Henry Whitfield House, Guilford

A short distance from the shore of Long Island Sound, hidden behind a modest lane in Guilford, stands the oldest house in Connecticut and the oldest stone house in all of New England. It has been here since sixteen thirty-nine, longer than the United States, longer than the idea of Connecticut itself.

The story begins in England, where a Puritan minister named Henry Whitfield found himself at odds with the Church of England under Archbishop William Laud. Religious pressure and the threat of persecution pushed Whitfield to make the decision that many of his contemporaries were making in the sixteen thirties: emigrate to the New World. In the summer of sixteen thirty-nine he led a company of twenty-five families aboard a ship called the Saint John and sailed for the coast of Connecticut.

They landed at what the Menunkatuck people, a band of the Quinnipiac, called their home. Whitfield negotiated a purchase of the land and renamed the settlement Guilford. Almost immediately, the colonists began building. They were exposed and vulnerable, a small English community in an unfamiliar landscape, and they built accordingly. Four stone houses went up as part of Guilford's defenses, and Whitfield's was the grandest of them. Its walls are nearly two feet thick, cut from local granite, designed to serve as a fort as much as a home. When danger threatened, the women and children of the community could take shelter inside.

Whitfield served as Guilford's first minister and its civic anchor for about eleven years before returning to England in sixteen fifty. The house passed through many hands over the following two centuries, was remodeled in the eighteen sixties, and eventually came to the attention of the state. Connecticut acquired it in nineteen hundred, making it the first Connecticut property opened to the public as a state museum.

Today the Henry Whitfield State Museum on Old Whitfield Street is a rare and tangible link to the very first generation of English settlement along this coastline.