Making the Most of Your Visit to Connecticut

Connecticut is small enough to cross in an afternoon and dense enough that you never quite finish it. In one day you can watch a whaling schooner get rigged in Mystic, tour the house where Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn, and eat a coal-fired pizza in New Haven that people argue is the best in the country. The Constitution State packs shoreline, capital city, and college town into roughly five thousand square miles. Here is how to make the most of a visit, and a little of the history that makes it worth the trip.

A short history of the Constitution State

Connecticut became the fifth state in 1788, one of the thirteen original colonies. Long before that it was home to the Mohegan, Pequot, and Niantic peoples, and the state takes its name from their word quinnitukqut, roughly "beside the long tidal river," a reference to the Connecticut River that splits the state down the middle on its way to Long Island Sound.

The Constitution State nickname is a point of local pride. Many trace it to the Fundamental Orders of 1639, a set of governing rules drawn up by the river towns of Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield that some historians consider the first written constitution in the Western tradition. Whether or not it was truly the first, it put Connecticut early on the idea that a government should be written down and agreed to, and the name stuck.

Where Connecticut sits

Connecticut is New England's southwestern corner. Massachusetts borders it to the north, Rhode Island to the east, New York to the west, and Long Island Sound runs along the entire southern edge. That position is the whole appeal. You can be in Manhattan in under two hours, in Boston in under three, and still spend your evening on a quiet stretch of coast watching the tide go out. The Sound itself is the state's front yard, a protected saltwater estuary that shapes the weather, the seafood, and the sailing.

For getting your bearings before a trip, or for holding onto one afterward, the Sound is also the piece of Connecticut most people want on their wall. A Connecticut wood chart of Long Island Sound carries every channel and shoal at its true depth, the same water you drove along, carved in layers of birch.

The three Connecticuts

It helps to think of the state in three parts, each with its own character. Give a trip a day or two in each and you will have seen the real thing.

• The Shoreline, running east along the Sound to Mystic and Stonington.
• Hartford, the capital, up the river valley in the center of the state.
• New Haven, the college town on the coast, home to Yale.

The Shoreline and Mystic

The heart of the Connecticut shoreline is Mystic, an old shipbuilding village where the drawbridge over the river still stops traffic on the hour. The anchor here is the Mystic Seaport Museum, founded in 1929 to keep the country's seafaring past intact. Spread across nineteen acres on the water, it holds more than five hundred historic vessels, including the Charles W. Morgan, the last wooden whaleship left in the world, along with marine paintings, scrimshaw, ship plans, and a working preservation shipyard.

Give the food an afternoon of its own. The shoreline runs on shellfish, and a lobster roll eaten at a picnic table over the water is close to the point of the trip. Abbott's Lobster in the Rough in Noank has been doing exactly that since the 1940s, and neighbors like Ford's Lobster and Red 36 keep the tradition going. If you have had your fill of seafood, the well-regarded Engine Room in Mystic makes a serious burger.

There is more to the coast than the plate. Stonington's vineyards, some of the first in the state and pouring since the late 1980s, are built for a slow picnic afternoon. A little inland, the Essex Steam Train and Riverboat pairs a vintage steam ride through the river valley with an hour-long cruise on the Connecticut River, dinner service included if you want to make an evening of it.

Hartford, the capital

Head up the river valley and you reach Hartford, a compact capital with more to do than its size suggests. The must-see is the Mark Twain House, the striking Gilded Age home where Samuel Clemens lived for seventeen years and wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The rotating exhibits make it worth a visit even if you last read Twain in a classroom.

Families should build in a day for the Connecticut Science Center, a nine-story museum on the riverfront that opened in 2009 and runs on hands-on exhibits for every age. For a summer evening, the Hartford Yard Goats play at Dunkin' Park, regularly rated one of the best ballparks in the minor leagues. And if you can catch the UConn Huskies in season, do. The women's basketball program is among the most dominant in the history of college sports, and the arena atmosphere shows it.

The Hartford area is also wedding country. Grand rooms like the Society Room of Hartford, the restored Lace Factory on the river in Deep River, the Eolia Mansion at Harkness Memorial State Park, and the waterfront Saybrook Point draw couples from across New England to marry in Connecticut.

New Haven and Yale

New Haven is the state's college town, a smaller-scale city with a real cultural pulse. The center of it is Yale University, and you can spend a full day inside its orbit. Walk the Gothic quads, then take in the free Yale University Art Gallery and the Peabody Museum of Natural History, whose great hall of dinosaur skeletons has been drawing wide-eyed kids for generations.

Work up an appetite first with a hike in Sleeping Giant State Park just north of town, where the ridgeline really does look like a reclining figure from a distance. Then settle the age-old argument for yourself: New Haven's coal-fired apizza. Frank Pepe has been baking thin, blistered pies since 1925, and the line out the door is part of the experience. Order the white clam pizza, a New Haven original, and understand what the fuss is about.

Bring Connecticut home in wood

The best souvenir of a trip like this is the water itself. A Woodchart wood map turns real survey data into stacked birch, so every channel of Long Island Sound or the quiet basin of an inland lake like Waramaug in the Litchfield Hills sits on your wall at its true depth. Our most popular Connecticut pieces map the Sound, from the coves off Darien to the western reach near the New York line, but the collection runs deeper than that.

Whether you are marking a favorite stretch of shoreline, remembering a wedding on the water, or planning the next drive up I-95, start with the Connecticut wood map collection. For the wider region, the East Coast charts cover the coastline from here to the Carolinas, all carved to the same true depth.