Hartford, Connecticut

Hartford is the capital of Connecticut and an important commercial, insurance, and financial services hub in the New England region. The city's legacy dates to the American colonial era, when Hartford served as a model of participatory democracy that was, in many respects, ahead of its time. Hartford's modern history has been shaped by a spirit of manufacturing innovation that has generated prosperity and cultural, as well as architectural, notoriety. Historically a beacon for generations of immigrant settlers from all over the globe, Hartford remains one of Connecticut's most diverse places to live. It also continues to grapple with the challenges of urban poverty and renewal, as do many other cities throughout the northeastern United States.

Landscape

Hartford is located in the Connecticut River Valley, in the north-central part of Connecticut. It lies midway between New York City to the south and Boston, Massachusetts to the north. The city covers approximately 18 square miles of land, at a mean elevation of 147 feet, along the western bank of the Connecticut River. Its position at the head of the navigable portion of the river facilitated Hartford's development into a major inland port and an important player in the regional economy.

Hartford consists of seventeen distinct neighborhoods: Asylum Hill; Barry Square; Behind the Rocks; Blue Hills; Clay/Arsenal; Downtown; Frog Hollow; North East; North Meadows; Parkville; Sheldon/Charter Oak; South Green; South Meadows; South End; South West; Upper Albany; and West End. Each of these areas has a unique history, appearance, and character. The older districts, in particular, reflect Hartford's nineteenth-century importance as an industrial, financial, and cultural center.

The Sheldon/Charter Oak neighborhood, for example, contains the site where Hartford's founding fathers, a group of Dutch traders, first settled in 1623. Asylum Hill got its name from the Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons (later renamed the American School for the Deaf and relocated in West Hartford), founded by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet in 1807. And Behind the Rocks, for example, was home, during the late nineteenth century, to the Rocky Hill Quarry, where large numbers of Irish immigrants once toiled to produce trap rock used for road construction.

Hartford features a moderate New England climate. The average low temperature in January is 18.8 degrees Fahrenheit; July's average high is 85.2 degrees Fahrenheit, based on NOAA data. The city typically receives around 47.5 inches of precipitation each year. The bulk of the rain arrives in the summertime, when Hartford experiences frequent thunderstorms—the result of storm systems moving eastward into the capital from the Berkshire Mountains. Hartford's proximity to the Atlantic Ocean, which lies to the south, also makes the city prone to nor'easters, intense storms characterized by driving winds and heavy precipitation.

People

With a US Census Bureau estimated population of around 120,686 (as of 2022), Hartford is Connecticut's fourth-most populous city after Bridgeport, New Haven, and Stamford. Its urban neighborhoods contain significant pockets of poverty. The median household income in Hartford between 2018 and 2022 hovered around $41,841, and 26.9 percent of Hartford's residents lived below the poverty line during that time.

Hartford is one of the state's most diverse places to live. Although Connecticut as a whole is nearly 64 percent White, the US Census American Community Survey showed that White people made up an estimated 14.9 percent of the capital's population in 2022. An estimated 46.1 percent of Hartford's residents are Hispanic or Latino and 36.1 percent are African American or black. About 11.3 percent are aged sixty-five or older.

Hartford has historically served as a melting pot for immigrants from all over the world. The city was known during the nineteenth century for its large population of residents of Irish descent, with most originally hailing from County Kerry. In this same era, Hartford also witnessed the rise of a robust Jewish community, made up primarily of immigrants fleeing anti-Semitic environments in their native Eastern European nations. Hartford's Jewish residents quickly established a thriving commercial presence in the city, where many set up family businesses as tailors, grocers, butchers, and jewelers.

World War I saw a large influx of African Americans, who relocated to Hartford from the southern states to work in Connecticut's thriving tobacco industry. Following World War II, waves of Puerto Rican immigrants settled in the city for the same reason. During the twentieth century, Hartford has become home to significant communities of Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, German, French Canadian, and Greek immigrants.

Hartford's neighborhoods continue to represent a rich cross-section of ethnic and social groups. The Parkville section, for example, is home to large numbers of people of Portuguese, Brazilian, Puerto Rican, and Vietnamese extraction. The North End and Blue Hills areas have predominantly African American and West Indian populations. The South End, which historically featured a strong Italian heritage, later saw an influx of Eastern European immigrants, especially from Albania and various parts of the former Yugoslavia. Hartford's West End features a significant gay community.

Crime has been a serious problem for the city, but statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation show a marked decline in the 2020s. In 2017, Hartford experienced 1,343 violent crimes and 4,907 property crimes. In 2022, those numbers were 685 reported violent crimes and 3,130 reported property crimes.

Economy

As home to the state legislature and Connecticut's Supreme Court, Hartford employs a relatively large number of government workers. In addition to government, the top Hartford-area employers by the end of 2023 were in education, health care, trade, transportation, utilities, professional services, manufacturing, and finance.

