What’s with Yale and the lobstermen? Nothing, except that the lobstermen’s town is where Yale was born. On October 9, 1701 the General Court chartered the Collegiate School and named Pierson its rector; the plan was Saybrook, but his congregation would not let him go, so the college came to his house. The first student, Jacob Heminway of East Haven, walked in alone in March 1702 with thirty shillings for a year’s tuition and was, in his own words, all the college for the first half-year. Pierson taught Latin, Greek, logic and divinity at his own table, wrote the physics textbook the school lacked, and kept preaching on Sundays. When he died in March 1707 the trustees sent the students to Saybrook, the seniors to Milford, and in 1716 settled the school in New Haven, which took Elihu Yale’s name two years later. Yale kept the name. Clinton kept the man.
The town took its modern name in the same era of ambition. Incorporated in 1838, separating at last from inland Killingworth, the shoreline parish named itself for DeWitt Clinton — the New York governor whose Erie Canal had just remade American commerce and inspired town names across the young country. The new Clinton carried its shipbuilding, fishing, and oystering trades through the 1800s as the Connecticut shoreline's quiet middle: never a city, never asleep.
Why People Visit Clinton
Clinton offers the Connecticut shoreline at its most relaxed — a real harbor town with beaches, marinas, and a colonial Main Street, plus the surprising distinction of being where Yale began. Visitors come for the water, the history, and the easy shoreline pace, and stay for the beaches, the harbor, and the oysters.
