New Haven Colony
English possession in North America between 1639 and 1665
New Haven Colony was an English colony from 1638 to 1664 that included settlements on the north shore of Long Island Sound, with outposts in modern-day New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. The colony joined Connecticut Colony in 1664.
The history of the colony was a series of disappointments and failures. The most serious problem was that New Haven Colony never had a charter giving it legal title to exist. The larger, stronger colony of Connecticut to the north did have a charter. New Haven's leaders were businessmen and traders, but they were never able to build up a large or profitable trade because their agricultural base was poor, farming the rocky soil was difficult, and the location was isolated.
History
In 1637, a group of London merchants and their families moved to Boston with the intention of creating a new settlement. The leaders were John Davenport, a Puritan minister, and Theophilus Eaton, a wealthy merchant who brought £3,000 to the venture. Both had experience in fitting out vessels for the Massachusetts Bay Company. The two ships that they chartered arrived in Boston on June 26, 1637.
“New Haven Colony” enters the record as english possession in North America between 1639 and 1665. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Haven, Colony and English can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“New Haven Colony” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Haven, Colony and English provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q847131. VIAF identifies the subject as 122437403. The Library of Congress control number is nr95040847. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1638, 1664 and 1637.
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This entry incorporates text from “New Haven Colony” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.