Dating Streets
Part of the process of determining how a street was named is knowing when it was named. A good example of this is Thornton Street. It might be reasonable to assume that it was named for Thornton Wilder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and playwright who lived for many years in Hamden. However, the street name first appeared on a plat made in April 1917, when Wilder was a sophomore at Oberlin College in Ohio. His first work was not published until 1926. Thornton Street was more likely named for being near thorny bushes.
In The Streets of New Haven: the Origin of Their Names, Doris Townshend dated streets by noting the first year they appeared in city directories, dating back to 1840. Hamden, being not a city but a town, or more truly a collection of villages, was not covered in directories until much later. The 1893 New Haven city directory included streets in Highwood. Whitneyville and portions of Hamden Plains and the State Street area were added in 1913. Spring Glen up to Hawthorne Avenue was included in the 1916 edition, although Hamden streets were included in the same alphabetical listing as those in the city. By 1929 Hamden had developed sufficiently that street names throughout the town were included in a separate section of the New Haven directory. House numbers were still not assigned on many streets, a situation which persisted as late as the 1950 census on some rural roads.
For consistency, these listings usually date streets by the year of the first plat on which they appeared. This is an accurate indication of when they were named. Particularly for earlier streets, they might not have actually been cleared, paved, or had any houses on them for several years after.
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