Fort Nathan Hale
fort in Connecticut
Fort Nathan Hale, also known as Fort Hale Park, Black Rock, is a 20-acre (8.1 ha) city park located on the east shore of New Haven Harbor in New Haven, Connecticut. It includes the site of a 1659 fort, a Revolutionary War-era fort, and a Civil War-era fort. The fort was named after Nathan Hale, Connecticut's official hero. Since 1921, the site has been owned by the state of Connecticut. It has been used as a park and maintained as a historical site by the City of New Haven. Educational programs are given throughout the year to students attending local schools.
The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970. In 1970 the listing included three contributing buildings, one contributing site, and three contributing structures.
History
In early 1776, the colony of Connecticut commissioned the construction of a fort on a point of rock that stretched out into the harbor to protect the port of New Haven from the British. This was the location of an earlier unnamed fort from circa 1657, and on this site was erected Black Rock Fort.
The public source identifies “Fort Nathan Hale” as fort in Connecticut. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Fort, Nathan and Hale.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5471740. Authority coordinates are 41.271, -72.904. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1659, 1921, 1970 and 1776.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fort Nathan Hale” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.