🏛Visiting Mystic Seaport Village Museum Mystic, Connecticut

Mystic Seaport is the nation’s leading maritime museum. Founded in 1929 to gather and preserve the rapidly disappearing artifacts of America’s seafaring past, the Museum has grown to become a national center for research and education with the mission to “inspire an enduring connection to the American maritime experience.

The Museum’s grounds cover 19 acres on the Mystic River in Mystic, CT, and include a recreated 19th-century coastal village, a working shipyard, formal exhibit halls, and state-of-the-art artifact storage facilities. The Museum is home to more than 500 historic watercraft, including four National Historic Landmark vessels, most notably the 1841 whaleship Charles W. Morgan, America’s oldest commercial ship still in existence.

L.A. Dunton Ship
Built in 1921, she is the last ship afloat of her type, which was once the most common sail-powered fishing vessel sailing from New England ports. In service in New England waters until the 1930s and Newfoundland into the 1950s. 

Joseph Conrad Rigged Ship
Joseph Conrad is an iron-hulled sailing ship, originally launched as Georg Stage in 1882 and used to train sailors in Denmark. 

Brant Point Lighthouse
Brant Point Light is a lighthouse located on Nantucket Island. The station was established in 1746, automated in 1965, and is still in operation.

Restoring the Charles P. Morgan Ship
Charles W. Morgan is an American whaling ship built in 1841 whose active service period was during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ships of this type were usually used to harvest the blubber of whales for whale oil, which was commonly used in lamps.

Figure Heads
A figurehead is a carved wooden decoration found at the prow of ships largely made between the 16th and 20th centuries.

Thomas Oyster House
Thomas Oyster House is one of the few remaining buildings that could be classified as a typical small northern oyster house. The building was constructed about 1874 at City Point, New Haven, Connecticut, by Thomas Thomas. New Haven once was the largest oyster distribution center in New England; now there is only one oyster-opening shop left in this state, that of the Bloom Brothers in South Norwalk.

Mystic Bank
The office of a shipping merchant is represented on the second floor of the Mystic Bank. In the larger seaports, some merchants specialized in operating ships.

Thames Keel &Ship Building Exhibit
The 92-foot keel assembly from the whaleship Thames is set up on blocks in a shed within the Preservation Shipyard. The keel is the “backbone” and the starting point for the construction of a ship and so, displayed along the entire length of the keel, is an exhibit on the process of shipbuilding that takes visitors from the laying of the keel to her launching.

Mystic River Scale Motel 

Visiting Mystic Seaport

Stonington Crew
John Flaherty, president of Friends of Stonington Crew, the nonprofit fundraising support for the team, which receives minimal funding from the school department, thanked everyone in attendance, as well as Mystic Seaport for again hosting the team on its docks. He said the team would not be able to compete at the level it does without the support of its donors.

Roann Florence Western Rig Dragger
Roann is one of the last surviving examples of the fishing vessels that replaced sailing schooners like the Museum’s L.A. Dunton. The eastern rig draggers originated in the 1920s; indeed, Thomas McManus, who designed the Dunton, was influential in their development.