The first real helicopter on Earth lifted off here. On a September morning in 1939, Igor Sikorsky's VS-300 rose into the air over the Housatonic River, and the American helicopter industry was born in Stratford. But the town is three centuries older than that flight — a 1639 Puritan harbor at the mouth of the river on Long Island Sound, named for Shakespeare's Stratford, with oyster boats, a colonial sea-captain's house, and a lighthouse on the Sound. This is Stratford, Connecticut, and this page tells its story.
Then, in 1939, Stratford changed the world's idea of flight. Igor Sikorsky's VS-300 made the first practical helicopter flight here on September 14, and the town became the cradle of the American helicopter — every presidential Marine One has been built in Stratford since 1957. For a small Connecticut harbor, it is an outsized claim to fame: the place where the helicopter went from dream to working machine, on the same riverbank where oyster sloops had worked the tide two centuries before.
Why People Visit Stratford Connecticut
Stratford draws visitors with a rare mix of colonial harbor history, Long Island Sound shoreline, and aviation heritage. Travelers find it both a 1639 oyster town with a lighthouse and beaches and the birthplace of the American helicopter, with the quiet, layered character of the Connecticut shore. It is historic, maritime, and unmistakably New England.
