North Haven, Connecticut: Bricks, Bogs, and a Separate Parish
Near New Haven, Connecticut
North Haven was purchased as part of New Haven's original land grant in sixteen thirty-eight and saw its first European settlers arrive in the following decades. Almost immediately it became economically useful in ways the settlers had not expected. New Haven founder Theophilus Eaton is said to have opened a brickyard here, and bog iron was mined near Pool Road.
Farmers and ironworkers and brickmakers filled the community for generations, but always as the northern quarter of New Haven. Residents formed their own church parish in the early seventeen hundreds, an early assertion of independence that took decades to become official. In seventeen fourteen the Reverend James Pierpont left eight acres to his neighbors in what was then called the Northeast Parish, and its first meeting house was finished in seventeen twenty-two.
In seventeen eighty-six, North Haven became a separate municipality, having finally separated from New Haven after nearly one hundred and fifty years as its agricultural hinterland. The census of seventeen ninety counted one thousand two hundred thirty-six residents. It remains a town of New Haven County today, neighbor to the city but unmistakably its own place.
After the Civil War, brickmaking along the Quinnipiac River expanded, especially at the Stiles company, and drew immigrants to town.
