The peninsula passed into colonial hands in 1712, acquired by James Morgan through a land lottery; the earliest surviving house, the Yeomans place on Palmer Cove, dates to about 1713. Growth was slow — there were still only a handful of houses by the 1820s — because the point was nearly an island, cut off to the northwest and open to the water everywhere else. It kept the isolated, end-of-the-road feeling that the village has never quite lost.
Everything changed around 1850, when the Palmer brothers, John and Robert, established their shipyard and Noank found its calling. The yard built the famous 'Noank smack' — a fast, able fishing sloop native to the village — and one of them, the Emma C. Berry of 1866, survives today as a National Historic Landmark, the oldest commercial sailing vessel of her kind still afloat. The C. H. Mallory and Spicer steamship interests added to the bustle from 1861. For a few decades a tiny Connecticut point was a genuine center of American shipbuilding.
Why People Visit Noank
Noank rewards visitors who like their shoreline quiet and real — a working harbor instead of a boardwalk, a dense historic village instead of a strip. People come for the boatyards and the lobster shacks at the water's edge, for the walk through the cottage-lined historic district, and for the view out to the Sound from the end of the point. It is peaceful, photogenic, and unmistakably a Connecticut fishing village.