Hartford's economy is anchored by the health care and social assistance industries, which supplanted the city's once-renowned insurance and financial services industries as the major economic drivers. Hartford's reputation as the Insurance Capital of the World traces its origins to the colonial era, when ship owners sought to insulate the risks to the rich cargoes carried by vessels operating out of Connecticut ports. Hartford was once the site of dozens of insurance industry giants, including Aetna Inc., Travelers Property Casualty Corporation, MassMutual, and the United Health Care Company. By 2022, Aetna and the Hartford still maintained their headquarters in the city. Several other insurance companies also had offices located in Hartford.

Small- and mid-size businesses make up a significant portion of the economy. The greater Hartford area is home, nonetheless, to a number of large corporations and multinational corporations. High-tech manufacturing firms turn out products ranging from nuclear reactors, missile components, jet engines, and aerospace equipment. The manufacturing sector also produces chemicals, fiber optics, and pharmaceutical products.

Hartford owes its preeminence as one of the New England region's biggest retail markets to its strategic location at the mouth of the Connecticut River and at the intersection of major interstate highways. Barges and tankers move significant volumes of cargo up and down the Connecticut River. Hartford enjoys the advantages of water, rail, and road links to other Connecticut commercial ports such as those in New Haven, Bridgeport, and New London, as well as to the Port of New York. Bradley International Airport, located fifteen miles north of the Hartford, was processed more than 170,000 tons of air cargo a year by 2023.

Hartford is also home to the corporate headquarters of one of America's most storied enterprises, the Colt's Manufacturing Company. Sam Colt's 1836 patent for his invention of the Colt revolver—the first weapon capable of firing multiple rounds without reloading—laid a cornerstone for a key segment of Hartford's economy. Colt began purchasing 250 acres of riverfront land in Hartford in 1851, attracted by the low prices at which the flooding-prone land was being offered. By 1855, Colt's plant, protected from floodwaters by a newly built dike, was operational.

Over the next century and a half since, Colt built a reputation, one that endures today, as one of the world's leading firearms manufacturers. Since the company's founding, Colt has produced, almost exclusively in Hartford-area plants, more than 30 million revolvers, pistols, and rifles for sale all over the globe.

In 2017, the municipal government of Hartford reached the brink of bankruptcy but was bailed out by the state government. Population decreases and nontaxable public properties had led to chronic deficits.

Landmarks

Hartford's history is intertwined with the story of some of the earliest colonial settlements in America. Thanks to these deep roots, the capital boasts numerous sites and structures of historic, cultural, architectural, and archeological importance. In recognition of this rich heritage, in 2005 the city formally established a Historic Preservation Commission dedicated to protecting such sites throughout the capital.

Many of Hartford's most important landmarks are located in the downtown city center. The most prominent of these is the Connecticut state capitol building, which sits atop high ground overlooking Bushnell Park. Designed in 1874 in a High Victorian Gothic style, the marble-and-granite building is crowned by a gold leaf dome. Its grounds feature some of the city's most striking monuments. These include a statue of the American Revolution hero Israel Putnam.

Bushnell Park is one of the oldest open public spaces in Hartford, still used for festivals, musical performances, and outdoor recreation. Designed in the mid-nineteenth century by a Swiss-born architect and botanist, the park contains a broad variety of trees and shrubs from all over the globe. Highlights of the park include: a working carousel dating to the World War I era; the Soldiers and Sailors' Memorial Arch, built in honor of the four thousand Hartford citizens who served in the Civil War; a Spanish War Memorial, honoring the Hartfordians who fought the Spanish-American War; the Corning Fountain, which features sculptures of Native American hunters and fisherman and a hart (male deer), symbolizing the first English settlers in the area; and a monument to Horace Wells, a Hartford dentist who pioneered the use of nitrous oxide gas as an anesthetic—using himself as a guinea pig.

Bushnell Park also contains a pump house built by the Army Corps of Engineers after the so-called Great Flood of 1936, which placed the park and much of Hartford underneath several feet of water. Army engineers rerouted the main branch of the Park River into a vast underground tunnel beneath the park. Today massive pumps continue to push the flow of the Park River into the Connecticut River.

Other important Hartford landmarks include: the Colt Dome, featuring a statue of a rearing colt atop the blue onion dome on the original Colt firearms manufacturing facility; the thirty-four-story Travelers Tower, erected by the Travelers Insurance Company (once the tallest structure in New England and which still offers visitors panoramic views of Hartford from its observation deck); the Old State House, designed in 1796, which housed Connecticut's government from 1797 to 1873; the Ancient Burying Ground, Hartford's first public cemetery, which was used from 1640 to 1803; and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, America's oldest public art museum.

Landmark homes in Hartford include the Mark Twain House, a nineteen-room Victorian-style mansion designed in 1873. Samuel Clemens (pseudonym Mark Twain) and his wife had moved to Hartford two years earlier so that Clemens could work in proximity to his Hartford-based publisher. The Mark Twain House was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1963. Another landmark Hartford residence is the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, where the famous author of the antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin lived in Victorian Gothic revival splendor following the completion of the home in 1871.

