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 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.
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.
