In 1731, Connecticut's colonial legislature established Canaan Parish as a religious entity in northwestern Norwalk and northeastern
Stamford. The right to form a
Congregational church was granted to the few families scattered through the area. As inhabitants of Norwalk or Stamford, Canaan Parish settlers still had to vote, pay some taxes—no
income tax, and many other modern taxes did not yet exist—serve on juries, and file deeds in their hometowns. Because Canaan Parish was not planned as a town when it was first settled in 1731, when New Canaan was incorporated in 1801, it found itself without a central common, a main street, or a town hall. Until the
Revolutionary War, New Canaan was primarily an agricultural community; after the war, the town's major industry was shoemaking. As New Canaan's shoe business gathered momentum early in the 19th century, instead of a central village, regional settlements of clustered houses, mill, and school developed into distinct district centers. Some of the districts were centered on Ponus Ridge, West Road, Oenoke Ridge, Smith Ridge, Talmadge Hill, and Silvermine, a pattern that the village gradually outgrew. Since then, the name has been controversial, with residents affectionately using the latter, and local critics of New Canaan still using the original nickname.
The "Harvard Five" and modern homes New Canaan was an important center of the modern design movement from the late 1940s through roughly the 1960s, when about 80 modern homes were built in town. About 20 have been torn down since then. "During the late 1940s and 1950s, a group of students and teachers from the
Harvard Graduate School of Design migrated to New Canaan ... and rocked the world of architectural design", according to an article in PureContemporary.com, an online architecture design magazine. "
Philip Johnson,
Marcel Breuer,
Landis Gores,
John M. Johansen and
Eliot Noyesknown as the
Harvard Fivebegan creating homes in a style that emerged as the complete antithesis of the traditional build. Using new materials and open floor plans, best captured by Johnson's
Glass House, these treasures are being squandered as buyers are knocking down these architectural icons and replacing them with cookie-cutter new builds." "Other architects, well-known (
Frank Lloyd Wright, for example) and not so well known, also contributed significant modern houses that elicited strong reactions from nearly everyone who saw them and are still astonishing today ... New Canaan came to be the focus of the modern movement's experimentation in materials, construction methods, space, and form", according to an online description of
The Harvard Five in New Canaan: Mid-Century Modern Houses, by William D. Earls. Some other New Canaan architects designing modern homes were Victor Christ-Janer, John Black Lee, Allan Gelbin, and
Hugh Smallen. The film
The Ice Storm (1997) shows many of New Canaan's modern houses, both inside and out. The film (and
Rick Moody's novel of the same name, upon which it is based) takes place in New Canaan; a mostly glass house situated on Laurel Road is prominently featured. == Geography ==