A river toll dispute drew the first state line across the Connecticut River
In the 1640s Hartford tried to tax Springfield's boats passing its fort at the Connecticut River's mouth. Boston retaliated by charging Connecticut ships to enter its harbour, and Hartford backed down. Springfield sided with Massachusetts anyway, and the border that resulted was only the start of centuries of arguments over New England's longest river.
The river runs roughly 406 miles south from a source just 300 yards below the Canadian border to Long Island Sound, where it supplies 70 percent of the Sound's fresh water. Its name comes from Mohegan and Nipmuc words meaning beside the long tidal river, while Dutch colonists called it the fresh river. People have lived in its valley for about 6,000 years, and in the early 1600s tribes including the Pequots, Mohegans and Pocomtuc held different stretches.
The Dutch explorer Adriaen Block charted it in 1614 and a fortified Dutch post called the House of Hope went up at the future Hartford in 1623. Puritan groups followed, founding Hartford in 1635 and Springfield in 1636. William Pynchon chose the Springfield site shrewdly: it sat where a trade path crossed the river between two tributaries, just above Enfield Falls, the first waterfall boats could not pass, so traders would have to unload there. English success squeezed the Dutch into a boundary treaty in 1654, though they kept their trading post until the English seized New Netherland in 1664.
Upriver the quarrels continued. New Hampshire and New York both claimed what became Vermont, and in 1764 the Board of Trade set the line along the river's western bank. Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys resisted New York, leading to an independent Vermont Republic in 1777 and statehood in 1791. Vermont and New Hampshire kept disputing the line until the Supreme Court fixed it in 1933 at the low-water mark on the Vermont shore. Near the source, the vague treaty phrase northwesternmost headwaters spawned the tiny Indian Stream Republic, which lasted from 1832 to 1835.
Falls that once blocked boats later powered mills, turning Springfield and Hartford into industrial innovators until railroads reduced the river's commercial role.
Source: Connecticut River
