The Water That Raised Me
If you drive through southeastern Connecticut on I-95, you'll cross the bridge over the Thames River between New London and Groton—probably without giving it much thought.
Long before I ever drove over that bridge, I grew up on the river beneath it.
I learned to swim there. I learned to sail there. Nearly every summer memory I have begins somewhere on that water. If the weather was nice, chances are we were out on the river—swimming, water skiing, sailing, or simply climbing into a little boat to see where the day would take us.
It was just home.
It never occurred to me that there was anything remarkable about it.
Some people grow up in the mountains.
Some grow up on farms.
I grew up on a river.
Only after I moved away did I realize I'd mistaken the familiar for the ordinary.
It would take years before I started wondering why this river mattered so much.
The Fort Above The River
One of my favorite places growing up was Fort Griswold.
It sits high on a hill overlooking the Thames.
Even today, whenever I cross the bridge into Groton, my eyes instinctively drift upriver to the granite monument above the fort. It doesn't quite feel like I'm home until I see it.
As a kid, I loved exploring the fort. There was a tunnel through the fort’s grassy earthworks that always seemed more exciting than it probably was.
I’d climb onto the barrels of the old cannons near the entrance, take all 166 spiral steps to the top of the monument, and imagine what it must have been like centuries ago, but I never stopped to wonder why this fort was built here.
Years later, I finally did.
Construction of Fort Griswold began in December 1775, just months after the Revolutionary War began. It was completed three years later.
Back then, rivers like the Thames were highways, supply lines, and strategic assets.
The Thames was deep enough for large ships, sheltered by Long Island Sound, connected directly to the Atlantic, and it rarely froze in winter.
That's why forts stood on both sides of the river: Fort Griswold in Groton and Fort Trumbull across the water in New London.
But that still didn't stop one man from attacking those forts in 1781.
His name was Benedict Arnold.
He knew the value of the river, having grown up a few miles upriver in Norwich.
Today, Benedict Arnold's name is almost synonymous with betrayal. But before that, he had been one of George Washington's most capable generals. After attempting to surrender West Point to the British, he switched sides. Now he was back in his home state of Connecticut—this time wearing a British uniform.
On September 6, Arnold led roughly 1,700 British regulars, Hessians, and Loyalists into the Thames. While Arnold directed the attack, about 800 British troops climbed the hill toward Fort Griswold, where Colonel William Ledyard and roughly 165 militia and local volunteers prepared to defend it.
Ledyard knew he was badly outnumbered. The British demanded the fort's surrender.
He refused.
The defenders fought fiercely, inflicting heavy casualties before the British finally breached the earthworks. Only then did Ledyard order his men to stop fighting.
According to legend, he stepped forward and offered his sword to a British officer.
The officer immediately killed him with it.
What followed remains one of the Revolutionary War’s most notorious massacres. By the time it was over, eighty-five American defenders were dead. Across the river, much of New London was in flames.
The British had captured Fort Griswold, but this was a raid, not an occupation. By dusk, they were withdrawing to their ships.
Fort Griswold had been built because the Thames was too valuable to leave undefended. The war eventually ended, but the geography that made the river strategically important didn’t change.
Generations later, the Thames would help shape another part of everyday life in Groton.
What You Don't See Between The Tugs
Growing up, there was one rule everyone on the river understood.
If you saw two tugboats coming toward you, you got out of the way.
Not because of the tugboats. Because somewhere between them, barely breaking the surface, would be a submarine.
Most of the submarine remained hidden beneath the water. Usually all you could see was the conning tower, a few antennas, and—if you looked carefully—the stern trailing far behind it.
What I remember most is how quiet they seemed.
Ferries churned the water. Fishing boats rattled. Sailboats slapped against the waves.
The submarines simply glided past.
We were kids. We did plenty of things we probably shouldn't have on the river, but nobody fooled around with submarines. If one was coming down the river, every other boat moved aside.
Those submarines came from a place right there on the river that everyone knew as Electric Boat.
The name always seemed a little funny to me, but around Groton—and especially in my family—everyone just called it EB.
I don’t remember ever asking where the name came from.
The answer reaches back to John Holland, one of the pioneers of the modern submarine.
Holland had developed a submarine that used a gasoline engine on the surface and batteries powering an electric motor underwater. In 1899, financier Isaac Rice founded the Electric Boat Company to complete Holland’s vessel. Underwater, it was quite literally an electric boat.
The more interesting question is why Electric Boat ended up in Groton at all.
