Before European colonists arrived, the Naugatuck River had abundant runs of migratory fish that had long provided an important food source for Native Peoples, and this spot at the foot of a gorge was a popular fishing place for local tribes. The original town, Chusetown, was named after a local Indian chief, and as it developed, dams were built to power mills and other industries. In 1763 a dam was built on the bedrock gorge here for a gristmill, and in 1803 David Humphrey, a former aide-de-camp to General George Washington during the Revolutionary War, built the nation's first woolen mill using that water power. Chusetown was renamed Humphreysville in 1804 and then Seymour in 1850 after Governor Thomas H. Seymour. In 1856 the large brick building later known as the Tingue Mill was built as a paper mill, and after the Tingue family acquired it in 1880, it became by 1900 the nation's leading manufacturer of plush for seats in Pullman railroad cars. In 1955 two back-to-back Category 3 hurricanes caused catastrophic flooding in Connecticut, devastating the Tingue Mill, which never reopened, and it was torn down in 1959 to make way for the Route 8 highway overpass constructed in 1966. The Tingue Dam survived both the floods and the highway construction and remained the last barrier to fish runs upstream. Because fish need to move upstream to reach spawning and nursery habitat, a nature-like bypass channel was built around the dam instead of removing it, since the dam's historic presence and the structural integrity of the Route 8 overpass piers had to be maintained. This engineered fishway, one of the first and largest of its kind on the East Coast, is about 500 feet long, averages 25 feet wide, and has an average slope of 3 percent, with its lower portion cut from solid bedrock, its upper portion excavated from soil, and rock riffles added to create conditions favorable to migrating fish including American shad. The bypass reopened 25 miles of suitable upstream river habitat that had been blocked for more than 250 years.