Stonington Connecticut Holiday Ornament - Old Lighthouse

The town beneath these stories is one of Connecticut's oldest. Settled in 1649 on the Pequot coastal homeland and established as a town in 1662, Stonington incorporated its village core as a borough in 1801 — the oldest borough in the state. By 1842 its small fleet of fishing, whaling, and sealing vessels traded busily enough that the federal government made the harbor a port of entry, and the little granite Customs House still faces Main Street just north of Cannon Square. In the decades that followed, Portuguese fishing families made the borough their own, and their Blessing of the Fleet each July remains the harbor's great annual rite.

The 21-year-old who found Antarctica. In the autumn of 1820, six years after the British sailed away, a 21-year-old Stonington sea captain named Nathaniel Brown Palmer sailed south out of this harbor on a 47-foot sloop called the Hero. He was hunting fur seals. The fleet had been working the South Shetland Islands off the tip of South America, and the seals there were getting scarce. Palmer was sent further — past the known maps, past where any American ship had reliably gone — to look for new rookeries. On November 17, 1820, barely past his 21st birthday, Palmer sighted a coastline that no one in his hemisphere had ever charted. He sailed close enough to see mountains rising directly out of the ice. What he was looking at would later be named Palmer Land, and the entire peninsula extending north toward South America is now the Antarctic Peninsula — the seventh continent's northernmost reach. He was the first American to sight Antarctica — one of the first three sightings in history, all within that same year — and the only one of the three with the continent's great peninsula carrying his name today. He came home to Stonington. Lived the rest of his life here. His house still stands at 40 Palmer Street, two blocks from the lighthouse he sailed past on his way south. A continent named for a kid from a one-square-mile village.

Why People Visit Stonington Connecticut

• Tour the Old Lighthouse Museum at 7 Water Street, the 1840 granite lighthouse that since 1925 has been the oldest lighthouse museum in America, holding the original sixteen-star battle flag from 1814.
• Visit Cannon Square, where the two surviving 18-pounder cannons that defended the borough in 1814 still point toward the harbor entrance.
• See the Captain Nathaniel B. Palmer House at 40 Palmer Street, home of the 21-year-old sea captain who first sighted Antarctica in 1820.
• Relax on DuBois Beach, sandy cove at the tip of the borough with views across Fishers Island Sound to Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York.
• Walk Water Street, tree-lined with white picket fences, antique shops, and historic sea captains' homes.
• Watch the working fleet at Town Dock, Connecticut's last commercial fishing fleet, with views of the harbor and surrounding islands.
• Explore the historic American Velvet Mill on Bayview Avenue, built in 1888 to attract new industry to the borough. The American Velvet Company opened there in 1892 and at its 1950s peak was the largest velvet producer in the United States, operating roughly 300 broad looms with around 450 workers. The company moved operations to Virginia late in the 20th century, and the building has since been repurposed as a maker space.
• Come in December for the Lobster Trap Tree by the Town Dock — the borough's internationally photographed Christmas tree built entirely of stacked lobster traps.