Did George Washington spend the evening of April 10th 1776 dancing up a storm and impressing the ladies with his minuet and cotillion moves at Old Lyme’s Peck Tavern? Legend has it that he did. Had he spent that day examining America’s first submarine, the Turtle, being put through its paces at Poverty Island in the Connecticut River? Circumstances say it was both possible and likely. What we do know for certain is that General Washington graced our town with his presence

The Will of the People can never be expressed when only one half of that people have the right to express it. —Katharine Ludington At the bend of Lyme Street, where it meets Ferry and McCurdy Roads, stands Old Lyme’s South Green, a site central to the revolutionary doings of our town’s patriots in the 1770s. It was here that the Parsons Tavern stood, once home to Reverend Jonathan Parsons who preached resistance to Britain, and his sons Major General Samuel Holden Parsons an

“The shot heard ‘round the world”, fired at Lexington in 1775, is typically how we mark the beginning of the American Revolution. But wars don’t arise out of thin air—especially wars undertaken against the most powerful imperial army in the world. Before war comes ideology, and few writers were more important in developing the rhetoric of revolution than Lyme’s own Reverend Stephen Johnson. A decade before the Revolution, Reverend Johnson, the minister of Lyme’s First Congre

Walking down Lyme Street on a beautiful autumn day, you might consider that this very lane was once a footpath for the Nehantic People—not just hundreds, but thousands of years ago. Archaeologists have established evidence of their early settlement across the area, including at the rock shelters in the Town’s Ames Family Open Space. Local traditional Native villages stood in places known today as Black Hall, Watch Rock, and Talcott Farms. The Native people referred to thes