What's with Iron Works Village? Before it was East Haven, it was Iron Works Village — and that name is the key to the whole town. In 1655, on the shore of a pond fed by Lake Saltonstall, colonists fired up Connecticut's very first iron works, smelting bog iron just a few years after the New Haven Colony took root. It was only the third ironworks in all of New England. The furnace gave the settlement its first identity and its first industry, and though the fires went cold long ago, the village it built grew into the shoreline town that still sits at the east edge of New Haven Harbor.
That trolley line is East Haven's quiet claim to fame. Today the Shore Line Trolley Museum keeps the Branford Electric Railway running — the oldest continuously operating suburban trolley line in the United States — carrying riders on century-old streetcars along the same shoreline route, past Farm River and its tidal marshes. The town itself has long since become a New Haven-area shoreline suburb, with its beaches on Long Island Sound, its greens and ball fields, and the easy rhythm of a coastal town. But the trolley still clangs along the marsh, a living thread back to the iron-works village that started it all.
Why People Visit East Haven
Visitors come to East Haven for an unhurried slice of the Connecticut shore: a ride on a hundred-year-old trolley, a stroll past one of New England's oldest stone churches, and an afternoon on a quiet Sound-side beach. Salt marshes and shoreline trails sit a few minutes from the Town Green, and New Haven's museums and harbor are right next door. Equal parts colonial heritage and easy coastal living, East Haven rewards anyone drawn to the working shoreline of Long Island Sound.
