If you grew up in Stratford, work at Sikorsky, or head to Short Beach every summer, you’ll find your town on this map just as it stands in 2026. Look for your road. Main Street, East Main Street, Barnum Avenue, Stratford Avenue, Hollister Street, Columbus Avenue, Lordship Boulevard, Ocean Avenue, Park Boulevard, Dorne Drive, River Road and Tavern Rock Road are all printed by name, along with many more.

Stratford is in Fairfield County, on Long Island Sound at the mouth of the Housatonic River.

KNOWOL made this map in 2026 from public survey data, and gave it the look of an old atlas. The land is shaded from United States Geological Survey elevation data, and 18,239 buildings are drawn in their places, from Oronoque down to Lordship. The streets and the town line come from the Census Bureau. Stratford, Oronoque, Johnsons Corner and Lordship are printed by name. A guide of 34 numbered landmarks runs along the bottom, with the National Register sites marked, and we checked those against National Park Service records. From across the room it’s the whole town at the mouth of the Housatonic. Up close, you can find your own street.

Pequannock, Cupheag, Stratford

Stratford was founded in 1639 by the Puritan minister Adam Blakeman, William Beardsley and a band of families newly arrived from England. That year the General Court in Hartford called it the “new plantation at Pequannock,” in 1640 it was known as Cupheag, and by April 13, 1643, it was Stratford, after Stratford-upon-Avon in England. The title panel reads “Stratford, Connecticut,” with “Incorporated 1639” and the coordinates 41°13′ North, 73°07′ West.

Stratford’s first lands took in what became Trumbull, Shelton, Monroe and part of Bridgeport, and Stratford families went on to found Newark, New Jersey, in 1666. In 1707 the first Anglican church in Connecticut was founded here. Early on the town lived by oystering and shipbuilding, and later by its factories, but ConnecticutHistory.org says it’s best known as the birthplace of the American helicopter industry, built on the work of Igor Sikorsky.

Main Street from Paradise Green to Stratford Point

The numbers below match the guide printed on the map. Start at Stratford Town Hall (25), in the middle of the sheet. Main Street runs through the center of town, past the Judson House (3), the Stratford Historical Society Library (15), the Sterling House Community Center (16) and Stratford Station (22), then carries on up the right side toward Sikorsky Aircraft (23). Huntington Road branches off it to Paradise Green (2) and Bunnell High School (26).

Go south on Main Street instead and it meets Stratford Road on the way down to Lordship. From there, Prospect Drive runs out to the Stratford Point Lighthouse (29), and Lordship Boulevard runs along the bottom past the Stratford School for Aviation Maintenance Technicians (17), near Sikorsky Memorial Airport (12). Many of the roads are named, and each small block is a building, so zoom in on the preview and look for yours.

Map of Stratford, Connecticut, with a numbered guide to 34 landmarks from Paradise Green to Lordship and Stratford Point
Click to explore a larger preview. The digital watermark does not appear on printed maps.

Stratford Center

The guide marks the old town center as the Stratford Center Historic District (32), 220 acres with 257 historic buildings, including Academy Hill Green, where the first settlers had their fort in the 1600s. The Captain David Judson House is here, at 967 Academy Hill. David Judson built it in 1723 on the stone foundation of the house his great-grandfather William built in 1638, keeping the old chimney, and nine generations of Judsons lived in it until 1888. Its cellar is believed to have housed enslaved people in the early 1700s. Its broken scroll pediment doorway is called one of the finest in Connecticut, and the Stratford Historical Society runs it as a museum and research library.

The district also takes in Christ Episcopal Church of 1723, built for the first Episcopal parish in Connecticut, and the old Episcopal burying ground, where William Samuel Johnson, a framer of the Constitution, lies. It once held the American Shakespeare Theatre, a 1,500-seat stage where well-known actors performed. The Sterling House Community Center (16) is a Romanesque mansion of 1886 that Bruce Price designed for John William Sterling. His daughter Cordelia left it to the town as a park in 1931, and it’s been the town’s community center since 1932. The Stratford Library (5) and the Perry House (18) are close by, and the YMCA of Stratford (24) and the Birdseye Municipal Complex (13) are a short way off.

