Niantic: A Village Named for a People

Niantic takes its name from the Nehantic people, an Algonquian band who lived along this stretch of the Connecticut coast when English settlers arrived in the seventeenth century. The Niantic split into two branches. The Western Niantic lived near the mouth of the Connecticut River under Pequot influence, while the Eastern Niantic, in what is now Rhode Island, largely escaped the devastation of King Philip's War through their leader's neutrality.

Today Niantic is a quiet summer resort village tucked into a cove off Long Island Sound, known for its state park beach and the local bookshop housed in a former Methodist church. The name itself is one of the oldest continuously used place-names on the Connecticut shore, a small linguistic trace of the people who fished and farmed here for centuries before the first English farmsteads broke the forest.