Long Island Sound

Long Island Sound forms a sheltered maritime corridor between Long Island and the southern New England mainland. Estuaries, tidal waters and nearby land offered rich resources to indigenous communities, including fish, shellfish and plants from coastal environments. Canoes connected settlements and supported exchange across waters that could be easier to travel than some inland routes. The Sound was therefore a lived and named landscape long before European colonial ports developed around it.

Dutch navigator Adriaen Block recorded entering the Sound in 1614. Dutch and English settlement later transformed its shores through new towns, land claims and commercial shipping. Conflict, dispossession and epidemic disease profoundly affected Indigenous societies. The sheltered waterway continued to connect communities on both shores with the wider Atlantic world.