The first English names for this stretch of water were Dragon Point, Dragon River and Dragon Town. The usual explanation is the right one: harbour seals hauled out along these banks in numbers when the first European sailors came up the river, and "dragon" was near enough.
Seals are back in Long Island Sound in winter now. They were gone for a long time.
A separate place
Fair Haven sits about two miles from the New Haven Green, and it has spent much of its history being deliberately separate from it. The farmers here formed their own village in 1679 while still part of the New Haven Colony. A wooden bridge across the Quinnipiac in the late 1700s connected the two banks. The area between State Street and the Mill River became part of New Haven in 1784 and was called New Township. Fair Haven separated again in 1837, with a population of about a thousand.
A sea captain who visited in 1747 was struck enough by the place to call it Fayre Haven, and the name replaced the dragons.
Clamtown
What Fair Haven had was oysters, and nearly everyone in it worked them in one way or another: building boats, making kegs, cultivating and harvesting the beds, buying and selling the catch. By the middle of the 19th century New Haven's oyster trade was second only to Baltimore's by volume, and the nickname for the village was Clamtown.
The boat they developed for the work was the sharpie: long, narrow, flat-bottomed, shallow enough to work the beds and fast enough to get the catch home. It is one of the few American small-craft designs to come out of a specific fishery in a specific place, and it came out of this one.
Bigger vessels worked from here too, trading to the West Indies and bringing back sugar, molasses and fruit. The First Church on Grand Avenue had forty-eight ship captains in its congregation, and its 237-foot spire was the landmark returning sailors looked for, until a storm took a hundred feet off it in 1877.
The collapse
The oyster industry fell apart in the early 20th century. Overfishing did part of it; pollution did the rest. The beds sat downstream of an industrial river that had been treated as a drain for decades, and the oystermen fought the factories over the water for years without winning.
An adult oyster filters up to fifty gallons of water a day. The beds were not only a business, they were the harbour's filtration system, and losing them made the water worse in a way that made it harder to bring them back.
Now
Oystering on the Quinnipiac has been rebuilding, on cleaner water. The seals are back each winter. Watch also for the Asian shore crab, a small aggressive newcomer that arrived in ships' ballast and is now the most common crab on many Long Island Sound shorelines.
The sign at this spot
The full sign, in English and Spanish. Zoom in to read it.
This sign is still a draft. The hatched boxes are photographs that have not been sourced yet.
Sources and further reading
Where a link goes to a scanned original — a newspaper page, a map, an engineering journal — it is the actual document, not a summary of it.
- Fair Haven, oystering and Clamtown — Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute
- Dragon Point — Connecticut Historical Collections
- What happened to the oysters — Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute
- Mill River Watershed Based Plan — Save the Sound
Research and credits
Historical research for the Mill River Trail signage was carried out by Colin M. Caplan of Magrisso Forte and John R. Logan, with contributions from Jason Bischoff-Wurstle of the New Haven Museum and walk notes by Steve Hamm. Images are credited individually. Locator maps are drawn from OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL.