How streets in Hamden developed
We are indebted to the Quinnipiac tribe for establishing paths that some our streets follow today. In 1930, the Colonial Dames of America produced a map of how the area that is now Connecticut was divided among the various indigenous tribes, and the paths connecting their settlements. One of these was a path west of the Quinnipiac River, the route State Street follows today. Very likely the Quinnipiacs used paths along the Mill River and the ridgeline between those two rivers to travel between their fishing grounds on the shore and hunting grounds in the hills. Those two paths, respectively, established the routes of Whitney Avenue and Ridge Road.
The first detailed map of the Connecticut Colony was produced by Moses Park in 1766. The area of Hamden today was still part of the town of New Haven at the time, and State Street was still the only road shown in that area. Hamden was incorporated as a separate town in 1786, but the first good map to show its boundaries was not made until 1811, by Warren & Gillett. Oddly it did not show State Street, but did show Whitney Avenue and Hartford Turnpike. Those two roads connected near Eli Whitney's armory. (In 1861, Whitney's son built the Lake Whitney dam still in use today, severing that road connection.) The map also showed a road leading from New Haven to Whitney Avenue near the Mount Carmel Congregational Church. It comprised parts of the present Dixwell Avenue, Shepard Avenue, and Sherman Avenue.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, increasing settlement throughout Connecticut required maps of each county. The first of these for New Haven county was made by R. Whiteford in 1852. Most of the present roads longer than about half a mile were shown on this map, but none of them were named. Rather, the names of house owners and businesses were shown. Street names and addresses were not needed as there was no home delivery of mail. Next came a county map made H. & C.T. Smith in 1856. Street names were still not shown on the main map, but there were inset maps of the central portions of most towns that included street names. There was an inset of Mount Carmel covering the area along Whitney Avenue from Cannon Street to Todd Street, but none of the streets named have the same names today! They were River Road (now New Road and Broadway), West Road (Evergreen Avenue), East Road (Hogan Road), and Mountain Street (Mount Carmel Avenue).
The first map of just the town of Hamden was in an atlas of New Haven County made by F. W. Beers in 1868. Again the names of homeowners were shown but not streets, with one exception: West Woods Road, the current Shepard Avenue. However, the city of New Haven map in this atlas showed, with names, ten streets just north of the city line, and the route of the New Haven and Centreville Horse Railroad terminating in that area. Despite that name, the horse-drawn streetcar line never extended beyond that point, but it did begin the transformation of Hamden from an agricultural town with a few small industrial villages along the Mill River to a bustling suburb of New Haven.
When farmland was subdivided into lots for houses laid out along new streets, a map, called a plat, had to be filed with the Town Clerk's office. The first of these was in 1865, for the area near that horsecar terminus, showing Goodrich, Morse, Edwards, and “St. Mary's” streets. Around the turn of the twentieth century, electrified trolley lines reached into Hamden. An 1896 plat of Whitney Park, a subdivision including streets off Whitney Avenue from Athol Place to Hawthorne Avenue, showed the electric line, assuring prospective purchasers of house lots of quick, reliable transportation to downtown New Haven. As automobiles became more widely available in the 1920s, much of the land in the southern half of town was subdivided, leading to a more than doubling of town population during that decade.
Around this time, the start of home mail delivery and extension of utility lines required that each house have a unique address. Since Hamden had several post offices, there were many instances of the same name used on streets in different parts of town. Town Engineer F. Walden Wright began a program of renaming streets to avoid duplicates, and numbering houses to give each a unique address.
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