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Community Corner

Drawing The Line

Figuring out exactly where the original borders of Waterford were is trickier than it might seem.

In 1801, when Waterford was set off from New London and became a town of its own, the borders of the new town needed to be defined.
Because the original Waterford was larger than the Waterford of today, I wondered what areas used to be a part of town but now belong to someplace else. I thought it would be easy to look up. I soon discovered otherwise.

The 1801 lines began “at the north-east corner of the city of New London where it joins the Groton line.” That was easy enough to find on a modern map, but “thence westerly on said city line to a large rock on Plumb’s hill, so called, about four rods west of the road leading from Norwich to New London” was not. I was starting to see some flaws in my idea, namely that large rocks tend to move over the course of centuries, Plumb’s hill probably no longer belongs to Plumb, and I don’t know how long a rod was. The rock problem continued with the next part of the border, “thence running south 37 deg. west,
to a large rock belonging or lately belonging to John Ashcroft, a little to the eastward of Cedar swamp.” Just how large were these rocks, I wondered. And did no one foresee a time when later citizens might wonder which of several rocks was meant, or when the Cedar Swamp might be drained, or when no one would remember which land was once owned by John Ashcroft?

At the time, town borders were inspected in the ancient British tradition of “perambulating the bounds.” I could imagine how early 19th century people traipsing through woods and along streams might recognize a “high water mark” and a “large clump of rocks” as landmarks. Today there is something almost unimaginably parochial about their interpretation of their landscape, a seeming inability to conceive of a person from someplace else, who might not know that the aforementioned “large clump of rocks” at the western point of Lester’s Gut was known as “the great shore rock.”

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For all the perambulating that must have gone into creating them,
the original borders only applied for the following 38 years. In 1839 a new town, East Lyme, was created from parts of Waterford and Lyme. This was common at the time. Old Lyme and Lyme were one until 1855. Though Old Lyme is the newer town, it had been settled first. Lyme itself had been previously set off from Saybrook , which is now Deep River. (And now I’ve gotten myself into a whole other county.) Ledyard was merely a part of Groton before 1836. Montville, which features in the original Waterford boundaries (“northerly on said Lyme
line, to the southerly line of the town of Montville”) had been incorporated from New London in 1786.

A map of Connecticut showing town boundaries demonstrates this
history of cutting up and rearranging. Amid the straight lines are many squiggles and zigzags and curves, necessitated by rough terrain and the constraints of whose farm ended where, who owned which clump of rocks. Waterford combines an almost-straight line, a naturally wavy coast, a sharp curve, and that border with East Lyme, which looks as if it incorporates – to paraphrase a joke about a different country - the places where the man who drew the line had his fingers on the ruler.

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Having abandoned my first idea of tracing the old bounds myself,
I decided to at least drive the southern border. From Hunt’s Brook - then Alewife Brook or Lester’s Gut - the border extended “westerly as the sound runs to the southerly line of the town of Lyme.” No matter what year it is, following the Sound and stopping at the border with Lyme (i.e. Old Lyme) seemed pretty fool-proof. So I drove out of Waterford into the village of Niantic, which was sparsely populated in 1801 compared to Flanders, to the north. I passed familiar campsites
and hotels and beaches, stores and restaurants and sidewalks full of strolling vacationers. Only this time everything looked slightly different, because I saw it through the eyes of those early Waterford town planners. “All of this,” I imagined them thinking, “All of this once was ours.”

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