The settlement came first, in 1638. When the New Haven Colony bought up the land along the Sound, the eastern shore of the harbor was set aside as farmland and called, plainly, East Farms — a parish of New Haven worked by colonists who built wharves, planted fields, and fished the tidal marshes. For its first century the place answered to New Haven in everything: its church, its government, its land. But the iron furnace, the salt works, and the steady growth of the village gave East Farms an identity of its own, and a long, patient campaign to become a town in its own right.
In 1707 the parish shed its old name and became East Haven. The town that grew up around the Green took its lasting shape in 1774, when colonists raised the Old Stone Church — First Congregational — a steepled fieldstone meetinghouse that still stands as one of the oldest stone churches in New England. The Town Green spread out before it, a small common that would gather the town's monuments, its bandstand, and, much later, an oak grown from a sapling sent by President Theodore Roosevelt. The church and the Green remain the historic heart of East Haven.
Why People Visit East Haven
Visitors come to East Haven for an unhurried slice of the Connecticut shore: a ride on a hundred-year-old trolley, a stroll past one of New England's oldest stone churches, and an afternoon on a quiet Sound-side beach. Salt marshes and shoreline trails sit a few minutes from the Town Green, and New Haven's museums and harbor are right next door. Equal parts colonial heritage and easy coastal living, East Haven rewards anyone drawn to the working shoreline of Long Island Sound.
