The brothers who collected buildings. Ask Stratford for its strangest story and you'll be sent to Boothe Memorial Park: two brothers, David and Stephen Boothe, spent the early twentieth century filling their family homestead with structures nobody could quite explain — a clocktower museum, a chapel, a blacksmith shop, a windmill, a trolley station, and, in time, an original Merritt Parkway tollbooth. They willed all thirty-two acres to the people of Stratford, and the town has been happily puzzled by it ever since.
Then, in 1939, Stratford changed the world's idea of flight. Igor Sikorsky's VS-300 made the first practical helicopter flight here on September 14, and the town became the cradle of the American helicopter — every presidential Marine One has been built in Stratford since 1957. For a small Connecticut harbor, it is an outsized claim to fame: the place where the helicopter went from dream to working machine, on the same riverbank where oyster sloops had worked the tide two centuries before.
Why People Visit Stratford Connecticut
- Tour Boothe Memorial Park, a 32-acre former estate with an eclectic collection of historic buildings on the Housatonic.
- Visit the Captain David Judson House (1750), the Stratford Historical Society's colonial Georgian home.
- See Stratford Point Light, the lighthouse marking the mouth of the river on Long Island Sound.
- Relax at the Lordship beaches and seawall, facing out onto the Sound.
- Explore the National Helicopter Museum and the Connecticut Air & Space Center, telling the town's aviation story.