Igor Sikorsky’s First Helicopter Flight

Igor Sikorsky chose Stratford for his aircraft factory in 1929. On September 14, 1939, outside the factory in Stratford, Sikorsky sat in the open cockpit of an experimental helicopter called the VS-300, wearing his usual overcoat and fedora. He was 50 years old, the company’s chief designer and its chief test pilot. Tethered by cables, the machine lifted off the tarmac about three feet, roughly tabletop height, and stayed up for about ten seconds. His son Sergei later said his father wanted to prove he could design and build a helicopter without knowing how it should be done, and then fly one without ever having flown one before. It worked. The first free flight came on May 13, 1940.

The VS-300 was the first helicopter with a single main rotor and a tail rotor, and that layout became the standard for helicopters around the world. The machine itself was given to Henry Ford in 1943, and it’s still on display at the Henry Ford Museum.

Sikorsky Aircraft (23) is still based in Stratford. You’ll find it in the top right corner of the map, and Sikorsky Memorial Airport (12) down in Lordship. The airport belongs to the city of Bridgeport but sits entirely in Stratford, and in 1972 it was renamed for Sikorsky, its most famous tenant. Near it is the Connecticut Air & Space Center (31), founded in 1998 by State Senator George Gunther to tell the story of flight in Connecticut, now in part of the old Curtiss hangar of 1929.

Lordship and the Shore

Lordship was once an island, called Great Neck, worked as a common field by the first settlers, and its name goes back to a meadow known in the 1650s as Mill’s Lordship. At the southeastern tip of Stratford Point is the Stratford Point Lighthouse (29). The first light here was built in 1822, and the present cast-iron tower of 1881 was one of the first prefabricated cylindrical lighthouses in the country. It still guides ships, and it was listed on the National Register in 1990.

Short Beach Park (6), 30 acres at the mouth of the Housatonic, has 1,000 feet of beach, ball fields and a skate park, with the nine-hole Short Beach Golf Course (28) beside it. To the west, Long Beach (1) runs about a mile and a half, and its middle is a nature preserve for nesting birds like kestrels and ospreys. North of it is the Great Meadows Unit of the Stewart B. McKinney National Wildlife Refuge (34), a key stopover for migrating birds. Lordship Beach (20), Stratford Seawall Park (10) and Lordship School (4) are in the neighborhood too.

Putney, Paradise Green and the North

In the Putney section is Boothe Memorial Park (27), 32 acres around the Boothe Homestead (9), which the guide lists separately though it stands inside the park. The house was built about 1840 on the foundations of a house of 1663, and it’s said to be “The Oldest Homestead in America.” Around 1914 the brothers David Beach Boothe and Stephen Nichols Boothe began filling the grounds with some twenty unusual buildings, among them a windmill, a clock tower museum, a trolley station, a chapel, a blacksmith shop and the Americana Museum (8). The park also keeps the last remaining highway toll booth in Connecticut. The town has owned it since 1949.

Where the railroad crosses the river into Milford is the Housatonic River Railroad Bridge (33), also called the Devon Bridge, a border site shared with Milford. The present rolling lift bridge was finished in 1906, the fourth railroad bridge on the site. The first, built in 1848, was the longest covered bridge ever built in Connecticut. In the north end of town is Roosevelt Forest (21), 250 acres of woods, ponds and trails set aside in the 1930s and named for Franklin Roosevelt. The guide also lists Wilcoxson School (7), Second Hill Lane School (11), David Wooster Middle School (14), Nichols School (19) and Harry B. Flood Middle School (30).

Created by KNOWOL in 2026, this map of Stratford suits a living room, office, library or den, and it can even help teach children the geography and history of the town. It’s a thoughtful gift for someone who calls Stratford home, a Sikorsky retiree, or a family that just bought a house in Lordship. It’s printed on museum quality archival paper in three sizes. Open the preview and find your street, then click here to get your copy of the Stratford map.

Buy the Stratford, Connecticut map

Maps of towns near Stratford

Sources