What's with Gungywamp? Tucked in the woods inland from the harbor is one of the strangest-looking places in Connecticut — a hundred-acre site of stone chambers, old foundations, and a double ring of laid stones called Gungywamp, now a State Archaeological Preserve. Because the chambers are low and stone-roofed, and because one of them catches a shaft of sunlight through a small opening at the equinox, the site has drawn a century of romantic theories — Irish monks, Norse voyagers, ancient astronomers. The archaeology tells a quieter story: Native people used this land for thousands of years, and the stone structures themselves are colonial-era — root cellars that worked like early refrigerators, and a double stone circle that was almost certainly a mill for grinding bark or grain. The equinox light through the chamber window is real, and genuinely lovely; the lost civilization is not. Gungywamp is Groton's reminder that the most interesting history is usually the true one.
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.
