East Lyme is really two villages under one town hall. On the Sound sits Niantic, the coastal village named for the Nehantic — the Niantic people — who fished these waters and gathered along the shore for centuries before the English arrived. Inland sits Flanders, a farm district that took its name from the Belgian-style cottage textiles once spun along the old Post Road. The two have always pulled in different directions — one toward the water, one toward the land — and East Lyme is the town that holds them together.
Two great green spaces fixed that summer character in place. Rocky Neck State Park spreads more than seven hundred acres along the Sound, with a wide sandy beach, a tidal salt marsh, and a landmark stone-and-timber pavilion built by WPA and CCC crews in the 1930s — one of the finest pieces of public architecture on the Connecticut shore. Inland, Nehantic State Forest, set aside in 1925, was the first state forest in New London County. And along the water in Niantic, the mile-long Niantic Bay Boardwalk, opened in 2005, traces the shore past the old railroad line, with the Sound on one side and the bay on the other.
Why People Visit East Lyme
East Lyme rewards visitors who want the Connecticut shoreline at its most easygoing — a sandy state-park beach, a waterfront boardwalk, and a village built on the bay. People come for Rocky Neck and the Niantic Bay Boardwalk, for the colonial Thomas Lee House, and for a simple, scenic shoreline day where beach-cottage summers and quiet New England history sit a short walk apart.
