Samuel Hopkins

Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1693, he graduated from Yale in 1718 and became the second pastor of the First Congregational Church in West Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1720. He served there for decades, building a reputation for learning, steady ministry, and public respect.

He is especially noted as an early advocate of maple sugar production in New England. Sources about his life credit him with describing Indigenous methods of making maple sugar in a published pamphlet in the early 1750s, which helped spread interest in it more broadly.

Hopkins died in 1755 at age 61. Although he is less widely known today than some later members of the Hopkins family, he remains an interesting figure from colonial New England: a pastor, pamphleteer, and one of the earliest people linked to popularizing maple sugar in the region.