Naugatuck Trail

Connecticut

This hiking trail is a leftover: postwar housing cut it down to a fraction of its old length, and orphaned pieces of it still carry the name in four other towns.

hikinghistoricalnatural

The Naugatuck Trail runs about seven miles now, blazed in blue rectangles across a six-hundred-foot plateau in the Naugatuck State Forest. In the nineteen thirties and forties it was much larger. Then came the postwar housing boom, and the trail was drastically reduced. What was cut off did not entirely disappear. Bethany, Orange, Woodbridge and New Haven all still have local paths called the Naugatuck Trail, vestiges of the long original route south. The old line can be traced on a map printed in nineteen forty in the Connecticut Forest and Park Association's Walk Book. Decades later, in nineteen ninety-eight, Bethany's conservation commission was still writing about those leftover stretches, recommending the town buy up the land they crossed as open space. The surviving mainline climbs Beacon Cap and Spruce Knoll, passes near Beacon Hill without topping it, and crosses seasonal streams including Egypt Brook before ending alongside Route 8 and the river.

This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
But post–World War II housing developments of the Connecticut Blue-Blazed Trails, led to its drastic reduction.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, on the same roads

  • Prospect, Connecticut 4.2 mi Prospect calls itself the best small town in Connecticut because a magazine once ranked it the worst.
  • Post University 5.8 mi A school that started out teaching typing and bookkeeping in Waterbury counts a former president of Paraguay among its graduates.
  • Bank Street Historic District (Waterbury, Connecticut) 6.6 mi Waterbury's most ornate commercial building was built for elite tenants and ended up housing a piano tuner and a billiards parlor.
  • Quinnipiac University 7.7 mi Quinnipiac won its first national championship in any sport ten seconds into overtime.
  • Marion, Connecticut 9.3 mi A hill in this Connecticut neighborhood is called French Hill because Rochambeau's army slept on it in 1781.
  • Southbury, Connecticut 10.4 mi In 1937, a farming town in Connecticut wrote a zoning law to stop the American Nazi movement from building its largest training camp.