8 Strangest Landmarks in Connecticut

Connecticut has a quiet talent for the one-of-a-kind. Not strange in any unsettling sense, just confidently, happily different: a state where a 1949 house made entirely of glass counts as a landmark, where the world's largest PEZ dispenser greets visitors in Orange, and where a dam in the Litchfield Hills was built to look like a medieval castle. The eight places below are the kind that make you tilt your head and grin. None of them is trying to be anything other than itself, which is exactly what makes them worth the drive.

Devil's Hopyard State Park

The name sounds ominous, but the story behind it is pure folklore. At Chapman Falls in East Haddam, the rushing Eightmile River has drilled a series of almost perfectly round holes into the rock. The Puritans, unable to explain them, decided the Devil had burned them with his tail in his hurry to get free. Geologists have a calmer answer: swirling water and trapped stones grinding out potholes over thousands of years. You can judge for yourself on the short Chapman Falls Loop, a 0.4-mile walk from the parking lot, or link together longer trails running two to five miles. The river holds trout, and the park keeps campgrounds for anyone who wants to stay the night with the legend.

Gungywamp

Few places reward curiosity like Gungywamp, an archaeological site within the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center in Groton. No one even agrees on the name, which researchers have traced to Gaelic, Mohegan, Pequot, and Algonquin roots, with proposed meanings as different as "church of the people" and "place of ledges." The site itself is a genuine puzzle of stone chambers, a double stone circle, house foundations, and cairns, used by Native Americans thousands of years ago and again in Colonial times, though whether for ritual or simply for corralling livestock, no one can say for certain. Nature center guides lead monthly hikes across the rocky, uneven terrain. While you are in Groton, the self-styled "Submarine Capital of the World," visit the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine, and the free Submarine Force Museum docked beside it.

PEZ Factory and Visitor Center

Orange is home to something genuinely singular: the largest collection of PEZ memorabilia on earth, displayed at the PEZ Visitor Center attached to the company's U.S. factory. The centerpiece is the world's largest PEZ dispenser, joined by a PEZ-themed motorcycle built by Orange County Choppers and decades of dispensers tracing the candy's history. A viewing window looks out over the factory floor, where the little bricks are still made, with games to play and prizes to win along the way. The whole place leans cheerfully into its own niche, which is the best thing about it. The town, named for William of Orange, also keeps the seasonal Sunflower Farm and a few restored historic homes open for tours.

Dinosaur State Park

In 1966, a construction crew breaking ground for a state building in Rocky Hill turned up around 2,000 fossilized dinosaur tracks, one of the largest such track sites in North America. Rather than pave over them, the state built a geodesic dome over roughly 500 of the prints and reburied the rest to protect them. The tracks were pressed into soft mud some 200 million years ago by a large theropod much like Dilophosaurus. Outside, more than two miles of trails wind past plantings that represent the dinosaur age, including conifers, ginkgoes, and magnolias. While you are in Rocky Hill, catch the Rocky Hill-Glastonbury Ferry, which has run since 1655 and holds the title of oldest continuously operating ferry in the United States.

Saville Dam

Most dams are strictly business. Saville Dam, on the Farmington River in Barkhamsted, looks like it wandered off the set of a medieval film, with a stone tower that could pass for a castle turret. It holds back the Barkhamsted Reservoir, and beneath that water lie the foundations of Barkhamsted Hollow, a village deliberately flooded when the dam went up. The dam is a longtime favorite for photographs and for the views over the reservoir and the valley below. Around it, People's State Forest and the American Legion State Forest offer hiking loops from a third of a mile to a few miles, some gentle enough for beginners, while the Farmington River draws kayakers, canoeists, and trout anglers to a catch-and-release stretch near Riverton.

Barker Character, Comic and Cartoon Museum

If you grew up with Saturday-morning cartoons, the Barker museum in Cheshire is a straight shot of nostalgia. Popeye, Betty Boop, Mickey Mouse, and Shirley Temple turn up among more than 80,000 pieces of memorabilia, from lunchboxes and dishes to bobbleheads, puppets, and the gravity-powered Ramp Walkers that have been toddling downhill since the 1870s. It is a collection assembled with obvious love rather than irony. Cheshire, a town of about 29,000, makes an easy base: Roaring Brook Park has a moderate hike out to Roaring Brook Falls, one of the tallest waterfalls in the state, and the larger cities of Waterbury, New Haven, and the capital, Hartford, all sit within roughly half an hour.

Museum of Puppetry

The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, on the University of Connecticut campus in Storrs, holds more than 2,500 puppets from around the world, and many are uncannily lifelike, with furrowed brows and wide eyes that look ready to strike up a conversation. It grew out of UConn's long-running puppet-arts program, the only one of its kind in the country, and fills out the collection with books, films, and the audiovisual archive of Puppeteers of America. Admission is free, donations welcome, and the museum runs tours, rotating exhibitions, and workshops. The William Benton Museum of Art sits on the same campus, and the surrounding Storrs area adds outdoor options like the Adventure Park, with climbing and ziplining for ages seven and up.

The Glass House

Architect Philip Johnson built the Glass House in New Canaan in 1949 as his own weekend home, and nearly 80 years later it still looks radical: four walls of glass, no interior walls, and a view of the surrounding woods from every spot inside. Johnson treated it as an experiment in living without barriers, with the changing seasons supplying the only decoration the house ever needs. He said its proportions nodded to the Parthenon, the English landscape garden, and the Romantic movement all at once, and you can read all of that in person on a guided tour booked ahead of time. New Canaan rewards a longer visit too, with the New Canaan Nature Center and the country's oldest nature-based preschool just down the road.

Why Connecticut's One-of-a-Kind Spots Are Worth It

Different is not a flaw, and Connecticut seems to know it. A house with no walls, a dam dressed as a castle, a museum that treats cartoon lunchboxes and comic-strip toys as worth preserving, a forest full of holes the Puritans once blamed on the Devil: each of these places committed fully to being exactly what it is. That is the whole appeal. Pick one for an afternoon or string several into a weekend, and you will come away with the rare souvenir of having seen something that exists nowhere else.