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.
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.
