East Haven came of age during the Revolution. In July 1779 a British force under General William Tryon landed along the shore and struck at Black Rock Fort in Morris Cove before marching on New Haven — the war reaching right onto East Haven's beaches. The town remembers the other side of that year too: the Marquis de Lafayette and his troops encamped on the Green, and Lafayette thought enough of the place to return and visit it again decades later, in 1824. Salt for the army, men for the cause, and a French general on the common — the Revolution left its mark on the little shoreline parish.
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.
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.
