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.
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.
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.
