The shore completes the picture: Guilford Harbor and its salt marshes between the West River and East Creek, Jacobs Beach on the Sound, Lake Quonnipaug and Bluff Head inland — and three miles offshore, Faulkner’s Light, the 1802 stone tower on Faulkner’s Island that has marked the harbor approach for more than two centuries, the second-oldest light tower in Connecticut.
So Guilford gathers a covenant signed at sea, a purchase from a woman sachem whose people came first, the oldest stone house in New England, a green that has held its shape for nearly four hundred years, an 1802 island light, and a fair that never stopped running — and our Guilford designs gather that into wearable form. Whether Guilford is your hometown, your green, your shoreline summers, or the town you still measure others against, wear the history. On the Green since 1639.
Why People Visit Guilford Connecticut
- Tour the Henry Whitfield House, the 1639 stone house Reverend Henry Whitfield built the year he founded the town — the oldest stone house in New England, the oldest house in Connecticut, and the first house museum in Connecticut, opened in 1899; operated today as the Henry Whitfield State Museum.
- Walk the Guilford Town Green, the twelve-acre village green laid out by the Twenty-Five Planters in 1639 and still surrounded by the white-clapboard houses of their descendants, with the 1830 Greek Revival First Congregational Church along one edge.
- Tour the Hyland House on Boston Street, the early-eighteenth-century house (long dated by tradition to the 1660s) preserved by the Guilford Keeping Society — one of the finest surviving early New England houses on its original site.
- Tour the Thomas Griswold House, the c.1764 colonial house on the road to Madison, with period furnishings and a working blacksmith shop on the grounds.
- Walk past the Medad Stone Tavern (1803), the Federal-era tavern just north of the green that has been maintained as a museum since the 1960s.
- Look offshore for Faulkner's Light, the 1802 stone tower on Faulkner's Island three miles out in the Sound — the second-oldest active lighthouse in Connecticut, with seasonal Saturday boat tours run by the Faulkner's Light Brigade volunteer group.
- Walk the Westwoods Trails, the forty-mile network of forest trails through ledges, kettle holes, glacial erratics, and beaver wetlands inland from the Sound — the largest preserved hiking area on the central Connecticut shoreline.
- Relax at Jacobs Beach, the small Sound-front town beach with a sandy crescent, picnic groves, and views east to the Madison shoreline.
- Visit Lake Quonnipaug for the inland lake views, the picnic area, and the seasonal swimming and fishing.
- Walk the ledgy granite country out toward the Branford town line — quarry territory in the late nineteenth century, when pink-grey stone cut from these shoreline ledges shipped out to building projects across the country.
- Visit Bishop's Orchards just north of the green for pick-your-own peaches in July and August and apples September through October — a continuous family-run orchard since 1871, five generations operating on the same land.
- Time a visit for the Guilford Fair, the September agricultural fair held on the fairgrounds every year since 1859 — one of the oldest continuous fairs in Connecticut.
- Stop at the Guilford Free Library on Park Street for the local-history room and the genealogy collection, the best public starting point for Guilford colonial research.
