Samuel Stone

Biography

Stone was born in Hertford, the county town of Hertfordshire, England. The name of the town is pronounced "Hartford".

In 1620, he left Hertford to study at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, from where he graduated in 1624. He was ordained on July 8, 1626, at Peterborough and a year later became curate at Stisted, Essex. In 1633, Samuel Stone and Thomas Hooker sailed across the Atlantic on a ship named the Griffin. They arrived in Boston on 4 September of the same year, and a few weeks later, Samuel Stone became a Teacher of the Cambridge Church under Hooker, who was the preacher. In 1644, he became a Freeman. In 1636, Stone and Hooker led their congregation from New Towne (now Cambridge, Massachusetts) and established a new colony at House of Hope (a Dutch fort and trading post), making peace with the local Indians and renaming the town they called Saukiog as Hartford, after Stone's birthplace - they thus became the town's founding fathers.