Madison was settled as East Guilford in 1641 and incorporated under its own name in 1826, honoring James Madison, fourth President of the United States.
The peninsula is named for the Hammonassett people, who farmed and fished it for centuries before contact; the name means "where we dig holes in the ground."
Why People Visit Madison Connecticut
Madison offers the longest shoreline beach park in Connecticut on a peninsula named for the Hammonassett people who farmed it for centuries, a Town Green that has been the center of the village since 1641, a 17th-century saltbox house museum a few doors off the green, an 1838 Greek Revival church, a long-running town library, and a nationally-cited independent bookstore on the same Boston Post Road that has run through town since the colonial era. Visitors come for the beach, the green, the architecture, the bookstore, the marshes, the lower-Hammonasset estuary, the author events, and the simple shoreline rhythm of a New England town that has been holding the same compact center for nearly four hundred years. On Hammonasset shore since 1641.
