Long before the shipyards, the point belonged to the Pequot, who knew it as Nauyang — 'point of land' — and used it as a summer fishing and camping ground, documented here as early as 1614. The Pequot were forced from this coast in 1655, in the aftermath of the Pequot War; the removal was a dispossession, and it should be named as one. The village still carries the Pequot name it was given, and the Mashantucket and Eastern Pequot nations remain part of southeastern Connecticut today. Noank's story begins on Pequot ground.
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.
