Niantic

Niantic may refer to:

Niantic, Connecticut

Niantic is a census-designated place (CDP) and village in the town of East Lyme, Connecticut in the United States. The population was 3,114 at the 2010 census.

Geography

According to the United States Census Bureau, the CDP has a total area of 3.5 square miles (9.1 km²), of which 1.5 square miles (3.8 km²) is land and 2.1 square miles (5.4 km²), or 58.64%, is water.

Located on Long Island Sound, Niantic Bay is popular for swimming, fishing and boating. Wednesday evenings and weekend afternoons, the Niantic Bay Yacht Club organizes sailboat races and the Bay is filled with sailboats. The Millstone Nuclear Power Plant in nearby Waterford is visible on the bay's eastern horizon line.

Beachgoers may want to seek out the local Rocky Neck State Park, whose mile of beach offers much better views of Long Island Sound, including several offshore islands such as Gardiners Island, Plum Island, and Orient Point, the distant tip of Long Island.

The Rocky Neck beach is known for its sandbar, one of the few places along the Connecticut shoreline free of rocks and stones. At low tide the sandbar lies exposed and bathers may be able to walk out into the water for quite some distance before reaching waist depth. The sandbar at low tide is a popular place with kids for building sandcastles, digging holes and flinging mud. Besides beachgoing, Rocky Neck offers camping in the summertime, and a large, flat meadow area with a number of picnic tables and outdoor barbecue grills. Weekends are usually the most crowded time in summer, with many people coming down to the shore to get away from the more intense inland heat.

Niantic people

The Niantic, or in their own language, the Nehântick or Nehantucket, were a tribe of New England Native Americans, who were living in Connecticut and Rhode Island during the early colonial period. Due to intrusions of the Pequot, the Niantic were divided into an eastern and western division. The Western Niantic were subject to the Pequot and lived just east of the mouth of the Connecticut River while the Eastern Niantic became very close allies to the Narragansett.

The division of the Niantic became so great that the language of the eastern Niantic is classified as a dialect of Narragansett while the language of the western Niantic is classified as Pequot-Mohegan.

History

The Niantic were an Algonquian speaking people, speaking an Algonquian Y-dialect, similar to their neighbours the Pequot, Montauk, Mohegan, and Narragansett. The tribe's name "Nehantic" (Nehântick) means "of long-necked waters" believed by local residents to refer to the "long neck" or peninsula of land now known as Black Point; located in the village of Niantic, Connecticut. The Nehântics spent their summers fishing and digging the shellfish which were once abundant there and for which the area is famous (see Millstone Nuclear Power Plant). They lived on corn, beans, and squash, supplemented by hunting, fishing, and collecting.