At the mouth of the Connecticut River, this site includes nearly 18 acres, much of it marshland within a globally significant estuary and one of the least disturbed large-river tidal marsh systems in the U.S. Originally it was the Algonquin Nehantic village of Pashbeshauke, whose people lived mainly by fishing and hunting while also raising beans, maize, and tobacco. Around 1590, Pequots migrated into Connecticut from the Hudson River Valley, conquered local tribes, and under Sassucus reached the height of their power, while internal rivalry led Uncas to leave and form the Mohegans with the aim of overthrowing Pequot dominance. In 1614, Dutch explorer and cartographer Adrian Block sailed into the river, then called Quonitocuti, in the Onrust and named it De Versche. As Dutch traders and English settlers arrived in the 17th century, conflict with the Pequots intensified, with skirmishes and battles here followed by a formal declaration of war by Saybrook, Hartford, Boston, and Plymouth Plantations. In 1631, the Warwick Patent conveyed a vast section of New England to 15 lords and gentlemen, and in 1633 the patentees commissioned John Winthrop the younger as first governor of the River Connecticut. He engaged Lieutenant Lion Gardiner to build a fort and lay out a town, and in March 1636 Gardiner arrived with his wife Mary aboard the Batchelor and began a palisaded fort and windmill. Fort Saybrook thus became the first military fortification in southern New England and the first legal patentee plantation in the area now known as Connecticut, taking its name from Viscount Saye and Seale and Lord Brooke. In April 1636, Gardiner’s son David was born here, the first recorded non-native birth in Connecticut. Pequot warriors repeatedly harassed the fort, and in 1637 the Saybrook, Hartford, Plymouth, and Boston colonies declared war on the Pequots, joined by Uncas and his warriors; after later events including the defeat of the Narragansetts in 1644, many Pequots were placed under Uncas’s control and the Mohegans became the most powerful tribe in New England. The fort remained active on and off for the next 150 years, was sold with surrounding property in 1808 for $391, and in 1812 was renamed Fort Fenwick and armed for the War of 1812 before later being unmanned. The Connecticut Valley Railroad acquired the property in 1870-71, leveled what remained of the old fort and battery mound for tracks and a roundhouse, and operated there until abandonment in 1915. In 1930, descendants of Lion Gardiner commissioned a statue of him, and the New Haven Railroad conveyed its Saybrook Point property to the State of Connecticut for monumental purposes. In 1980, local residents formed the Fort Monument Park Association and began archaeological exploration that unearthed Native American and early settler artifacts; in 1981, junior high school students bought the area from the state for $1.27 and deeded it to Old Saybrook as a passive park, and in 2002 another acre of waterfront property was added.

Photo: Michael Herrick