There are few Americans today who are such strangers to the fabled history of the New England shore that they can approach the region with an unaffected eye. This stretch of land, where Yankees abode with the sea, somehow perpetually evokes its past. One’s view of it today has become an inseparable mix of present physical character and the enduring ghosts (both real and imaginary) of history. Trim Nantucket, for example, with its yachts, vacation homes, and mid-nineteenth century mansions, is conjured by our minds into colonial Quaker Nantucket, the sandy, unadorned “gray lady of the sea.”
With this in mind, it is perhaps best to tie off this tapestry of the New England shore’s history with a look at the region as it stands today.
As one moves eastward from the Connecticut-New York border, the first leg of the trip along the shore takes one through the “Gold Coast,” prestigious Fairfield County, where residential shoreline real estate is the world’s most expensive. In little Byram, hard by the New York line, one can peer across well-guarded estates to glimpse among the trees impressive homes, some Victorian, some of the dignified colonial revival style, and a few so hilariously palatial that the visitor might expect one of Louis XIV’s mistresses to come walking out the front door.
Before World War II, Fairfield County, the western third of Connecticut’s shoreline, was a scattering of industrialized cities among sleepy little villages, which were the haunts of artists, bohemians, and summer people. Just before the war, business executives discovered the region, and they were followed after the war by the Madison Avenue advertising crowd. By the mid-1950s, the scene was set-enter the gray-flanneled commuter with his newspaper to await the train at the Darien or Westport station.
Today, giant corporations are moving their headquarters into Stamford and other shoreline cities, greatly urbanizing the bedroom-town image. The Old Post Road, as Route 1 is commonly called, now guides motorists past the colonial town greens before swinging them out into the mayhem of Post Road shopping centers. car dealerships, and fast-food restaurants.
Moving farther east, one finds the middle class being allowed to approach the shore as the commuting distance to New York becomes too long. Small vacation houses fill the somewhat oily beachfront. Land values remain high, and a cottage is considered to have a respectable yard if a car can be parked between adjoining houses.
East of New Haven, the terminus of the commuter trains, life relaxes back to communities typical of Connecticut “steady habits.” Colonial houses line the shore road at dignified intervals, then begin to clump together to mark a village centered around a white-steepled church. Outside town, the road is often the solitary intruder through a salt marsh spanning a tidal river by a small bridge before again making high ground. The marshlands are Connecticut’s last true wilderness, although over half have been bulldozed into building lots since the century began. Like the windmill raising water to make America’s prairies into lush farmland, so too did the modest sump pump transform life along the marshy Connecticut shore The summer homes, set on pilings, now were given dug foundations and became year-round homes. Here, as elsewhere along the coast, the interstate highway system of the 1950s and 1960s awoke many sleepy little towns. After this sudden entry into the twentieth century, they either became part of the region’s growing suburban area or were saved from “progress” by the liberal application of time and money by the old families and concerned newcomers who attempted to preserve the towns’ old character.
While cottages crowd the little roads leading down to water, there is still much untouched land. It can best be seen from the windows of the shore train from New York to Boston. The roadbed runs past villages, to cut through rocky woods and over the many salt marshes. In season, one looks out on ducks and swans in surprising numbers, trailing their young behind them as they paddle up a tidal creek. Ospreys nest on poles set up for them in the marsh, glaring and fluffing out their feathers at the noisy intruder that rushes by. At dawn, raccoons wash at the river bank, and twists of morning fog lie in the still-shadowed coves.
Rhode Island comes next on the northeast journey. The marshlands here are now fronted by barrier beaches, for the shore has passed out of the placid Long Island Sound and now faces the open sea. Those Connecticut bathers who come here suddenly realize how dilute their home waters are as they feel the sea salt drying on their bodies. The ocean has its hazards, however, since hurricanes have decimated many beach colonies and shifting beachfronts have tumbled many cottages into the surf. The population here allows room for the old industries, and little inlets at Point Judith house active fishing fleets.
The rough southern shores turn north in Narragansett Bay, a separate world of islands, passages, and small bays, lying in placid protection from the open ocean. It combines a portion of the rugged grandeur of the Maine coast with its own balmy climate. It is no wonder that the Indians of the southern New England region chose to center their activities here. From atop the high Newport Bridge can be viewed the grandest sweep across this region, a sight that rivals the vista of dawn from the summit of Cadillac Mountain on Mount Desert Island. The bridge at Newport replaced an old ferry, which itself provided an inspiring view from its upper foredeck as the ferry threaded through the vessels in Newport Harbor to dock at the old waterfront.
The next region the traveler sees is the shores of misty Buzzards Bay, dividing Cape Cod from the mainland. For most, the bay is simply a way station to the Cape. The residents of its shore villages live content that few recognize the beauty of some of the old communities, leaving them relatively unbothered. Fall River and New Bedford are the population centers of the region. New Bedford remains an active fishing port. Deep-sea vessels line the docks, a few foreign cargo ships tie up alongside the fish packing plants, and the cats that prowl the waterfront are sleek and well fed.
Cape Cod soon looms into the landscape. The traveler must now actively avoid the new to locate the more timeless. Venture down the small side roads that wind down to the shore in the less commercial towns. Here are the old homes built around windmills. Cedar-sided Cape houses are set off by yards ornamented with purple hydrangea and bordered by wild roses. Farther inland, the scrub pines, knurled and covered with lichen, twist up out of the sand in stunted, toylike forests, reminiscent of the improbable pines in ancient Chinese paintings. As the traveler moves up to Boston along what is known locally as the South Shore, the landscape combines comfortable suburbs and more rural sections like those along the Connecticut shore into a pleasant homogeneous blend.
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