Guilford grew as an agricultural town — crops, timber, livestock, and orchards on the inland slopes from the very beginning — with shipbuilding on the tidal rivers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and granite quarried along the Guilford–Branford line late in the 1800s, pink-grey stone from the shoreline ledges shipping out to building projects far beyond Connecticut. The Guilford Fair has run every September since 1859 — one of the oldest agricultural fairs in the state.
At the center of it all is the Green — laid out in 1639, twelve-plus acres, one of the largest village greens in New England, its shape virtually unaltered in nearly four centuries. The 1829 Congregational church anchors its north end, and the streets around it hold one of the deepest collections of colonial houses in Connecticut: the Hyland House (a museum since 1918), the Thomas Griswold House of about 1764 with its blacksmith shop, and the Medad Stone Tavern of 1803.
Why People Visit Guilford Connecticut
Guilford offers the oldest stone house in New England, one of the largest village greens in the country, four historic-house museums in walking distance of each other, an offshore lighthouse, forty miles of inland hiking, century-and-a-half-old family orchards, and a continuously running September fair. Visitors come for the Whitfield House, the green, the Hyland and Griswold houses, the granite shoreline, the apple and peach seasons at the orchards, the fair, and the simple shoreline pleasure of a village that has been holding its center since 1639. It is old, intact, and very Connecticut.
