Fort Good Hope (Dutch: Fort de Goede Hoop) was a factory (trading post) in the seventeenth-century Dutch colony of New Netherland. The trading post was located at modern-day Hartford, Connecticut.
History
In 1633, the Geoctroyeerde West-indische Compagnie (WIC) (1621–1793) of the United Netherlands Dutch Republic (commonly known in English as the Dutch West India Company) built a fortified trading house on the south bank of the Little River (now Park River), a tributary river of the Versche or Fresh River (now the Connecticut River). The WIC had planned Fort Good Hope to be the northeastern fortification and a trading center of the WIC. The land was part of a larger tract purchased on 8 June 1633 by Jacob van Curler on behalf of the WIC from the Sequins, one of the clans of Connecticut Indians. Curler added a block house and palisade to the post while New Amsterdam sent a small garrison and a pair of cannons.
English settlers from other New England colonies moved into the Connecticut Valley in the 1630s. In 1633, William Holmes led a group of settlers from Plymouth Colony to the Connecticut Valley, where they established Windsor a few miles north of the Dutch trading post. In 1634, John Oldham and a handful of Massachusetts families built temporary houses in the area of Wethersfield, a few miles south of the Dutch outpost. In the next two years, 30 families from Watertown, Massachusetts joined Oldham's followers at Wethersfield. The English population of the area exploded in 1636 when clergyman Thomas Hooker led 100 settlers, including Richard Risley, with 130 head of cattle in a trek from Newtown (now Cambridge) in the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the banks of the Connecticut River, where they established Hartford directly across the Park River from the old Dutch fort. In 1637, the three Connecticut River towns—Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield—set up a collective government in order to fight the Pequot War.
The location of this confluence of rivers is at contemporary Sheldon Street in Hartford. The fort is recalled today with a nearby avenue called Huyshope, once the center of economic activity in the city.