In May 1785, after years of petitioning, East Haven finally won its independence and was incorporated as a separate town, with Isaac Chidsey as its first selectman. Through the nineteenth century it lived by the shore — farming the uplands, oystering the Sound, and shipping goods from its wharves — a narrow strip of Connecticut coast running from the harbor inland. Then, at the turn of the twentieth century, the electric trolley arrived, and with it the line that would outlast every other: the Branford Electric Railway, threading along the shore and the salt marshes toward Branford.
What's with Iron Works Village? Before it was East Haven, it was Iron Works Village — and that name is the key to the whole town. In 1655, on the shore of a pond fed by Lake Saltonstall, colonists fired up Connecticut's very first iron works, smelting bog iron just a few years after the New Haven Colony took root. It was only the third ironworks in all of New England. The furnace gave the settlement its first identity and its first industry, and though the fires went cold long ago, the village it built grew into the shoreline town that still sits at the east edge of New Haven Harbor.
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.
