Greenwich Purchase of 1640
Greenwich, Western Connecticut Planning Region, Connecticut
Marker Inscription
Near this spot on July 18th, 1640 Captain Daniel Patrice and Robert Feake, in the name of the New Haven Colony, purchased this land from the Siwanoy Tribe of Indians for 25 colored English coats.
The Story
In the summer of 1640, two agents of the New Haven Colony struck a bargain with the Siwanoy people for the coastal land that would become Greenwich, paying in English coats rather than coin. Such cloth-and-goods transactions were the common currency of early New England land dealings, where two cultures with very different ideas of what it meant to 'own' ground met at the water's edge of Long Island Sound. The purchase planted one of the first English footholds in what is now Connecticut's southwestern corner, a frontier then contested between Dutch New Netherland to the west and the spreading Puritan colonies to the east.
Why it matters
It marks the founding transaction of Greenwich and captures, in a single line of goods-for-land, the fraught colonial encounter between English settlers and the region's Native nations that reshaped the whole Northeastern seaboard.
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Related people
- · Daniel Patrick
- · Robert Feake
Related events
- · Purchase of Greenwich from the Siwanoy, 1640
Themes & tags
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