New London keeps two seafaring identities at once. There is the whaling city — Whale Oil Row, the old harbor, the 1833 Custom House, and the lights that still guide ships in: New London Harbor Light, raised in 1801 and the oldest and tallest lighthouse in Connecticut, and the offshore Ledge Light of 1909, square on its house out in the channel. And there is the Coast Guard city — the academy on the Thames, the cadets, and the Eagle standing out under sail, one of the last great square-riggers flying the American flag. Between them runs the Thames itself, with the ferries pulling out for Orient Point and Block Island, the Amtrak trains along the waterfront, and the working harbor that has defined the place since 1646.
As whaling faded, the harbor found new work. The Coast Guard's officer school — afloat since 1876 — moved ashore to Fort Trumbull in 1910, was renamed the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in 1915, and in 1932 built its permanent campus on land New London citizens gave up the Thames. Since 1946 the academy's training barque Eagle has sailed from New London: a 295-foot square-rigger built in Germany in 1936 and taken as a war reparation, today the only active square-rigger in U.S. service. The city kept a literary fame, too — the playwright Eugene O'Neill spent his boyhood summers at the cottage on Pequot Avenue he later set on the stage, down to the moan of the harbor foghorn that runs all through Long Day's Journey Into Night.
Why People Visit New London Connecticut
People come to New London for its deep maritime history and its working-harbor life — the whaling heritage, the Coast Guard Academy, the lighthouses and ferries, the literary thread of Eugene O'Neill. It is a real seaport, not a recreated one: a small Connecticut city with a great harbor and a long view down the Thames toward the Sound.
