New Haven's 1638 Founding and the Nine Squares: A Puritan Theological Grid Hiding in Plain Sight
Walk from the New Haven Green west on Chapel Street, turn south on College Street, then east on Crown Street, and north on Church Street, and you will have walked the perimeter of one of the original nine squares the founders of New Haven laid out in 1638. Most American cities of comparable age have lost their colonial grid to fire, redevelopment, war, or the slow accretion of street-widening and zoning decisions over four centuries. Boston's tangled medieval-feeling streets are the result of cow paths and unplanned growth. Philadelphia's grid is mostly intact but has been reshaped by skyscrapers, expressways, and 20th-century redevelopment. New Haven is the unusual case: the original 1638 grid is still there, the original central square (today's New Haven Green) is still there, the streets still meet at right angles in the same places, and the public spaces still occupy the same blocks they did when John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton chalked them out before the first English winter.
This is more interesting than it sounds. The nine-square plan was not city planning in any modern sense. It was not about traffic flow, not about commerce, not about defense, not even, primarily, about real estate. It was a physical projection of Puritan theology, drawn by a Puritan minister with biblical text in mind, intended to reproduce on the Connecticut shoreline a specific architectural vision from the Book of Revelation — the Heavenly City of New Jerusalem. The central square was meant to be the city's spiritual center, surrounded by the eight residential squares of the gathered congregation. Yale, founded sixty-three years later in 1701, eventually built its way out of and across the grid, and as the academic institution overtook the religious experiment over the following two centuries, the original theological intention was buried, then forgotten, then half-remembered as architectural curiosity.
This guide walks the actual layout, the theological reasoning behind it, the colonial history of the religious experiment that produced it, and how Yale's eventual physical and institutional dominance gradually overlaid a research university on top of what was meant to be a Puritan walled garden.
The 1638 Founders: Davenport, Eaton, and the Failed New Haven Colony
The two men who founded New Haven, John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton, came to the Connecticut shoreline not as commercial colonists but as religious refugees of a specific and uncompromising Puritan strain. Davenport was a Cambridge-educated English Puritan minister who had been the vicar of St. Stephen's Coleman Street in London through the 1620s. By the early 1630s, Archbishop Laud's enforcement of Anglican conformity drove many Puritan ministers into exile. Davenport fled first to Amsterdam, then sailed for Massachusetts Bay with a substantial group of his English followers in 1637. Theophilus Eaton, a wealthy London merchant and longtime member of Davenport's congregation, came as the practical leader of the lay community.
Davenport and Eaton arrived in Boston in June 1637 and considered staying — Davenport could have taken a Boston pulpit, Eaton could have set up his merchant operation. But they had a more theologically rigorous vision than what they found in Boston, and after a few months they decided to plant their own colony to the south, where they could design civic and religious institutions from scratch on what they considered properly biblical principles. In April 1638, the Davenport-Eaton company sailed south, landed at Quinnipiac (the Native American name for the harbor that became New Haven), purchased land from the local Quinnipiac people through a treaty negotiation, and began laying out a town.
The colony they founded, renamed New Haven in 1640, lasted as an independent political entity from 1638 to 1664. It had its own General Court, its own laws, its own currency, its own foreign policy. In 1664, after political pressures including the English Restoration, New Haven Colony was forcibly absorbed into the Connecticut Colony — the merger was not voluntary, and Davenport, who lived to see it, considered the merger a defeat of the religious project he had spent twenty-six years building.
But before the merger, in those twenty-six years, Davenport's colony had time to physically realize the theological vision it had been founded on. The first artifact of that vision was the street grid.
The Nine Squares: Theology Drawn on Land
The 1638 town plan, drawn most likely by Davenport himself in consultation with the colony's surveyor John Brockett, divided a roughly square area of land near the harbor into a 3-by-3 grid of nine squares, each approximately 825 feet on a side. The center square was reserved for public use — the meetinghouse, the burial ground, public ceremonies, militia training, and the market. The eight surrounding squares were divided into house lots, with sizes scaled to family wealth.
