Fort Saybrook Monument Park covers nearly 18 acres at the mouth of the Connecticut River, including about eleven acres of marshland within a globally significant and unusually pristine large-river tidal marsh system in the U.S. Northeast. The site was originally the Algonquin Nehantic village of Pashbeshauke, meaning the place at the river’s mouth, where Nehantics lived mainly by fishing and hunting and also raised beans, maize, and tobacco. Around 1590, Pequots migrating from the Hudson River Valley conquered local tribes along the Connecticut River, and by the time Europeans arrived they were at the height of their power under Sassucus, though internal rivalry led Uncas to break away and form the Mohegans. In 1614, Dutch explorer and cartographer Adrian Block became the first white man to sail into the river, then called Quonitocuti, aboard the Onrust and named it De Versche. Other Dutch traders and English settlers followed in the 17th century, and conflict with the aggressive Pequots brought skirmishes, battles, and 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 Gardiner arrived with his wife Mary in March of 1636 and built a stout palisade fort and windmill, establishing Fort Saybrook as the first military fortification in southern New England and the first legal patentee plantation in the area now known as Connecticut. Named for Viscount Saye and Seale and Lord Brooke, the fort was soon harassed by Pequot warriors, and in 1637 Saybrook, Hartford, Plymouth, and Boston colonies declared war on the Pequots, joined by Uncas and his braves. 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, leveling what remained of the old fort and battery mound for tracks and a roundhouse, and remained active until 1915. In 1930, descendants of Lion Gardiner commissioned a statue of him, and the New Haven Railroad conveyed the property at Saybrook Point to the State of Connecticut for monumental purposes. In 1980, local residents formed the Fort Monument Park Association and undertook archaeological exploration that unearthed Native American and early settler artifacts. In 1981, junior high school students purchased the area from the state for $1.27 and deeded it to the town of Old Saybrook for use as a passive park, and in 2002 another acre of waterfront property was added.

Photo: Michael Herrick