The peninsula is named for the Hammonassett people, who farmed and fished it for centuries before contact; the name means "where we dig holes in the ground."
The village center held its shape while the century moved around it. The 1950s and 1960s brought suburban growth from New Haven and Hartford, but the compact colonial street plan — green, church, saltbox, library, shops along the Post Road — absorbed it without losing the town's character, and when the bookstore arrived in 1989 it slotted into a main street that had been built for exactly that kind of small, serious commerce since the stagecoach era — the same road where the 1685 saltbox had watched every era of traffic pass, from post riders to Model Ts to summer station wagons headed for the park gate. Madison today is what the shoreline towns all aspire to be: a working village center a mile from a two-mile public beach, with a green that has held the middle of it for nearly four hundred years.
Why People Visit Madison Connecticut
- Spend a day at Hammonasset Beach State Park — two miles of sandy beach on Long Island Sound, the largest shoreline state park in Connecticut, open to the public since July 18, 1920, with a boardwalk, campground, and picnic groves.
- Walk out to Meigs Point at the eastern end of the park — rocky headland views over the Sound — and visit the Meigs Point Nature Center for tide-pool touch tanks and salt-marsh exhibits.
- Stroll the Madison Town Green, one of the oldest in Connecticut, with the 1838 Greek Revival First Congregational Church facing it.
- Tour the Deacon John Grave House on the Boston Post Road — the 1685 saltbox that is one of the oldest houses in Connecticut, home to nine generations of the Grave family and now a museum.
- Visit the Allis-Bushnell House, the Madison Historical Society's museum a few doors down the Post Road.
- Browse the independent bookstore on the Boston Post Road that draws readers and authors from across the region — hundreds of author events a year on a colonial-era main street.
- Walk Madison Center — clapboard shops, cafes, and an art-house cinema along the Boston Post Road, built for window-shopping and ice cream.
- Paddle or birdwatch the lower Hammonasset River estuary and the salt marshes behind the beach.
- Fish or watch the boats along the East River and Neck River town shorelines.
- Circle Tuxis Pond on the walking path just behind the village center.
