New Haven CDP (Huron County), OH

New Haven is an unincorporated census-designated place in central New Haven Township, Huron County, at the meeting of U.S. 224 with State Routes 61 and 598. The community was laid out in 1815 in Ohio's Firelands, and its street plan followed the New Haven, Connecticut model, with right-angle streets around a diamond-shaped green. That layout still gives the place a town-center feel even though it is not a village government.

Early New Haven was a mercantile stop on the road toward Lake Erie: wagon trains of grain and other goods used the New Haven-Worthington Road, and 1833 records counted stores, taverns, physicians, and a tin factory. When the railroad bypassed the center in the 1840s, the shipping business moved west through Plymouth and New Haven began shrinking into a crossroads. Today the community's historical society, old green, churches, and highway junction carry the story. The local scoop is that New Haven was built to serve traffic long before it became a CDP.