Hartford

About Hartford

Hartford is the capital of Connecticut, set on the west bank of the Connecticut River in the heart of New England. Dutch traders built a fort here in 1623, and English Puritans led by Thomas Hooker founded the town in 1636. The Fundamental Orders adopted here in 1639 are often called the first written constitution in the Western tradition, which is why Connecticut is known as the Constitution State. In the 1800s Hartford became one of the wealthiest cities in America, the Insurance Capital of the World, and a center of manufacturing that produced Colt revolvers and Pope bicycles.

That prosperity drew writers and thinkers. Mark Twain built his extraordinary Victorian Gothic home in the Nook Farm neighborhood, where he wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and his next-door neighbor was Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Both houses are now museums. Today Hartford has about 120,000 residents and is still home to major insurance companies, with a skyline marked by the Travelers Tower.

Visitors find a city rich in culture and history. The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, founded in 1842, is the oldest continuously operating public art museum in the country, and the gold-domed Connecticut State Capitol stands in Bushnell Park, the first publicly funded park in the United States, with its 1914 carousel. Elizabeth Park has one of the oldest municipal rose gardens in the country, the Old State House dates from 1796, and the Connecticut Science Center overlooks the river, while the Riverfront Recapture parks offer trails and events along the water.