Groton's stories run to the water. The town took its name from Groton, the Suffolk manor of John Winthrop, who led the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; the river it sits on, the Thames, is named for London's — though locals say it plainly, "Thaymes," not the English way. They'll tell you Groton built more than seventy submarines for the fleet in a single world war, and that for decades the new boats slid down the ways straight into the Thames, the way the Nautilus did in 1954. Down at Fort Griswold every September, the town still gathers to remember the men who fell in 1781. The harbor that made Groton a target in the Revolution is the same deep water that made it the Submarine Capital of the World — the whole story turns on that one stretch of river.
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.
