The brothers who collected buildings. Ask Stratford for its strangest story and you'll be sent to Boothe Memorial Park: two brothers, David and Stephen Boothe, spent the early twentieth century filling their family homestead with structures nobody could quite explain — a clocktower museum, a chapel, a blacksmith shop, a windmill, a trolley station, and, in time, an original Merritt Parkway tollbooth. They willed all thirty-two acres to the people of Stratford, and the town has been happily puzzled by it ever since.
The Paugussett who lived along the Housatonic called this shore Cupheag — "place of shelter." In 1639 a group of Puritan families led by the Reverend Adam Blakeman settled at the river's mouth, and in 1643 the town was formally named Stratford, for Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon in England. For its first two centuries Stratford lived off the water: oystering and shipbuilding on the Housatonic, wharves and fishing boats, the 1750 Georgian house of Captain David Judson still standing as a reminder of the colonial harbor town.
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.
