Then, at the turn of the twentieth century, Waterford gained a palace by the sea. Edward and Mary Harkness — heirs to a Standard Oil fortune — built Eolia, a forty-two-room Renaissance Revival mansion, on a green point above the Sound around 1907. They laid out formal gardens, later refined by the great landscape architect Beatrix Farrand, and spent their summers there among the boxwood and the salt air. Mary Harkness left the estate to Connecticut, and in the 1950s it became Harkness Memorial State Park — its lawns, gardens, and water tower now open to anyone who wants to walk down to the water.
Today Waterford keeps the balance it has always kept — a shoreline town that is half history, half easy coastal living. Its beaches and coves draw summer crowds: Waterford Beach Park, Jordan Cove, Alewife Cove, the marinas at Mago Point on the Niantic. Harkness and Seaside hold long stretches of the coast as open parkland, and the O'Neill keeps the lights on for new plays each summer. It is a town of villages and greens and granite walls, looking out across Long Island Sound, comfortable in its own quiet. Waterford has never needed to be loud to be itself.
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.
