Groton
"In Groton the Thames River runs past the Revolutionary War and the Cold War in the same afternoon."
A working Navy town on the Thames River where the world's first nuclear submarine is now a museum you can climb through. Lia, who gets mildly claustrophobic, made it exactly halfway down the USS Nautilus before turning back.
Groton announces its identity before you’ve even parked — gray submarine hulls tied up along the Thames River, visible from the highway bridge, and a low rumble of activity from Naval Submarine Base New London that never quite lets you forget this is a working military town, not a resort. Lia grew up nowhere near a naval base and found the scale of it disorienting in a good way; I’d been half-expecting a sleepy coastal suburb and instead we spent the day threading between fortifications, memorials, and one very real decommissioned submarine.
The USS Nautilus and Submarine Force Museum
The centerpiece is the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine ever built, launched from Groton’s Electric Boat shipyard in 1954 and now permanently docked as the star exhibit of the free Submarine Force Museum. We walked its length through cramped corridors lined with bunks stacked barely a foot apart, past the control room where the crew steered the vessel under the North Pole in 1958, and Lia’s claustrophobia kicked in somewhere around the torpedo room — she surfaced (her word) well before I did, and admitted afterward she had a new respect for anyone who served on these things for months at a stretch.
Fort Griswold and the Battle of Groton Heights
A few miles south, Fort Griswold Battlefield State Park holds a much older and darker story: in 1781, Benedict Arnold — a Connecticut native turned British general — led an attack here that ended in the massacre of surrendering American defenders after the fort fell. We walked the earthworks in the early evening light, reading the memorial with the names of the militiamen killed, and climbed the adjacent granite monument for a long view down the Thames toward the Sound. It’s a somber counterpoint to the submarine museum’s technological pride, and together the two sites gave us a strange, layered sense of how long this stretch of river has mattered strategically.
Getting There
New London’s Amtrak station sits just across the Thames River from Groton, roughly two and a half hours from New York City or under an hour from Providence, with a short taxi or rideshare to reach the submarine base area. Bradley International Airport (BDL) near Hartford is about an hour’s drive north. A car helps for reaching Fort Griswold and Bluff Point’s coastal trails, though the museum and waterfront area near the base are walkable once you’ve arrived.
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