Reverend Thomas Hooker, Hartford Founder

Compiled by Timothy Lester Jacobs, SDFH Genealogist

THOMAS¹ HOOKER, REV., HARTFORD FOUNDER (THOMAS^A) was born Jul 1586 in Marfield, Leicester, England, and died 07 Jul 1647 in Hartford, CT.  He married SUSANNAH GARBRAND 03 Apr 1621 in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, England. She was born abt. 1600 in England, and died 17 May 1676 in Farmington, CT.

Thomas Hooker entered Emmanuel College in Cambridge, England in 1604, where he received the degree of B. A. In 1608, the degree of M. A. in 1611, and entering upon a divinity course he was elected a Fellow of the College, but left the college before completing the first course. After his stay at Emmanuel, he preached at the Esher parish, then, about, he became a lecturer at the Chelmsford Cathedral. However, in 1629 Archbishop William Laud suppressed church lecturers, and Hooker was forced to retire to Little Baddow. His leadership of Puritan sympathizers causes a summons to the Court of High Commission. Forfeiting his bond, he instead fled to Rotterdam, Holland, and then emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony aboard the ship “Griffin” in 1633.

Two of his sisters also emigrated to Massachusetts: Anne (possibly), who married George Alcock in England and went with him to Roxbury, where she died in the winter of 1630/1; and Dorothy (q. v.) – the widow of John Chester – who may have come with her brother Thomas on the “Griffin”, but who was in Cambridge in 1634 and did remove to Hartford with her brother.

He settled in Newtown (now Cambridge), where he was chosen pastor on 11 October 1633. He held several lots of land in Cambridge, and in the 8 February 1635/6 list of houses in that town, Thomas Hooker held four. Voting in Massachusetts was limited to freemen, individuals who had been formally admitted to their church after a detailed interrogation of their religious views and experiences. Hooker disagreed with this limitation of suffrage, putting him at odds with the influential pastor John Cotton. Owing to his conflict with Cotton and discontented with the suppression of Puritan suffrage and at odds with the colony leadership, Reverend Hooker decided to remove from Massachusetts, taking his flock with him.

Gov. Winthrop’s Journal, dated 5 October 1635, states: “about sixty men, women and little children, went by land toward Connecticut with their cows, horses and swine, and after a tedious and difficult journey arrived safe there”, thus establishing a new colony in Connecticut, first called Newtown, changed soon after to Hartford.

Thomas Hooker played a significant role in the creation of “the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut”. This document is one of the modern world's first written constitutions and was a primary influence upon the current American Constitution, written nearly a century and a half later.

On May 31, 1638, when a new form of government was under consideration, Hooker preached a sermon, in which he laid down the doctrines that “the choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by Gods own allowance,” and that “they who have the power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in their power, also, to set bounds and limitations of the power and place unto which they call them,” because “the foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people.”

In the Hartford land inventory of February 1639/40 held: two acres on which his dwelling house stood with other outhouses, yards, gardens or orchards located on the road on the north bank of the Little River; twenty acres in the Old Oxpasture; fourteen acres and two roods in the South Meadow; eleven acres in the Forty Acres; twenty-two acres in the swamp by the Great River; twenty acres lying in Hockanum; one acre and three roods in the Little Meadow; twenty-four acres in the Cow Pasture; and twenty-four acres of woodland in the Bridge Field. He later acquired an additional five parcels of land.

Frank Shuffleton wrote a comprehensive biography on him: “Thomas Hooker: 1586 to 1647”, Princeton, 1977

Genealogy: “The Descendants of the Rev. Thomas Hooker”, Edward Hooker, Rochester, NY, 1909 (This is a dated genealogy, in which the author gets the ancestry of Thomas Hooker wrong, and is lacking in the citation of sources. However, most of the data presented crosschecks fairly well with other genealogies and primary sources.)