The Deacon John Grave House (1685) on the Boston Post Road is one of the oldest houses in Connecticut — home to the Grave family for nine generations, until 1978.
The town earned its shoreline reputation the long way. Shipbuilding and oystering worked the rivers through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and by the early twentieth the cottages had begun spreading along the shore — summer people discovering what the farmers had always known about the light on the Sound. When the Park and Forest Commission opened Hammonasset in 1920, Madison became the town whose beach belonged to everybody, and the summer rhythm that followed — cottages filling, the campground at the park, the village green in its shade — has run every year since, interrupted only by the Second World War, when the park served as an Army reservation and the beach trained soldiers instead of swimmers.
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.
