Fort Saybrook Monument Park encompasses nearly 18 acres at Saybrook Point on the Connecticut River, where Western Niantic Indians lived before Europeans arrived in the early 1600s, calling the place Pasbeshauke, or place at the river's mouth. Dutch traders including Adriaen Block reached the area in 1614, called it Kievets Hoek, briefly attempted a settlement around 1623, and traded with the Pequots, who expanded their influence across the Connecticut River Valley and Long Island Sound and by 1635 had built a confederacy of dozens of tribes while allowing the Dutch to build the House of Hope at present-day Hartford. English settlement followed with Plymouth in 1620, Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, Windsor in 1633, Wethersfield in 1634, and Saybrook in 1635 after Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, granted land to 15 patentees including Lord Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke; John Winthrop, Jr. was commissioned first Governor of the river Connecticut, and military engineer Lion Gardiner came in 1636 with his wife, twelve soldiers, and two women to build a fort and lay out a town. Fort Saybrook, the first military post on the Connecticut River, became the site of the most prolonged and intensive fighting of the Pequot War, with more than 20 Pequot attacks, skirmishes along what is today College Street and at Cornfield Point, and more than 30 English settlers and soldiers killed. The war grew from political, cultural, and economic conflict among the English, Dutch, Pequot, Mohegan, Narragansett, and others as the English tried to break the Dutch and Pequot fur and wampum trade; after murders of English traders, English demands on the Pequot, and attacks on Block Island and Pequot villages, the Pequot besieged Fort Saybrook from September 1636 through April 1637, reducing Gardiner's garrison to a dozen men. English commanders at Fort Saybrook then planned the attack on the Pequot fort at Mistick that led to the massacre of 400 to 700 Pequot, followed weeks later by another attack in Fairfield in which most of the remaining Pequot were killed or captured; the 1638 Treaty of Hartford abolished the Pequot tribe, banned its name and language, and dispersed surviving members to other tribes or to the West Indies. After the war the original 1636 fort, built about a quarter mile north of the site, fell into disrepair and burned in 1647; a new fortification closer to the river, Fort Fenwick, saw modest use in the Colonial Wars, the Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812 before being abandoned by the 1820s. The land was later leveled by the Connecticut Valley Railroad in 1870, with passenger service continuing to Fenwick until 1915 and Saybrook Point until 1922. In 1930 the Gardiner family commissioned William Ordway Partridge to create a statue of Lion Gardiner, and a monument honoring George Fenwick also stands in the park. Archaeological work beginning in 1980 uncovered Native American and early European settler artifacts and the railroad roundhouse foundation; in 1981 Old Saybrook students symbolically bought the area from the state for one dollar and deeded it to the town, and in 2010 archaeologists from the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center began a multi-year investigation that did not find the original fort but produced strong evidence that it stood about a quarter mile north of the site.