The Submarine Capital of the World — where the first nuclear submarine slid into the Thames in 1954. Groton, Connecticut sits on the east bank of the Thames River, on a deep-water harbor that has been building and berthing ships for three centuries. It is the place where the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, the Nautilus, was launched in 1954 — and where she still floats today, open to anyone who wants to walk her decks at the Submarine Force Museum. Groton has earned the title Submarine Capital of the World for a simple reason: the boats that disappear beneath the world's oceans have been built and based here for generations. But the town's salt runs deeper than steel — back to a 1705 shipbuilding-and-whaling village, and to the hallowed ground of Fort Griswold.
But the buildings stood. In 1946 Pfizer bought the yard for under a million dollars and filled those same halls with towering fermentation tanks. Groton went on to brew penicillin by the ton — enough to supply most of the United States and half the world — and helped drive the price of the miracle drug from twenty dollars a dose down to under two cents. The antibiotics perfected here traveled with medics to the front-line MASH tents of Korea, and then reached everyone else. Today that rocky point on Eastern Point holds a gleaming research campus where nearly every one of the company's medicines is shaped, in part. From a fish dock to a cure that circled the globe — the same half-mile of Thames riverbank.
Why People Visit Groton Connecticut
Groton draws people who love the sea and the stories that come with it. It is the Submarine Capital of the World, with the first nuclear submarine open to walk through; it is a Revolutionary battlefield with a monument to its fallen; and it is a working shoreline of deep harbor, forts, beaches, and lighthouse points. Visitors come for the rare combination — naval history you can stand inside, colonial history you can climb, and a Connecticut coast you can walk all in one town on the Thames.
