addition, the soil in the western Coastal Slope has a high content of lime, which was scooped out of the Marble Valley, carried south, and incorporated into the region's glacial drift. The addition of lime made the soils here particularly fertile - almost as fertile as the Glacial Lake Hitchcock basin. Timothy Dwight travelled through the Coastal Slope region in the early 1800s and was very enthusiastic about the land's productivity. He described it as a " . . . rich plain which skirts the Sound. ... This plain is a handsome piece of ground, bordered on the north by several hills. The soil is of an excellent quality .. . A more cheerful and elegant piece of ground can scarcely be imagined."' Always on the lookout for fertile land, the colonists settled the Coastal Slope early on. Saybrook, New Haven, Guilford, Milford, Stratford, Fairfield, Greenwich, and Stamford all were settled within ten years of Connecticut's first town, Wethersfield. 3
A couple of other important aspects of Connecticut's Coast result from the presence of the Coastal Slope in place of the Coastal Plain. One
| The southern New England Coast. |
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