New Haven to Boston, Part 4

[All this info from plaques near the Route 1--Baldwin Bridge.]

These northerly hills sloping down to marshland—Essex and the tranquil towns of Middlesex County, the tidal estuary ebbing around and between Nott Island, Lord’s Cove, Goose Island, Calves Island—250 million years ago, this land lay encompassed in the spine of a mountain range thrust up by violent tectonic collisions.

It was around 25,000 years ago that the last of the Ice Age glaciers swept down over New England and scored the land so deeply, furnishing the soft outlines of future river valleys. Paleo-Indians arrived here 10,000 years ago, over the Siberian land bridge from Asia. North America was then a vast tundra, and the humans were most likely following herds of caribou.

 During the course of our most recent glacial epoch, a much greater portion of the world’s oceans were locked up in Earth’s ice caps, and world-wide sea levels were about 400 feet lower than they are today. The Connecticut land mass once extended out about 100 miles south of present-day Long Island, out to where the Atlantic Ocean now washes the continental shelf. Ancient forests stretched to this southern coast, their petrified remains today reposing off the Atlantic beaches, and here also roamed the shaggy mastodon herds memorialized in Neolithic cave paintings. For hunter-gatherers, it was a gold coast.

The course of the Connecticut River was established 13,500 years ago., During one of Earth’s periodic climate shake-ups, with global temperatures climbing, the packed ice of taiga and tundra retreated northward all across the crust of the earth, and this once-compressed layer of crust began to rise. To the north, where the heaviest layers of ice had pressed down, the crust now rose to the most dramatic elevations, forcing the glacial lakebeds of North America to drain southward. Over time this continental drainage managed to effect the north-south cut of America’s main riverways, and the river channel of the Connecticut was laid during this thaw.

By 5,500 years ago, the North American climate had grown mild and hospitable, and the human societies which had immigrated so recently now began to settle into permanent villages. Some time in the last four thousand years, a rich alluvial soil was deposited along the banks of the Connecticut, establishing the bounteous marsh environment of the present day.

By 3,500 years ago, the Connecticut River had become an important commercial waterway. Copper from Michigan, chalcedony spear-points from Labrador—these were traded between established cultures up and down the coast. Disputes over land claims along the riverbank began to simmer as early as a thousand years ago, after corn, beans, and squash had become well-established in vital croplands attached to agrarian communities.

            Today, most vessels on the Connecticut carry gasoline and home heating oil, hauling these necessaries upriver as far as Hartford.          

NEW LONDON: 14 MILES