East Rock is the most obvious thing in New Haven and the easiest to take for granted. It is a 365-foot cliff of basalt — trap rock — formed when a sheet of lava cooled underground roughly 200 million years ago, as the continent was pulling away from Africa. Glaciers later stripped the softer material off its face.
What is less obvious is that it was very nearly not a park.
Private ground
Through the middle of the 1800s the land that is now East Rock Park was divided among several private owners, and they used it the way you would expect people to use a large exposed mass of good building stone: they quarried it.
One owner had a different idea. A local showman built a large boat on top of the rock, called it Noah's Ark, and charged people to come up and look at it — a piece of nineteenth-century roadside attraction logic, two centuries before anyone called it that.
Making a park
The city started buying parcels, and in 1880 created a parks commission to manage what it had assembled. Ultimately the park reached about 427 acres across New Haven and Hamden.
Its principal designer was Donald Grant Mitchell, a New Haven writer and landscape designer who also laid out Edgewood Park. The Olmsted Brothers firm — the successor practice to Frederick Law Olmsted — designed the portion of the park along the Mill River, including Rice Field.
In 1887 the Soldiers and Sailors Monument was built on the summit, and the rock acquired the silhouette it has now.
And nearly lost again
In the 1960s the state proposed running a highway connector along the Mill River and through the park. Residents formed a Save Our Park Committee and stopped it, though Interstate 91 still took about ten acres.
A park is not a natural feature. It is a decision that has to keep being made.
What is here now
Peregrine falcons nest on the trap rock cliffs of the Connecticut ridges, and the updraughts off the face make this good raptor country. In the woods, watch for garlic mustard and Japanese barberry — both introduced, both aggressive, and both changing what can grow underneath.
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.
- New Haven's Sentinels: the story of East Rock and West Rock
- The East Rock Connector — Connecticut roads
- Report of the New Haven Civic Improvement Committee, 1910
- Mill River history — Mill River Trail
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.