The grid was bounded by what would become George Street, Grove Street, State Street, and York Street. The internal streets — Chapel, Elm, Church, College, High, Temple, Crown, Court — divided the nine squares from each other. Most still exist with the same names. Most still meet at the same right angles they did in 1638.
The theological intention was specific and is documented in Davenport's writings and sermons. Davenport drew his city plan from Ezekiel 48 and Revelation 21, the two biblical passages that describe the dimensions of the Heavenly City of New Jerusalem. Both describe a square city with twelve gates, a temple at the center, and surrounding tribal allotments in a deliberately symmetrical pattern. Davenport understood his New Haven plan as an attempt to physically realize this biblical geometry on the Connecticut shoreline. The center square was the temple precinct. The eight surrounding squares were the gathered tribes of the congregation.
This was not metaphor. Davenport's sermons argued explicitly that the physical arrangement of a town shaped its spiritual life, that a properly ordered grid would produce a properly ordered congregation, and that the New Haven plan was a deliberate effort to make the gathered church visible in the streets and the buildings. The center square — today's New Haven Green — was not a park in the modern sense. It was sacred ground. The Green's continued status as public ground, with three churches on it but no commercial buildings, is a continuous artifact of this 1638 theological zoning.
The New Haven Green: Three Churches on Sacred Ground
The most visible artifact of the 1638 plan is the Green itself — a 16-acre rectangular public space at the center of the original grid, bordered by Chapel, Church, Elm, and College Streets. The Green is owned not by the City of New Haven but by the Proprietors of the Common and Undivided Lands at New Haven — a private corporation continuously in existence since the 17th century, whose membership consists of five trustees who in turn elect their successors. The proprietors have, by long tradition, leased the Green to the City of New Haven for public use at a nominal rate. This unusual ownership structure is itself a 1638 artifact — the original colonial proprietors held the land in common, and the descendant corporation has maintained that holding for nearly four centuries.
Three churches stand on the Green today, all built in the early 19th century, all aligned along Temple Street running north-south through the center of the original square. From north to south:
United Church on the Green (1815) — a federalist-style brick church serving a Congregational/UCC congregation that traces its lineage to the original 1639 New Haven church Davenport founded.
Center Church on the Green (1814) — a federalist-style church directly descended from Davenport's original 1639 First Church of Christ in New Haven. Center Church holds the historical mantle of being the same congregation Davenport founded — a continuous Congregational/UCC community for 387 years. Beneath Center Church, accessible by tour, is the Center Church Crypt — the colonial burial ground from the 1638 founding, with stone grave markers from the 17th and 18th centuries preserved in situ beneath the church floor.
Trinity Church on the Green (1816) — a Gothic Revival Episcopal church, the earliest example of Gothic Revival church architecture in the United States. Trinity's presence on the Green is itself historically significant — it represents the late-18th-century opening of New Haven's religious life beyond the original Congregational monopoly. When Trinity was permitted to build on the Green, the New Haven establishment was acknowledging that the Davenport-era theocratic vision had ended.
The three churches on the Green are the visible monument to the long arc of New Haven religious history. The Congregational churches (Center and United) descend directly from Davenport's 1639 founding. Trinity's Episcopal presence represents the 19th-century pluralization. All three sit on land originally consecrated as Puritan sacred ground in 1638, on the central square of a grid drawn from Ezekiel.
The Burial Ground That Was, the Yale Old Campus That Is
The original colonial burial ground occupied the southwest portion of the central square, immediately south of where Center Church now stands. By the early 19th century, the burial ground was full and bodies were being interred elsewhere — most prominently at Grove Street Cemetery, opened in 1796 and one of the first chartered private burial grounds in the United States. The grave markers from the colonial ground were moved in 1821 when the Green was landscaped, but the bodies themselves were left in place beneath the Green. The colonial dead of New Haven still lie under the grass. Periodic excavations for utility work continue to surface human remains. A 2012 hurricane uprooted a tree on the Green and exposed a human skeleton; the city has standing protocols for handling it.
