Our Groton logo carries the same emblem every Merlin Classics Connecticut town wears — an oyster above "Connecticut, Est. 1636," the colony's founding year, rendered in hand-printed black and white with a worn, vintage feel. The oyster is the shoreline state's mark, the through-line that ties Groton to every other Connecticut town we make. What makes this one Groton is everything around it: the submarine harbor, the monument on the heights, the deep Thames water. On a tee or a cap it reads less like a souvenir and more like a small piece of the Connecticut coast — Est. 1636, worn plain.
Groton's stories run to the water. The town took its name from Groton, the Suffolk manor of John Winthrop, who led the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; the river it sits on, the Thames, is named for London's — though locals say it plainly, "Thaymes," not the English way. They'll tell you Groton built more than seventy submarines for the fleet in a single world war, and that for decades the new boats slid down the ways straight into the Thames, the way the Nautilus did in 1954. Down at Fort Griswold every September, the town still gathers to remember the men who fell in 1781. The harbor that made Groton a target in the Revolution is the same deep water that made it the Submarine Capital of the World — the whole story turns on that one stretch of river.
Why People Visit Groton Connecticut
Groton draws people who love the sea and the stories that come with it. It is the Submarine Capital of the World, with the first nuclear submarine open to walk through; it is a Revolutionary battlefield with a monument to its fallen; and it is a working shoreline of deep harbor, forts, beaches, and lighthouse points. Visitors come for the rare combination — naval history you can stand inside, colonial history you can climb, and a Connecticut coast you can walk all in one town on the Thames.
