Old Saybrook: Connecticut's First European Foothold

Old Saybrook holds a distinctive place in New England history as the site of one of the earliest European settlements in what would become Connecticut. Dutch traders from New Netherland built a small trading post near the Connecticut River mouth as early as sixteen twenty-four. English Puritans arrived in sixteen thirty-five and built Fort Saybrook, establishing what became the first English settlement in Connecticut.

The colony was named for Viscount Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke, two English lords who backed the venture. The Collegiate School, which later became Yale, was chartered here in seventeen hundred one and stayed in the Saybrook area until it moved inland to New Haven in seventeen sixteen. The town that remains is a quiet shoreline community of summer cottages and marinas, but its location at the river's mouth made it the gate through which English colonial settlement of the Connecticut River valley first flowed.