Through the nineteenth century Waterford was a working shoreline. Farmers raised sheep on the rolling uplands of Quaker Hill and Jordan; fishermen and traders worked the coves; and the granite men cut and hauled stone from Millstone Point. The town had no single mill-town center — instead a scatter of villages and landings, each with its own character, tied together by the Sound and the two rivers that bound the town east and west, the Thames and the Niantic. It was quiet, rural, and durable, the kind of place that changed slowly and kept what it had. Stone walls still run through the second-growth woods where pastures used to be, quiet markers of all that work.
The town itself came later than its stone. For a century and a half this was the "West Farms" of New London — English colonists first raised crops on Fog Plain in 1645, and a sawmill turned at Quaker Hill by 1653. The farmers along the Sound eventually wanted a town of their own, and on October 8, 1801, Waterford was incorporated as Connecticut's 109th town. It took its name from the old city of Waterford in Ireland, a fitting borrow for a coast town. From the start it was a place of farms, fishing, and granite, strung along twenty-three miles of Long Island Sound shoreline.
Why People Visit Waterford
Visitors come to Waterford for an unspoiled stretch of the Connecticut coast: the gardens and mansion at Harkness, a famous playwriting center, granite-walled woods, and rocky beaches on Long Island Sound. It sits minutes from New London and the Mystic shoreline, with two state parks holding long reaches of open coast. Equal parts heritage and easy beach time, Waterford rewards anyone who likes the shore quiet and the history close at hand.