History

Hartford traces its origins to around 1633, when the Dutch traders established a fort and outpost they called the House of Hope in the area. Within a few years, the Reverend Thomas Hooker (1586–1647) led his congregation of about one hundred people along old American Indian trails until they reached the outpost, which they subsequently transformed into a bona fide colony. Hooker, a Puritan preacher, had been forced to flee his native England for the New World after a dispute with English religious authorities.

After also running afoul of Massachusetts clerical authorities (for his radical belief that all men, even those who did not own property, should enjoy voting rights), Hooker left the Bay Colony in 1636 to start a new settlement on the site of contemporary Hartford. In 1639, inspired by Hooker's advocacy, the colony adopted the so-called Fundamental Orders, which formally established government by the consent of the people. Hartford's example provided a model, in later years, to the framers of the United States Constitution.

Hooker succeeded in establishing harmonious relations with the local American Indian people. The reverend and his followers renamed the site of their community, known to the Algonquin people as Suckiog, Hartford, after the city of Hertford, England, the birthplace of Samuel Stone, one of the original settlers of the area. In the absence of conflict with their indigenous neighbors, the colonists quickly established a thriving agriculture-based economy.

Over the course of the next two centuries, Hartford evolved into a key trading center, thanks to its fortuitous location at the end of the navigable portion of the Connecticut River. Not just farmers, but merchants and manufacturers took advantage of the convenient waterway to ship their products to other ports in America, as well as those in England, the West Indies, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. The Port of Hartford, as the city was commonly known until the mid-nineteenth century, became a major point of distribution for a lucrative trade in molasses, spices, coffee, and rum.

Hartford's success as a commercial and shipping center led directly to the creation of the insurance industry, which became an enduring linchpin of Hartford's economy. Determined to insulate themselves from maritime risks, traders and ship owners stimulated the creation of shared coverage against accidents, storms, pirates, and other hazards at sea. The practice eventually expanded beyond marine coverage. In 1810, the establishment of the Hartford Fire Insurance Group represented a key milestone on Hartford's journey to becoming the insurance capital of the world.

Its transportation infrastructure and sophisticated commercial networks helped transform Hartford into a major industrial center in the nineteenth century. Powered by waves of immigrant settlers, Hartford's factories were an incubator for mass production methods and precision manufacturing. The city's association with such products began with the establishment of the Colt firearms operation in the early 1800s, and is carried on today by firms dedicated to turning out cutting-edge, high-technology components.

Throughout its history, Hartford's growth and prosperity were periodically threatened by seasonal flooding along the banks of the Connecticut River. A particularly devastating flood struck the city in 1864 and another one in 1936. In the aftermath of the Great Flood of 1936, the city commissioned the Army Corps of Engineers to construct a dike to protect Hartford. The construction was successful in protecting the city, but at the price of cutting off the downtown area from the Connecticut River. In 2000, access was reestablished with the opening of Riverfront Plaza, which has become one of the most popular public spaces in the capital.

In the 2010s, more than 1,500 public housing units, partially funded by Connecticut, were constructed in the capital, and a state university campus moved into downtown Hartford in 2017. It enjoyed federal and state investment in transportation as well. A new commuter rail service running through Hartford, from New Haven in the south to Springfield in the north, opened in 2018.

Bibliography

Faude, Wilson H. Hartford. Charleston: Arcadia, 2004. Print.

Felson, Leonard. "Inside a Commuter Rail Comeback in Hartford." Citylab, 20 July 2018, www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/07/hartford-trains-its-hopes-for-renewal-on-commuter-rail/565649. Accessed 26 Apr. 2019.

Foulke, Patricia, and Robert Foulke. A Visitor's Guide to Colonial & Revolutionary New England. 2nd ed. Woodstock: Countryman, 2012. Print.

Greenblatt, Alan. "How Did America's Richest State Become Such a Fiscal Mess?" Governing, Sept. 2017, www.governing.com/topics/finance/gov-connecticut-richest-state-fiscal-problems.html. Accessed 26 Apr. 2019.

Hartford African American Heritage Trail. John E. Rogers African American Cultural Center, 2010. Web. 18 Oct. 2013.

“Hartford City, Connecticut.” United States Census Bureau, www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/hartfordcityconnecticut/. Accessed 23 Feb. 2024.

"Hartford Police Department." FBICrime Data Explorer, cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend. 23 Feb. 2024.

“History of Early Hartford.” Society of the Descendants of the Founders of Hartford, 2024, www.foundersofhartford.org/historic-hartford/history-of-early-hartford/. Accessed 23 Feb. 2024.

Hussey, Kristin, and Eli Rosenberg. "What’s the Insurance Capital without Aetna? Hartford May Find Out." The New York Times, 11 June 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/06/11/nyregion/hartford-aetna-relocation.html. Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.