New Haven, Ohio, was the mercantile center of southwest Huron County during the first half of the 19th century, with immense wagons or "land schooners" lining the New Haven-Worthington Road for miles as they traveled from Columbus to the Lake Erie ports. Organized in 1815, New Haven was one of the early townships formed in Huron County and the Firelands, and its village was platted with streets at right angles around a diamond-shaped town green after the plan of New Haven, Connecticut. In the 1840s, New Haven rejected the railroad's direct route through the village, so the Sandusky & Newark was routed to the west through Plymouth, taking the shipping business with it, and New Haven then began a steady economic decline into a small crossroads village. Among its early citizens were Caleb Palmer, born in 1775 and buried in the Old New Haven Cemetery, an early Ohio surveyor in Trumbull County who came to New Haven, bought his first land in the area around 1811, settled there shortly afterward, and served as one of the first Huron County commissioners, a justice of the peace, and a postmaster, and Rouse Bly, born in 1793 and also buried in the Old New Haven Cemetery, a War of 1812 veteran who settled near New Haven around 1825 and, known for both his compassion and abolitionist opinions, opened his home as an Underground Railroad station in the decades before the Civil War. Another early presence in the village was the Methodist Episcopal congregation, New Haven United Methodist, which built its New England-style house of worship on the village green between 1841 and 1842.