History of Grove Beach Point
The part of Grove Beach Point now known as the Grove Beach Point Association
was developed by the Jasper Jay Smith Co. This company developed many of
the shoreline communities in our area. Click here to see the circa 1920
sales brochure used to market the GBPA.
The brochure states that there was service to the Grove Beach Station but makes no mention of the Shore Line Electric Railway that ran through our Association.
According to the
Shore Line Trolley Museum’s Trolley Towns CT
Site, trolley service
through Westbrook stopped for a while during this same period. "Served
by the Shore Line Electric Railway from 1910 to 1919; served by the New
Haven & Shore Line from 1923 to 1929." Two way service at the NHRR
Grove Beach station stopped about 1923 and was totally eliminated in late
1926.
Click here for an Aerial Photo of the Grove Beach
Area....If you ZOOM waaay in...to the left of the Menunketesuck river....you can see the remains of the old Shoreline Electric Railway.
The Railway ran in the gully between Mohawk Road and Wangum Road....westward towards Grove Beach Road North, behind Dairy Queen is the Street -Trolley Ave. Eastward over the river, the Railway extended out to what is now Trolley Road and Trolley Road Extension....over behind the firehouse.
According to the history of the Association written by Fran Forde, covering the period from 1920-1997:
“Before the 1600s , Pequot Indians fished and tilled the land now called Grove Beach and Grove Beach Point. The Indians called the Village Pochoug. It’s name meant the confluence of two rivers flowing out to the sea. In 1840 the village legally became Westbrook. In the Indian times, Grove Beach Point extended to what is now known as Menunketesuck Island and the rivers, the Menunketesuck and the Patchogue emptied into Long island Sound - east of the above Island. Coastal changes over the years and the flow of the rivers separated the island from our mainland.”
Click here to see a series of maps showing these and other changes in the GBPA area.
In 1928 we organized as
the Grove Beach Point Club with a Constitution and By-Laws. The process
of getting a Charter started in 1936, the first step being incorporation
as the GBPA in 1940. After making many changes we became a tax district
under a special act of the Connecticut legislature on May 11, 1945. This
was amended by an act of the Legislature on June 9, 1947 and again on
June 6, 2005. Although we originally owned and maintained our own roads
these were later turned over to the Town, probably as part of the 1947
amendment. There is little information about how the property owners cooperated,
if at all, between the time JJS started developing the area and the Beach
Club was organized.
There are copies of Fran Forde’s history of GBPA and the JJS sales brochure in the Westbrook Public Library and at the Westbrook Historical Society.
