Though our streets may feel empty at the moment, they’re still full of history.
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What’s in a name? Let’s take it to the streets.
According to Doris B. Townshend’s book The Streets of New Haven: The Origins of Their Names (second edition, 1998)—which, under normal circumstances, you can pick up in the New Haven Museum’s gift shop, and which comprises the major source of information for this article—George Street was New Haven’s very first road, carved out of the land in 1638.
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But it wasn’t called George back then. Its first known label, Brick Street, was more pragmatic and industrious. So was its second: Leather Lane. Then, in 1784, after New Haven officially incorporated as a city in newly independent America, the local government went on a titling tear, dubbing the street George after General George Washington.
You could be excused for thinking Chapel Street, also named in 1784, was a tribute to one or more of the New Haven Green’s graceful churches. In fact, it was named after a place of worship that would be demolished in 1822: the Yale College Chapel, which stood near the present-day corner of College and Chapel Streets.
At the time, Chapel Street was much shorter than it is today. Later, when New Haven annexed lands to the west and east (in 1844 and 1871, respectively), its extensions into those areas became known as West Chapel and East Chapel. Later still, the directional descriptives were dropped, unifying this central thoroughfare and making it the longest in the city.
One of Chapel’s more consequential present-day cross-streets, Orange Street, was known in colonial times as Mill Lane, for a straightforward reason: it led to a mill. But the story behind its present name is a lot more winding.
Back in 1687, King James II of England moved to revoke the Colony of Connecticut’s royal charter, hoping to consolidate it with several others into a single entity called the Dominion of New England. The king sent an agent to retrieve Connecticut’s existing charter but, fearful that some of their more home-grown freedoms would be lost, colonists are said to have hidden the document in a great white tree remembered by history as the Charter Oak.
As it turned out, James II’s days as king were numbered. In 1689, Dutch-born William III, a.k.a. William of Orange, ascended to the British throne. Among other well-liked decisions, he acknowledged the legitimacy of Connecticut’s favored charter, earning appreciation, respect and, eventually, an oblique tribute in the form of a well-trafficked New Haven street.
In lower East Rock, Orange intersects with Humphrey Street, which—along with its eastbound successor, Lombard—offers a pretty straight shot into the upper portion of Fair Haven. The road was named after David Humphreys (losing the “s” somewhere along the way), a Revolutionary War hero who seems to have fallen out of popular memory despite an exceptional resumé. A Yale graduate, he was not only an aide-de-camp to George Washington, a general in the Continental Army, a leader of the post-war Connecticut state militia and, in 1791, constitutional America’s very first foreign diplomat, but he also had a local village, Humphreysville, named after him. That name was lost in 1850, when the village became what is now downtown Seymour, but New Haven’s city grid still remembers him.
It also remembers Samuel Blatchley, the namesake of Fair Haven’s Blatchley Avenue. His company, S.L. Blatchley & Sons, built and sold a 19th-century version of affordable housing, featuring small cottage-style layouts and payment plans the city’s many laborers could afford. The business helped sustain New Haven’s tremendous population growth and industrial achievements in the latter half of the 19th century.
Back in the center of town, in the most picturesque section of Yale’s picturesque campus, there are two intersecting streets that conspire over an etymological bait-and-switch. Hillhouse Avenue—the two-block road that Charles Dickens is purported to have called “the most beautiful” in America—does not seem to refer specifically to James Hillhouse, the towering figure of New Haven history who, among many other things, gave the Elm City its titular elms. The street was given its title by Hillhouse’s son, James Abraham Hillhouse, and Townshend believes the naming was more likely intended to honor the entire family lineage rather than any individual within it.
Sachem Street, on the other hand, which crosses Hillhouse Avenue’s northern terminus, definitely refers to James Hillhouse the father, though you’d never guess it on your own. “Sachem”—a northeastern Native American word for “chief,” or “great chief”—was his nickname. Whether the sobriquet was self-given or bestowed by others, Hillhouse wholeheartedly embraced it. His colleagues in the United States Congress, where he served first as a representative and later as a senator, commonly used it—perhaps because, as legend has it, Hillhouse kept a hatchet that he would brandish during contentious disagreements on Capitol Hill.
Now that’s street credibility.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims. This updated story was originally published on June 5, 2014.