To the west of the Green sits Yale's Old Campus — the rectangular block bounded by High, Chapel, College, and Elm Streets that contains the original Yale undergraduate dormitories, including the only surviving 18th-century Yale building, Connecticut Hall (1750-1752). The Old Campus block is itself one of the original 1638 squares — when Yale relocated from Saybrook to New Haven in 1716, the college purchased land in this western square. Connecticut Hall is the only surviving piece of what Yale called Old Brick Row — eight academic buildings constructed between 1750 and 1820 that defined Yale's physical presence through most of the college's first 150 years. The other seven were demolished in 1933 to make way for the residential colleges. Connecticut Hall survived because by 1933 it was the oldest building Yale owned.
The 1638 plan put a Puritan congregation at the spiritual center of a colony. By the 1740s, that congregation had founded a college that gradually built its way into the western square of the same colonial grid. By the 19th century, the college had become the dominant institutional presence in New Haven, and by the 20th century, the religious experiment had effectively been replaced by the academic institution. Yale eventually built its way out of the original grid — the campus today extends north to Hillhouse Avenue and beyond, west to the Yale Bowl, south to Long Wharf — but the geographic origin point of the university is still inside one of those original colonial squares.
How the 1638 Grid Survived
That the 1638 grid survives at all is a historical accident with explanations. New Haven was not destroyed in any major war (the 1779 British raid burned some buildings but did not demolish the grid). New Haven did not experience a major fire that razed the central district (Boston's 1872 fire and Chicago's 1871 fire both required rebuilding from scratch). New Haven's 19th-century industrial growth happened to the south and west of the original grid, not inside it. New Haven's post-WWII urban renewal of the 1950s and 1960s, destructive of other parts of the city (most notoriously the Oak Street Connector for I-95), spared the central nine-square area because Yale was institutionally invested in preserving its surrounding context.
The grid's intactness is also partly a product of continuous Yale presence. Yale's gradual physical expansion into the squares immediately surrounding the Green meant that those squares were locked into institutional ownership rather than commercial redevelopment. The blocks west of the Green became Yale academic buildings. The blocks north became Yale residential colleges. The blocks east contain the city's downtown but in proportions that respect the original block sizes.
A modern visitor walking the Green and looking carefully at the street pattern can still see the 1638 design. The Green is rectangular and oriented to the cardinal directions. The streets meet at right angles. The surrounding blocks are roughly the same dimensions as the original squares. The block to the west, the Yale Old Campus, is one of the original eight residential squares, repurposed for the college.
What the Grid Means Now
The 1638 plan is not, in any active sense, the operating principle of contemporary New Haven. The city has, for at least 200 years, been a secular institution in which the original Puritan theological vision is essentially extinct. Center Church remains a working congregation, but its historical mantle as the spiritual center of an aspirational holy community is a memory rather than a current reality. New Haven's contemporary life is structured around Yale, the medical school, the regional service economy, and a substantial immigrant population whose religious and cultural inheritances have nothing to do with 17th-century English Puritanism.
But the grid is still there. The Green is still there. The three churches are still there. The Old Campus block is still there. And the historical fact that the city's central public space is owned by a private 17th-century proprietary corporation, leased to the city at nominal rates, is still there. New Haven retains its colonial-era physical structure not because anyone deliberately preserved it but because the structure was never seriously threatened by the kinds of disasters that dismantled comparable colonial American grids.
For an international student studying at Yale, the practical value of knowing this is twofold. First, the geographic logic of where Yale's buildings sit relative to the Green is a 1638 logic, not a 20th-century logic. Second, the long arc of New Haven history — from a Puritan theological experiment to a secular research university — is itself a useful object of study, and the physical city is the textbook. The nine squares are a hidden text in the streets. Once you can read them, the city's design becomes a documentary record of the Puritan Atlantic, with later layers of New England federalism, 19th-century industrialism, and 20th-century academic expansion drawn over the original geometric plan.
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