East of town
Besançon keeps a French name on the Lincoln Highway
St. Louis Catholic Church, on the National Register, marks the settlement on New Haven’s eastern edge.
Besançon sits on the eastern edge of New Haven, along the Lincoln Highway, and it has declined to be absorbed into a footnote. St. Louis Catholic Church there is on the National Register of Historic Places.
The settlement is the reminder that “New Haven” was never only a Connecticut souvenir. French families named a place. Swiss Amish families kept a language. The railroad named a timetable. The city is the stack, not any single layer of it.