This site at the Mystic River Bridge brings together the history of the bridge, the river, Mystic Seaport, and the neighboring towns. The present bridge, built in 1922, is the sixth on the site since a private wooden toll bridge was built here in 1819. It is a bascule bridge, with two 40-horsepower electric motors that pivot an 85-foot movable span weighing 660 tons, counterbalanced by two 230-ton concrete weights, and it is operated and maintained by the Connecticut Department of Transportation. The Mystic River estuary is thought to take its name from the Mohegan word for "great tidal river." Though navigable for only six miles from Old Mystic down the Noank, it supported an extraordinary shipbuilding industry: between 1784 and 1919, more than 1,400 vessels, ranging from fishing boats and barges to coasting schooners, steamboats, and clipper ships, were launched into its waters. Today Mystic Seaport, founded by local residents in 1929, stands as one of the world's leading maritime museums and occupies the historic locations of the George Greenman & Co. and Charles Mallory & Sons shipyard, which together launched more than 150 vessels from 1837 to 1878. Its floating collection includes the 1841 square-rigged whaleship Charles W. Morgan, the 1908 passenger steamboat Sabino, the 1921 Gloucester fishing schooner L.A. Dunton, and the locally built 1866 fishing smack Emma C. Berry, while artisans continue traditional preservation skills there. The east bank, formerly known as Mystic Bridge and part of the Town of Stonington, was a place where schooners and pleasure boats later tied up where seagoing ships and barges had loaded and unloaded cargo and coal from the 1870s to the 1920s. On the west bank in the town of Groton, the settlement once known as Mystic River includes homes along Gravel Street built between 1790 and 1890 for prosperous merchants and ship captains, and upriver Appelman's Point was an important shipbuilding site from 1853 to 1885.