If you think New Haven is a small city, today, imagine how often you’d bump into the same folks if we were 30 times smaller.
This morning, the New Haven Museum’s Jason Bischoff-Wurstle and I did, poring over very early population stats published in the New Haven Chronicle on this date back in 1786 for our latest episode of “This Day in New Haven History.” You can listen to our analysis by clicking on the audio above or finding it in iTunes or on any podcast app under “WNHH Community Radio.” Here are some of the highlights that stuck out to us:
Seventeen-eighty-six was still three years away from the adoption of the Constitution. Our independent United States was still governed by the Articles of Confederation, and until the Constitution was passed with its Article one, section two mandate for a national census, there was no formal national demographic accounting. Somebody on a more local level had still undertaken a skeletal survey — or the cities were already gearing up for the first decennial census of 1790 — because according to the numbers New Haven ranked at the time as the seventh largest city or town in all of the now united colonies, according to the article before us.
What did that mean, in 18th-century terms? Philadelphia had the most with 4600; then New York with 3500; Boston with 3100, Baltimore with 1900 houses, Charleston with 1540. After that there’s a big drop down to three-digit level cities, with Albany numbering 550 houses and good old New Haven boasting 500.
Lots of people lived together under the roof then, so the writer tells us to multiply the number of houses by seven to get a close approximation of the number of “fixed inhabitants.” Or multiply by eight, it is also suggested, to account for “strangers.”
By that count, New Haven had about 4,000 people. There were likely more, especially since African-Americans, both free and enslaved, were likely not counted.
For more on our colonial Elm City demographics — and other kinds of counting going on in our Custom House — tune in. It might make you want to start working for Census Bureau.
