Cheney & Company

A History of the Building

The Grand Avenue Bridge

At a Place Known as Dragon

Fair Haven

Grand Avenue Transportation

King's Block Stores

At a Place Known as Dragon

The village of Fair Haven used to be known as Dragon, the bridge over the Quinnipiac as Dragon Bridge. As the story goes, the banks of the Quinnipiac were populated with sea lions which the sailors called dragons, perhaps because of their deep bellowing. The name carried over to the land, and the early records of the area refer to it as "the place known as Dragon."

The town officially voted to be called Fair Haven in the mid 1800s, but the name Dragon purportedly stuck until 1877 and is still occasionally invoked in the spirit of town pride. The motto of the 1978 Fair Haven Festival, for example, was "An Old Dragon with New Fire."

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