NHRed.jpg)
A river is an obstacle before it is anything else. For two centuries the history of the Mill River in New Haven is mostly the history of getting across it — and then, once the railroad arrived, of what got built along it because the crossing was there.
A tidal stream
The Mill River rises in the uplands of Cheshire and runs about seventeen miles south through Hamden and New Haven into Long Island Sound. The lower river, the stretch you are standing on, is tidal: salt water pushes up it twice a day as far as the tide gate.
The ground here is clay, silt and sand — the floor of a shallow sea that sat between glacial periods. It is soft, it floods, and before it was filled it was marsh. None of that made it good to build on. All of it made it cheap.
Neck Bridge, 1641
English Puritans settled New Haven in 1638. Three years later they built the first bridge over the Mill River, called Neck Bridge, along what is now State Street. For most of two centuries that was the crossing — anyone going to Fair Haven went up to State Street and over.
In 1819 Eli Barnes helped pay for a bridge at Grand Avenue, privately, cutting the trip short. The city spent the next hundred years rebuilding both.
The railroad, 1839
The New Haven and Hartford Railroad opened in 1839, the city's first rail line, and carried its track over the Mill River on a bridge of red sandstone. That single decision did more to shape this riverbank than any other.
Before the railroad, industry on the Mill River meant water power: a gristmill, a carriage factory, a mill making wheels and axles, a paper mill, and from 1798 Eli Whitney's armory upstream. Those works had to sit where the current was. After the railroad, a factory only needed to sit where the freight was — and a site with a rail line on one side and a navigable tidal river on the other, minutes from a dense supply of labour, was as good as land got.
So the marshes were filled and the riverbank was taken. By the early 1900s the lower Mill River was lined with works making rubber boots, clocks, auto parts, cardboard, steam boilers, brass and wire.
The sandstone bridge was replaced in 1906-07 by the two concrete arches standing today. The Engineering and Building Record published the drawings in November 1908.
Three bridges, and one that stopped
Looking north from here you can see the sequence. The nearest bridge carried the New Haven, New London and Stonington Railroad, begun in 1852, east through Fair Haven and along the Connecticut shoreline; that line is abandoned now. The middle bridge is the 1906-07 arch, still carrying trains. The farthest is the Humphrey Street Bridge, built in 1952 to replace a 1909 crossing between State Street and Fair Haven.
What it cost
This was before the Clean Water Act, and the river was treated as part of the plant. Owners put into it whatever they wanted to be rid of. The discharge ran downstream into the oyster beds that ringed the industrial area, and the oystermen and the factories fought over it for decades — an argument the factories won.
By 1970 the Mill River tested at four times the legal limit for swimming, and there was serious talk of paving it over.
The industry left instead. The river has been recovering since, and river herring still run up it each spring to spawn, the way they did before Neck Bridge.
NewHavenMuseum1.jpg)
EngineeringRecord-b.jpg)
EngineeringRecord.jpg)