Moodus & Devil's Hopyard

The inland side of the Connecticut's east bank: leave the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, climb CT-149 to Moodus and Westchester, cross to Cobalt on CT-16 past the Comstock Covered Bridge, run CT-151 along the river through Middle Haddam and Haddam Neck, then from Moodus take Mt Parnassus Road to Millington and Hopyard Road. It's 38 miles of short bends and small villages. The route ends at CT-82, past Devil's Hopyard, and doesn't loop back.

The route starts at the Goodspeed Opera House, built on the riverbank in 1876 by William Goodspeed, a shipbuilder, merchant and banker. It was slated for demolition in 1958 and reopened in 1963 after a restoration, and beside it the East Haddam Swing Bridge, built in 1913, is said to be the longest of its type. Moodus comes from Machimoodus, the "place of noises": the rumbles that come out of the ground here are small, shallow earthquakes, Connecticut's largest recorded quake hit the area in 1791, and a magnitude 1.9 tremor was recorded in January 2026.

East Hampton is known as Belltown for the bell makers that worked there for more than a century, and Bevin Bros, founded in 1832, is today the last bell manufacturer in the country. On CT-16 you pass the Comstock Covered Bridge, an 80-foot bridge that the towns of Colchester and Chatham rebuilt in 1873 and that has only carried people on foot since a concrete bridge replaced it in 1934. At the end, Chapman Falls in Devil's Hopyard State Park drops more than 60 feet over steps of schist, and the potholes in the rock gave rise to the legend of the devil that names the park. The route ends at CT-82 and doesn't loop: the road west is the one the Durham, Chester & Old Saybrook route already covers.