As a historian whose work has focused on the colonial period, I often imagine the landscape in those times. The bones of the 1640 map of Hartford are still visible to me when I walk there today. The Ancient Burying Ground at Main and Gold Streets, once nearly six acres, is shrunken to a little over an acre, and the Hog River (also called the Park) is buried, but the streets more or less run as they did then, towards the meadows north and south, around the land divisions. The Connecticut River is now more cut off from the city than it was, but Riverfront Recapture has helped restore access.

Before colonization, the Wangunk populated the villages of Suckiog (Hartford), Pyquag (Wethersfield), Nayaug (Glastonbury), Mattabessic (Middletown), and Haddam, among others. Their grand sachem, Sequin, and his son Sequassen, the sachem of Suckiog, sent an envoy in 1631 to invite the English to settle there, an offer the English did not accept until 1636. A Dutch fort known as Huys de Hoop (House of Hope) already abutted the Indigenous village as early as 1633, but the Dutch were friendly with the rival Pequot people. Wangunk people remained in Hartford well into the 18th century; even into the 1840s, residents recalled the wigwams in the South Meadows that stood near where Wawarme Avenue, named after one of Sequin’s daughters, is now. When Samuel Colt named the streets surrounding his home and factory for the Indigenous people whose names he found on old deeds, he was not far off in documenting where they actually lived in Suckiog. Masseek Avenue was named for Wawarme’s son Massecuppe, who died in the early 18th century. His daughter, Asquasuttock, became the wife of Cushoy, sachem of the Wangunk at Middletown. She is known in colonial records as Mary or Tike, but she was the granddaughter of Miantonomi, the grand sachem of the Narragansett. In every place in Connecticut, as in Hartford, we walk across not just plots of land but across time and memory.

Map of Hartford, 2023

What do you see when you traverse your town or its woodlands and fields that might be invisible to others? What do you remember that others may have forgotten? Our Summer 2024 issue was about monuments and memory, but we also remember people and events with no monuments to remind us. In some ways, this issue follows up by inspiring us to reflect on the history at our feet. And what better time to explore than fall?

While we pause to appreciate what is beneath our feet, Connecticut Explored wants to express its appreciation for the two-year partnership support of Connecticut Humanities and the continuing office space provided by Central Connecticut State University. These institutions have been vital to our sustenance and growth!