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.
Waterford's quiet coast drew artists as well as gardeners. In 1964 the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center opened here, named for the Nobel-laureate playwright who had grown up just down the shore in New London. Its summer playwriting workshops — the National Playwrights Conference — have launched a remarkable share of the American stage, and the O'Neill is now woven into the town's identity as deeply as its beaches. Nearby, the landmark buildings of Seaside State Park stand on their own green point, a striking piece of early-twentieth-century shoreline architecture preserved as open space.
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.
