In the beginning, the people and their river were as one.
Indeed, the Connecticut River and its fertile valley were the reason the first European settlers plunked themselves down in Hartford.
There was no way of knowing it in those days in the early 17th century, when the river was pristine, but the relationship of Hartford to the river was to change dramatically over the next four centuries. For nearly a century the people and the river would be estranged.
The river the first settlers found, however, was a source of water and protein, teeming with fish, including bountiful spring runs of shad and Atlantic salmon returning from the sea to spawn upriver.
The fertile terraces set back from the river were ideal for agriculture, essential for survival. Native Americans in the area already had cleared some of them to grow corn and beans, and they kept some of the forest floor open through the use of fire.
But in the years just before European settlement the Native American population in what became Hartford crashed when infectious diseases inadvertently introduced by early European explorers spread through their communities.
For the European settlers, “It was like stumbling upon an abandoned city,” said William Hosley, an independent historian who long has studied the history of the river and the capital city. Much of the heavy lifting — clearing forest — had been done for them. “The valley was a miraculous resource when agriculture was the prevailing, predominant industry,” he said.
The river also was invaluable militarily, especially in the earliest years of settlement.
“Within a year of Thomas Hooker coming to settle Hartford, the river became a river of war,” said Walter W. Woodward, the official state historian and associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut. “It was a river of war right from the beginning, and for the next century and a half.”
Shortly after the Hooker party settled Hartford, Pequot Indians from southeastern Connecticut attacked Wethersfield. Immediately, the three first communities along the river, Wethersfield, Hartford and Windsor, mobilized for battle, sailing downriver to attack in what became a hugely bloody conflict with the natives.
Otherwise, in those early years the first settlers saw the New World as a vast, incredibly fruitful landscape that could never be exhausted, there to be exploited.
Nature’s ‘Lavish’ Bounties
For decades, with a comparatively small human population along its banks, the river remained healthy and a revered resource. On Jan. 2, 1792, a columnist for the Connecticut Courant who signed his name only “Patriot,” said in a front-page essay: “Nature has been lavish of her bounties upon this river. No part of the land is so low, as to be useless or to furnish putrid exhalations. No part above Middletown, is rocky or mountainous; and every part is rich and capable of high cultivation.”
Patriot went on: “The water of this river is extremely pure, running almost its whole course on a bed of sand. The current is rapid and not checked by the tide till it arrives near the sea. Such a large stream of water, penetrating the whole state, creates a motion of the air and keeps it pure.”
By then, as old maps of the city in the late 18th century clearly document, the riverfront was crowded with docks, wharves and shipyards, the shipyards producing seagoing wooden sailboats. The river was the major north-south transportation corridor, for trade and for travel. The city and the river still were inseparable.
“The river has been its life,” the famous Hartford theologian Horace Bushnell said of his city in 1847. At the time, it was still true. But even then, the city and its relationship to the river were rapidly changing.
Railroads And Sewers
In the mid-19th century, enormously powerful forces were altering both the river and the city, slowly but steadily destroying the bond between the people and the river.
The industrial revolution had taken off, and railroads, a product of that revolution, were transforming how goods and people were transported.
“I think the railroads were the end,” Hosley said. “Up until the railroad the Connecticut River was Hartford’s front door and its main street. Its ties to the outer world were through the river. Transportation and mobility were river oriented.”
With the railroad entering the city in 1839, west of the river, goods increasingly began to move by rail, and city development began to shift away from the waterfront, though there were wharves and even steamboat service into the 20th century.
Still, “the railroad usurped the river,” Hosley said.
The railroad was far from the only reason the Hartford community began to distance itself from the river, as it would for more than a century.
In 1843, with the city population growing, the first sewer channeled untreated human waste into the Park River and on the short distance into the Connecticut River. By midcentury, wastes from new factories, like the Colt Firearms complex, poured into rivers like the Connecticut, polluting them.
Those human and industrial wastes transformed the once salubrious waters of the Connecticut into a foul-smelling, dangerously unsanitary flow of filth.
In 1867, Hartford stopped using the river for drinking water.
“In the 19th century, it didn’t occur to people to say, ‘We need to clean up the river so that we can protect our drinking water.’ ” Woodward said. “Rather, they said, ‘We need to create reservoirs to provide drinking water so we can continue to use the river as a sink and cesspool.’ “
Water quality continued to deteriorate, fish populations suffered and some people complained. There were legislative hearings, calls for action, even efforts to restore Atlantic salmon to the river. By then the construction of upstream dams had wiped out the migratory run of salmon.
But the people calling for change were lonely voices. Little was done to make any meaningful change.
The City Turns Its Back
For decades, business and industry dallied, stalling for time using a sly tactic. “They said, ‘This is a very serious problem,'” Woodward said. “But we need to do research to find the best ways to solve it.”
Decades went by with no action. Somehow, industry never seemed able to figure out a solution it considered cost-effective.
By the early 20th century, recreational use of the river fell off dramatically.
Then came the major floods of 1936 and 1938, which did enormous damage in the city. The people had had it with the river. Both sides of the river were diked.
The city turned its back to the river, emphatically.
The construction of I-91 was perhaps the low point in the city’s relationship with the river. As if the dikes were not enough of a barrier, the new interstate highway was built over the dike system, creating an imposing, towering mass of steel and concrete that not only made it even more difficult to get to the river, it essentially eliminated any view of the river from ground level.
Reconnecting To The River
But, if the mid-19th century had been an enormously pivotal time in terms of the city’s relationship with its river, the late-20th century was perhaps its match.
No sooner was I-91 completed than a nascent environmental movement caught fire, in Connecticut and nationally. Connecticut was among the earliest states to move aggressively to clean up its rivers. The state ordered new or greatly improved municipal sewage treatment facilities and forced factories to treat chemical, metal and other wastes that until then were simply flushed into the rivers.
The rivers responded quickly. The Connecticut River that smelled of human and industrial wastes in the early 1960s was by 1980 far less polluted. People began to return to the river in boats, began to fish its waters, to walk along the river where they could.
In the early 1980s, a new, private organization, Riverfront Recapture, emerged with the goal of reconnecting Hartford, and East Harford, to the river once so integral to their affairs.
Recognizing that the state Department of Transportation was planning a major redesign of I-91 in Hartford, Riverfront Recapture urged the agency to use the opportunity to provide pedestrian access from the city to the river. The agency agreed, and in 1999 Riverfront Plaza was completed, with an amphitheater and walkways.
“Riverfront Recapture has definitely succeeded in reconnecting, in making the river part of the downtown experience,” Hosley said.
I-91 and the dikes are still artificial barriers along much of the waterfront, which is a far different landscape than it was centuries ago. As Woodward put it, the dike and the highway are “the barriers we put up between the people who live here and the reason they live here.”
Still, the access to the river through the plaza was a major improvement. It has proved enormously popular.
On a mild day, people flow from city offices to the plaza walking along the river or sitting with lunch. The plaza is the centerpiece of riverside events and celebrations, like fireworks displays.
The river has changed, the landscape is changed, but once again, the people of Hartford are embracing the river.
Contact Steve Grant at steve@thestevegrantwebsite.com.
