Hartford

Hartford is the capital of Connecticut, on the west bank of the Connecticut River in the center of the state. For more than a century it has been called the insurance capital of the world, as many American insurance companies were founded or based there.

The Puritan minister Thomas Hooker led his congregation from Massachusetts to the river in 1636 and founded the town on land near a Dutch trading post. In 1639 the river towns adopted the Fundamental Orders, often described as the first written constitution of a democratic government. The Old State House, designed by Charles Bulfinch and finished in the 1790s, has a brick front crowned by a balustrade and a cupola. In the 19th century the city grew rich on insurance and on the factories along the river, and writers settled in a neighborhood on its west side.

The Hartford, the insurance company that took the city's name, has its head office downtown, with a stag as its emblem. Travelers, the insurer known for its red umbrella, keeps large offices in a granite tower above the city center.

Mark Twain lived in a brick house on the west side from the 1870s to the 1890s and wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn there. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, spent her last years in a cottage next door. The Wadsworth Atheneum, opened in the 1840s, is the oldest public art museum in the United States. Bushnell Park, proposed by the minister Horace Bushnell and laid out by Jacob Weidenmann in the 1850s, was the first public park in the country paid for by a city vote.