Electric Boat wasn’t a shipyard. The company designed submarines, then relied on outside manufacturers to build them. As submarines became more sophisticated, that arrangement became increasingly difficult.
In 1909, Electric Boat decided to manufacture its own diesel engines and sent Frank Cable, one of its leading engineers, to find the right location for a new factory.
He chose Groton—and the former Eastern Shipbuilding Company site on the Thames. The company had failed, but it left behind exactly what Electric Boat needed: deep water, rail access, room to expand, and an experienced shipbuilding workforce.
In October 1910, Electric Boat formed the New London Ship and Engine Company—NELSECO—to build diesel engines at the site. Despite its name, the new factory stood in Groton. Production began in 1911.
At first, the Groton plant built engines, not submarines—but that would soon change.
Meanwhile, just a few miles upriver, the U.S. Navy was trying to decide what to do with land Connecticut had given it in 1868. It was originally established as a navy yard and storage depot but by the early 1900s, it had been repeatedly threatened with closure as warships shifted from coal to oil.
Connecticut Congressman Edwin Higgins fought to keep it open. His efforts helped preserve the yard long enough for the Navy to find another use for it. With Electric Boat’s Groton operation just downriver, the yard was a practical place to base the Navy’s expanding submarine force and train its crews.
In 1915, the Navy assigned its first group of submarines to operate from the yard. The following year, it became the nation’s first permanent submarine base.
Over time, more and more of submarine construction moved to Groton. What had begun as an engine plant grew into a shipyard capable of building complete submarines.
Electric Boat built the submarines. The Navy tested them, trained their crews, and sent them to sea.
During World War II, Electric Boat produced seventy-four submarines for the U.S. Navy. At the height of wartime production, the company was turning out a new submarine about every two weeks.
Groton had become the Submarine Capital of the World.
The Impossible Submarine
To me, EB wasn't a famous shipyard. It was simply where my grandfather went to work. He spent most of his career there as a naval architect. As a kid, I knew he designed submarines, but I had no idea what that actually meant.
It wasn't until years later that I began to understand what "designing submarines" really meant. Naval architects weren't simply drawing blueprints. Every new submarine presented a new engineering problem that had never been solved before.
One of the biggest challenges wasn't how submarines fought. It was how long they could stay underwater.
Diesel-electric submarines could travel underwater using batteries, but batteries eventually ran down. To recharge them, the submarine had to surface—or at least raise a snorkel above the water—to run its diesel engines again. No matter how advanced they became, every submarine eventually had to come up for air.
By the late 1940s, a new technology was emerging: nuclear power. Nuclear power promised something submarines had never had before: the ability to remain underwater for weeks—or even months—without surfacing. But there was a catch. No one had ever tried to place a nuclear reactor inside a sub.
Putting a nuclear reactor aboard a surface ship would have been ambitious. Trying to put one inside a submarine was something else entirely.
A surface ship offered far more room, but in a submarine, nearly every inch belowdecks already had something critical packed into it—and there was no walking away from a problem once you were underwater.
Yet the submarine was where nuclear power could make the greatest difference.
If nuclear power was going to work at sea, many believed it made more sense to start with a large surface ship.
One man did more than disagree.
Hyman G. Rickover led the Navy’s nuclear propulsion program, driving it forward with relentless urgency and demanding standards. Rickover believed the submarine should become the Navy's first nuclear-powered vessel.
His advocacy irritated his superiors. Rickover went around them, taking his case directly to Admiral Chester Nimitz, the Chief of Naval Operations. Nimitz had commanded submarines himself. He didn't need persuading.
But winning his support was only the beginning. The question wasn't whether Electric Boat could build a submarine. It had been doing that for decades. The question was whether anyone could safely fit a nuclear reactor inside one.
My grandfather became one of the engineers asked to solve that problem—fitting the shielding a nuclear reactor needed into a hull with no room to spare.
On January 21, 1954, First Lady Mamie Eisenhower broke a bottle of champagne across the bow as the USS Nautilus—the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine—slid into the Thames.
After nearly a year of further construction and testing, Nautilus left Electric Boat’s pier in Groton on January 17, 1955, and headed down the Thames.
Her first commanding officer, Eugene P. Wilkinson, sent four words to shore:
“Underway on nuclear power.”
Those four words are engraved today at the U.S. Navy Memorial in Washington, D.C.—on the same wall as John Paul Jones's "I have not yet begun to fight" and Neil Armstrong's "one small step for man."
And that is the story behind the place.
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