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What’s with the Stone House? Half a mile south of the Guilford Green stands a house begun in 1639 and finished by the following spring — the oldest house in Connecticut and the oldest stone house in New England. It was built for the town’s founding minister, Reverend Henry Whitfield, and its massive stone walls were meant to work twice: a home, and a fort stout enough to shelter the whole settlement. Before Guilford had a church it held services here; before it had a town hall it held meetings here. In 1899 it opened as the Henry Whitfield State Museum — Connecticut’s first state museum — and it stands today much as the town’s first winter found it: stone, steep-roofed, and permanent.
Guilford was started with a contract. In the spring of 1639, on shipboard between Surrey and the New England coast, twenty-five Puritan planters signed the Guilford Covenant — how they would govern themselves, divide the land, and build a town — before they had ever seen it. That September they purchased the land from Shaumpishuh, the woman who was sachem of the Menunkatuck band of the Quinnipiac — her people had worked this shore for generations, and like most colonial land deals it was an exchange weighted toward the newcomers; that honesty belongs in the story, as does she. Whitfield himself, like a number of Puritan householders of standing, held enslaved people in his household — part of the record too. The settlers named the town for Guildford in Surrey, and Guilford incorporated in 1718.
Why People Visit Guilford Connecticut
Guilford offers the oldest stone house in New England, one of the largest village greens in the country, four historic-house museums in walking distance of each other, an offshore lighthouse, forty miles of inland hiking, century-and-a-half-old family orchards, and a continuously running September fair. Visitors come for the Whitfield House, the green, the Hyland and Griswold houses, the granite shoreline, the apple and peach seasons at the orchards, the fair, and the simple shoreline pleasure of a village that has been holding its center since 1639. It is old, intact, and very Connecticut.
