And that's only half of it. This one patch of ground has lived four industrial lives. It built steel cargo ships in the First World War. It became one of the most advanced fish plants in America in 1927. It launched submarines in the Second World War — the boats that made Groton the Submarine Capital of the World. And in 1946 it started brewing penicillin by the ton. Ships, fish, submarines, medicine — the same riverbank, reinvented again and again.
The fish chapter is the one almost nobody remembers. In 1927, Atlantic Coast Fisheries bought the old Groton Iron Works yard and turned its cavernous steel sheds into something startlingly modern: a plant that filleted haddock, froze each fillet solid on aluminum plates, and wrapped it in crisp new Cellophane — individually quick-frozen seafood a full generation before it reached the average American grocer. Fortune magazine marveled at an operation built for ten million fillets a year, its lines run in part by rows of women at automatic wrapping machines. It was ahead of its time in the most literal sense: the fish were landed up in Boston, too far to stay competitive, and the Depression left shoppers wanting the cheapest food, not the finest. Barely four years after it opened, the plant went quiet. The future had arrived too early to survive.
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.
