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Stand on the Grand Avenue bridge and look down. Almost none of the ground around you is original. The Mill River here ran through a wide tidal marsh — mud, grass and shifting channels, flooded twice a day — and the solid land you are standing on is fill, carted in and dumped over the course of a century to raise the grade above the high tide mark.
What a marsh was for
A tidal marsh is not empty ground waiting to be improved, though that is exactly how New Haven's English settlers and the developers who followed them understood it. Marsh grass anchors sediment. The marsh shelters young fish, shellfish and birds. Above all it absorbs water: it takes a storm surge coming in off the harbour and slows it down before it reaches the street, and it takes fresh water coming down the river in flood and spreads it out. Filling a marsh removes that capacity permanently.
What the marsh did produce, colonists could see: salt hay. By the 1830s people were cutting it off Ball Island for animal bedding and fodder.
Allen Ball's bad land
The river splits here, and the ground between the channels became Ball Island. It takes its name from Allen Ball, a farmer working for John Davenport, the minister who founded the New Haven Colony. Ball came into the land around 1641 through a deed to his brother-in-law.
The island was considered bad land. It flooded constantly, it was muddy, and for two centuries nobody could think of much to do with it. It drifted into use as common ground. By the 1860s the lumber yard next door had taken it over, and industry had arrived on the river for good.
Barnesville
The corner of Grand Avenue and East Street, running down to the river, was once called Barnesville. It was named for Eli Barnes, a real estate developer and oyster farmer who built an inn on Grand Avenue around 1812, shortly after his marriage. He called it the Lafayette Hotel and hung a swinging portrait of the General on the front.
There was almost nothing else here at the time. Getting to Fair Haven meant going all the way up State Street to cross the Mill River. In 1819 Barnes helped pay for a bridge at this spot, privately, and cut the journey short. The bridge fell into disrepair quickly and the city spent the following century replacing it.
When the New Haven and Hartford Railroad opened in 1839, the calculation changed. Land next to a river and a rail line was worth filling.
The Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company
In 1887 two businessmen, Charles Bigelow and John E. Healy, moved their patent medicine works into a large brick warehouse at 521-525 Grand Avenue, across the river from Ball Island. They made and bottled Indian Sagwa, Indian Oil, Indian Worm Killer, Kickapoo Salve and Kickapoo Cough Cure.
The company sold its products as authentic Native remedies, claiming a connection to a Texas band of the Kickapoo Nation. That claim was marketing. Healy and Bigelow were white promoters who had come out of the travelling-show business, and the Kickapoo name and imagery were borrowed to sell bottled alcohol and vegetable extract to white customers. The company ran large touring troupes that performed staged "Indian medicine shows" across the country, and it employed Native performers, a number of whom lived in the neighbourhood around this warehouse.
It was one of the most successful patent medicine operations in the United States. It moved to 441 Chapel Street in 1893.
What came next
In 1890 the New Haven Electric Light Company built a power plant on the south side of Grand Avenue on Ball Island — one of the earliest electrical generating stations in the country, burning coal delivered by ship. As demand grew, the United Illuminating Company began work on its successor, English Station, in 1927. That plant ran until 1992.
Both burned coal and oil beside a river that had already lost its marshes, and the site is heavily contaminated with asbestos and PCBs. The 1890 plant was demolished in 2021. English Station still stands, empty, in the middle of the river, and the cleanup continues.
By 1970 the Mill River was measured at four times the legal limit for swimming. It has been recovering since the industry left.
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