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.
Our Waterford logo carries Connecticut's clam shell above "Connecticut — Est. 1636," the shared retro emblem of our Connecticut towns; the shell speaks to the shoreline, and 1636 marks the founding of the Connecticut Colony itself — not the town, which came much later, in 1801. Rendered in worn black-and-white, like an old oyster-crate label or seaside signage, it ties Waterford to every other Connecticut town we make. What makes this one Waterford is the story behind it — the granite, the gardens of Harkness, and the long light off the Sound.
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.
