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History Connecticut got its name after the Algonquin word, 'quinnehtukqut' which means beside the long tidal river. The first Europeans to the area were the members of the expedition of Dutch explorer Adriaen Block, who sailed through Long Island Sound and up the Connecticut River to present-day Hartford, encountering the Pequot people who lived in area. By the 1620s, Dutch traders from New Amsterdam established fur trading posts along the Connecticut River. Thomas Hooker, along with some Massachusetts colonists, were the first to go to the Connecticut colony for more freedom and financial opportunities. The rival English had simultaneously established the Massachusetts Bay Colony. King James I of England granted the Earl of Warwick, president of the Council for New England, the right to settle the area west of Narragansett Bay to the Pacific Ocean. In 1631, the Earl of Warwick conveyed the grant to 15 Puritan lords in England as refuge in North America in case the Puritan Revolution failed. The patentees included William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, as well as Lord Brooke, and Colonel George Fenwick. In 1635, the patentees commissioned John Winthrop, Jr., son of the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, as "Governor of River Colony". Winthrop arrived in Boston in October 1635 and learned that the Dutch were planning to occupy the mouth of the Connecticut River at a place called Pasbeshauke, meaning "place at the mouth of the river" in the Algonquian language. To counter the Dutch, Winthrop sent a small bark (canoe) to the mouth of the Connecticut with 20 carpenters and other workmen under the leadership of Lieutenant Edward Gibbons and Sergeant Simon Willard. The expedition landed near the mouth of the river, on the west bank in present-day Old Saybrook, on November 24, 1635 and located the Dutch coat of arms nailed on a tree. They tore down the coat of arms and replaced it with a shield painted with a grinning face. They established a battery of cannon and built a small fort. When the Dutch ship returned several days later, they sighted the cannon and the English ships and withdrew. Winthrop renamed the point "Point Sayebrooke" in honor of Fiennes (Viscount Saye) and Lord Brooke. The first English settlers arrived in 1636. Clergyman Thomas Hooker led 100 settlers with 130 head of cattle in a trek from Newtown (now Cambridge) in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and started their settlement just north of the old Dutch fort at Hartford. In 1637, the three Connecticut River towns (Hartford, Weathersfield, and Windsor) set up a collective government in order to fight the Pequot War. In the Summer of 1638, the towns drew up their Fundamental Orders, setting out the principles, powers, and structure of the government. These were adopted by the Connecticut council on January 14, 1639. The Connecticut Colony received a royal charter in 1662 and became an official crown colony. The New Haven Colony was a separate entity; it was merged into the Connecticut Colony under the 1662 charter. (The citizens of New Haven may have first recognized Connecticut authority on January 5, 1665.) Early Leaders Thomas Hooker, a Puritan cogregation leader of that time, was one of the major founders of the Colony of Connecticut. He wrote the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, which was the first constitution ever written in the U.S. It served as a model for the U.S. Constitution which was written many years later. Reasons For Founding Thomas Hooker led settlers to the Connecticut valley to help satisfy New England's increasing demand for farm land. He may have also left because of a squabble he got into with John Cotton. Although the two ministers argued over whether or not one could prepare for salvation, the argument may have actually been personal in nature. Hooker had been a prominent minister back in England, but, in Cambridge, he found his prominence was being overshadowed by Cotton. By withdrawing from the Bay Colony and moving west to the Connecticut River, Hooker was diffusing the conflict. Role of Religion Like Massachusetts Bay Colony, Connecticut was founded by Puritans who made the Congregational Church the established church in the colony. Tax dollars supported the local ministers, and colonists who failed to attend Sunday services were subject to fines. Until 1708, the Congregational Church was the only legal religion in Connecticut. That year, however, the colony recognized "sober dissent," and excused certain dissenters, notably Anglicans and Baptists, from paying taxes to support the state church, provided, of course, that they contributed to their own lawful dissenting church. Also in 1708, the colony adopted the Saybrook Platform, which took church sovereignty away from the local congregations and placed it in the hands of a colony-wide consociation controlled by ministers. In 1701, the General Assembly authorized the formation of the Collegiate School, with the mission of training new Congregational ministers in the colony. After locating in Killingworth, Saybrook, and Wethersfield, the school found a permanent home in New Haven in 1716. In 1718, following a substantial gift from Elihu Yale, a wealthy English businessman who had been born in Boston, the institution's name was changed to Yale College. In the early 1720s, religious controversy gripped Yale, as the school's rector, Rev. Timothy Culter, along with one of the tutors and two neighboring ministers were accused of converting to Anglicanism. Determined to enforce orthodoxy at the instution, in 1722 the school's trustees dismissed Rev. Cutler and the offending tutor, and adopted a resolution requiring that, in the future, all rectors and tutors must declare their assent to the Saybrook Platform. The Great Awakening sent shock waves through the colony in the middle of the eighteenth century, ripping the Congregational Church apart. Those who embraced the Awakening were known as New Lights, while those opposed to it became known as Old Lights. Unhappy with the often unemotional services of their regular ministers, New Lights in many towns petitioned to form separate religious societies or churches. Often Old Lights would oppose these attempts, arguing that the New Lights were neither sober (because of the emotional nature of their services) nor dissenting (because they continued to be Congregationalists). In 1741, Old Lights who tried to suppress the Awakening succeeded in convincing the General Assembly to pass an Itineracy Law, which prohibited traveling ministers from preaching in a Connecticut town without an invitation from the town's minister. Many historians believe that this law was the spark that led to the creation of issue politics in the colony. During the American Revolution many of the colony's Anglicans, most of which were concentrated in Fairfield County, remained Loyalists. One Anglican, Moses Dunbar of Bristol, was convicted of treason and hanged for being a Loyalist. The Congregationalism remained the established church in Connecticut throughout the Revolutionary Period, although, with time, more dominations were exempted as "sober dissenting" churches. With the adoption of Connecticut's 1818 state constitution, the Congregational Church was disestablished and separation of church and state finally came to Connecticut. 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