Rocky Hill: America's Oldest Ferry and a Dinosaur Discovery
Near Hartford, Connecticut
Rocky Hill, Connecticut can claim two unlikely distinctions separated by about two hundred million years. The first is the Rocky Hill to Glastonbury Ferry, started in sixteen fifty-five, which still runs on a seasonal basis today as one of the oldest continuously operating ferries in the United States. It crosses the Connecticut River from April to the end of November, and it began before Rocky Hill and Glastonbury were separate towns, when both belonged to Wethersfield.
The second arrived on August twenty-third, nineteen sixty-six, when a bulldozer operator named Edward McCarthy was excavating for a state highway department building and uncovered a field of three-toed dinosaur tracks pressed into the rock beneath his blade. Work stopped immediately. Two years later, in nineteen sixty-eight, the site was designated a state park and a National Natural Landmark.
Dinosaur State Park now covers more than two thousand identified tracks laid down about two hundred million years ago by carnivorous early Jurassic dinosaurs. About five hundred tracks are displayed under a geodesic dome, while roughly fifteen hundred more remain buried to keep them safe. The largest prints are called Eubrontes, a name given by geologist Edward Hitchcock, and they measure ten to sixteen inches long.
Rocky Hill was incorporated from Wethersfield in eighteen forty-three and named for the trap rock ridge in its northeast corner, a ridge that, as it turned out, had been a dinosaur highway long before it was anyone's town.
