Then, at the turn of the twentieth century, Waterford gained a palace by the sea. Edward and Mary Harkness — heirs to a Standard Oil fortune — built Eolia, a forty-two-room Renaissance Revival mansion, on a green point above the Sound around 1907. They laid out formal gardens, later refined by the great landscape architect Beatrix Farrand, and spent their summers there among the boxwood and the salt air. Mary Harkness left the estate to Connecticut, and in the 1950s it became Harkness Memorial State Park — its lawns, gardens, and water tower now open to anyone who wants to walk down to the water.
Through the nineteenth century Waterford was a working shoreline. Farmers raised sheep on the rolling uplands of Quaker Hill and Jordan; fishermen and traders worked the coves; and the granite men cut and hauled stone from Millstone Point. The town had no single mill-town center — instead a scatter of villages and landings, each with its own character, tied together by the Sound and the two rivers that bound the town east and west, the Thames and the Niantic. It was quiet, rural, and durable, the kind of place that changed slowly and kept what it had. Stone walls still run through the second-growth woods where pastures used to be, quiet markers of all that work.
Why People Visit Waterford
Visitors come to Waterford for an unspoiled stretch of the Connecticut coast: the gardens and mansion at Harkness, a famous playwriting center, granite-walled woods, and rocky beaches on Long Island Sound. It sits minutes from New London and the Mystic shoreline, with two state parks holding long reaches of open coast. Equal parts heritage and easy beach time, Waterford rewards anyone who likes the shore quiet and the history close at hand.
