The Wangunks lived at the great bend in the Connecticut River for countless generations before Europeans arrived, calling their home Mattabeseck and living in communities of round-topped wigwams sustained by hunting, fishing, and crops such as corn, squash, and sunflowers. English immigrant families first settled here in 1650, and in 1651 the Connecticut General Court incorporated the town of Mattabeseck, which spanned the river and included present-day Middletown as well as modern Portland, East Hampton, Middlefield, and part of Berlin. In 1653 the town was renamed Middletown, probably for its location between Hartford and Saybrook, and tradition holds that settlers worshiped beneath a large elm tree until a meetinghouse was built that same year. Puritanism was the only permitted faith and shaped all aspects of life: taxpayers helped fund the meetinghouse and minister, attendance at Sunday worship was required, and recreation, entertainment, and all but essential work were banned on that day. Middletown hired its first teacher in 1676 to comply with the Connecticut General Court's requirement that children be able to read the Bible. Before the English colonists arrived, the Wangunks had sold large tracts of land to the Colony of Connecticut while retaining a reservation on each side of the river, and in 1673 the English settlers officially re-purchased from the Wangunks the land within Middletown's boundaries, confirming their claim; by then the town's white population had grown to 200 men, women, and children. Middletown's first black residents arrived perhaps as early as the 1660s as enslaved people kidnapped from Africa and forced into hereditary bondage. Householders farmed the fertile riverbanks, while some men worked as blacksmiths, stonecutters, millers, carpenters, merchants, and shipbuilders, and before the century ended ships built here were carrying farm products downriver to Atlantic coastal towns and the West Indies. Daily life was difficult and dangerous: families were often large, women faced repeated and risky childbirth, men ruled their households, children began chores young, disease and accidents were common, many parents buried children, and widows and widowers often remarried quickly because managing a household, farm, and family alone was so hard.