Madison was settled as East Guilford in 1641 and incorporated under its own name in 1826, honoring James Madison, fourth President of the United States.
Hammonasset Beach State Park — Connecticut's largest shoreline state park, two miles of sand on Long Island Sound — opened July 18, 1920, and drew 75,000 visitors its first season.
Why People Visit Madison Connecticut
Madison offers the longest shoreline beach park in Connecticut on a peninsula named for the Hammonassett people who farmed it for centuries, a Town Green that has been the center of the village since 1641, a 17th-century saltbox house museum a few doors off the green, an 1838 Greek Revival church, a long-running town library, and a nationally-cited independent bookstore on the same Boston Post Road that has run through town since the colonial era. Visitors come for the beach, the green, the architecture, the bookstore, the marshes, the lower-Hammonasset estuary, the author events, and the simple shoreline rhythm of a New England town that has been holding the same compact center for nearly four hundred years. On Hammonasset shore since 1641.
