English settlers from other New England colonies…

English settlers from other New England colonies had moved into the Connecticut Valley in the 1630s, where tobacco is already being grown by the native population.

William Holmes had led a group of settlers in 1633 from Plymouth Colony to the Connecticut Valley, where they had established a colony a few miles north of the Dutch trading post.

Natives refer to the area as Matianuck.

It is about fifty miles (eighty kilometers) up river, at the end of waters navigable by ship and above the Dutch fort at Hartford, offering an advantageous location to trade with the natives before the Dutch. (The Sicaog tribe had made a similar offer to mediate to the Dutch in New Amsterdam, but New Netherlands has far fewer European settlers than New England and is not in a position to take up the opportunity.)

Sixty or more people led by the Reverends Maverick and Warham had arrived in 1635, having trekked overland from Dorchester, Massachusetts, where they had first settled after arriving in the New World five years earlier on the ship Mary and John from Plymouth, England.

Reverend Warham had promptly renamed the settlement Dorchester.

The colony's General Court changes the name of the settlement in February 1636 from Dorchester to Windsor, named after the town of Windsor, England, on the River Thames.