Early Settlement 1638 – 1824 The Quinnipiac Indians inhabited the Quinnipiac River Valley on a seasonal basis and the huge shell heaps, located outside the district’s boundaries, which were generated by their expeditions, evidence their enjoyment of the oysters found there. The first settlers came to New Haven in 1638 and the oysters on all sides if the harbor provided an abundant source of food.  The neck was divided into farm lots and for over 100 years this area remained an open, undeveloped expanse of pasture and salt meadows..  On the east bank of the Quinnipiac the land distribution is thought to have followed a similar pattern – large tracts were divided among the New Haven proprietors as part of the town’s Second division in the last half of the seventeenth century.  In 1707, the land in the district was divided when the town of East Haven was formed east of the Quinnipiac.  Settlements appeared concurrently on both banks of the river, and the village that later became Fair Haven though politically divided functioned as one village. The first white settlement in the district occurred in the late eighteenth century. Daniel Brown erected a house on the east bank facing present day Quinnipiac Avenue c.1765, a little north of Grand Avenue. (The core of this house still survives in a greatly altered state at 715 Quinnipiac Avenue, and is the oldest documented residence in the district). On the Neck there was little development except for the ferry path that extended from the northwest section of the Neck to the southeast point where Pardee’s ferry, chartered in 1650, provided a means of transportation for horses and passengers across the river. A small riverside settlement developed along the east bank of the river near the ferry, but no early buildings from this community still exist. The earliest permanent residents of the Neck had established homes in the area by the late eighteenth century. Thomas Alling bought a house lot on the Neck in March 1783, and in 1794 Moses and Dorothy Brockett sold a piece of land “with the old dwelling house.” The earliest dwellings were built at the water’s edge on the present day North and South Front Streets. Although none of these early houses survive, their form does in houses built in the nineteenth century. The first houses were small, one or two room timber frame structures built on raised ashlar block basements just above the high-water mark. The houses at 208, 254, and 262 North Front Street, although built in the early nineteenth century, are indicative of these early waterfront dwellings. A great spur to the development of the village, called Dragon, which was to span both banks of the river, was the construction of the bridge in the early 1790’s. The new bridge straddled the river at approximately the same site as the present Grand Avenue bridge. After the bridge was finished in 1792, settlement shifted from the area south of the bridge northward to Grand Street, the newly completed east/west axis road linking the bridge to the ferry path. Grand Street (now Grand Avenue) became the main street of the growing village. Stephen Rowe, a leading settler of the village, purchased a lot on the corner of Grand Avenue and North Front Street in 1796, and in 1797 he acquired a parcel diagonally across the corner adjacent to the bridge. In 1804 he built a large tavern and store that became the center of the oyster trade in the early nineteenth century.  This building still stands at 182 North Front Street. Nathaniel Granniss, a real estate speculator, donated three quarters of an acre just west of the bridge on Grand Street for a public common and site for a meeting house or school. The east bank also went through a period of change in the late eighteenth century. The town of East Haven established a public east west highway in 1790 following approximately the same route as the present Quinnipiac Avenue. In the same year East Haven also offered lots for sale between the highway and the river. The construction of the Grand Street bridge linked the small settlement on the east bank permanently with the Neck settlement and provided a more direct route to New Haven for residents East Haven. Oyster fishing and trading was the primary industry of the growing waterfront community. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century scattered parcels were bought and sold all along the water’s edge. The parcels often included the “waterlot” in front of the parcel where the residents usually built a small wharf and/or sheds. The mollusks were gathered in long dugout canoes, than taken to each household were they were opened by women and children in the dark, cool basements of each dwelling. After opening, the oysters were placed in the wooden kegs in which they were shipped out of town. Oyster dealing was not the sole commercial activity however. Many early residents owned small ships or schooners that plied the Atlantic coast. Several residents, including Stephen Rowe, traveled as far south as the West Indies. Other residents were ship builders, constructing one and two masted schooners in shipyards along the muddy banks. Still other residents were small farmers.