10 Things Connecticut Residents Are Tired of Explaining to Everyone Else

Ask a Connecticut resident what county they live in, and watch them pause.

The state abolished county government back in 1960.

So, towns handle the schools, the roads, and the taxes a county runs everywhere else.

These are the things Connecticut residents are tired of explaining to everyone else.

Note: This is general information, not tax or financial advice. Mill rates, tax rules, and dollar amounts are subject to change.

1. Yankees or Red Sox

Connecticut sits wedged between two TV markets, and residents can’t just name one team the way someone from Ohio might.

Ask where the loyalty splits.

You’ll hear about the Munson-Nixon Line, an invisible border where Yankees fans give way to Red Sox fans.

It cuts straight through towns like Waterbury, splitting neighbors down the middle.

Football splits the state too.

Fans lean Giants in the southwest and Patriots in the northeast.

That split hardened in 1998, when Patriots owner Robert Kraft agreed to move games to Hartford and then backed out.

Out-of-staters usually guess Red Sox for the whole state, assuming Boston’s pull reaches everywhere in New England.

Fairfield County residents correct that assumption constantly, since it’s Yankees territory just like the Bronx.

Many Connecticut fans still hold the grudge.

2. Your Town’s Mill Rate

Connecticut runs property tax through a mill rate, and newcomers assume the number works the same everywhere in the state.

It doesn’t.

A mill equals a dollar of tax for every thousand dollars of a home’s assessed value, and each of Connecticut’s 169 towns sets its own rate.

Hartford charges 68.95 mills.

Washington, about two hours away, charges 10.85.

Same state, same tax code, wildly different bills on identical homes.

House hunters who moved from a state with one countywide rate ask why a Connecticut agent can’t just quote a single number.

Residents just say it depends on the town.

Cars get a break from that swing.

Connecticut capped the mill rate on motor vehicles at 32.46 statewide, so a car’s tax bill can’t stretch as wide as a home’s does town to town.

3. County? What County?

Connecticut residents field the county question constantly, and the honest answer surprises the person asking.

There isn’t one.

Connecticut abolished county government back in 1960, handing the schools, the police, and the roads to its 169 towns instead.

Towns run the show now.

Connecticut went further than either neighbor: All eight counties lost their governments in that same 1960 act.

Rhode Island never had county government to lose, and Massachusetts still runs six of its fourteen counties today.

The eight old county names still show up on envelopes and real estate listings, a label with no office and no budget behind it.

4. Steamed, Not Grilled

Connecticut’s Ted’s Restaurant in Meriden serves a cheeseburger that never touches a grill.

Ted Duberek opened the place in 1959, and it still runs on the same idea.

Workers pack fresh ground beef into small steel trays and slide them into a steam cabinet for about 10 minutes.

The fat drains away instead of charring onto a flattop.

There are no grill marks.

There’s no smoke smell.

Cheddar steams separately in its own cabinet, then lands on top, so the burger arrives fully cooked but barely browned.

Visitors from other states assume it’s a typo the first time they see it on a menu.

It isn’t.

5. Apizza, Not Pizza

New Haven, Connecticut, calls its pizza apizza, and the difference matters to everyone who grew up there.

Frank Pepe started making it in 1925 on Wooster Street, baking the dough hot and fast until the crust blisters and chars.

Locals order it charred, not burned.

The white clam pie came later, built from littleneck clams, garlic, and olive oil with no tomato sauce at all.

Outsiders hear clams on pizza and assume it's a joke.

It's the specialty.

Ask for a slice in New Haven, and you'll get a look because apizza gets cut into strips and shared from the whole pie, not ordered by the piece.

6. How You Say Connecticut

Connecticut spells its own name with two C's, and almost nobody outside New England says the second one out loud.

Newcomers try anyway.

They sound out every letter like it's a phonics lesson.

It isn't a phonics lesson.

The word traces back to quinnitukqut, an Algonquian phrase for long tidal river, and English settlers folded it into their own spelling without matching the sound.

Four centuries later, English spelling still doesn't match the Algonquian sound.

Connecticut residents correct the pronunciation so often it stopped feeling like correcting and started feeling like small talk.

7. Why There Are No Tolls

Connecticut hasn't charged a highway toll since 1989, and drivers from New York or Massachusetts always ask why.

A tractor-trailer driver fell asleep at the wheel and slammed into traffic backed up at the Stratford toll plaza in January 1983, killing seven people.

The crash turned public opinion against tolls for good.

Connecticut pulled every tollbooth off its highways over the next several years, and the last toll in the state was paid at the Charter Oak Bridge in April 1989.

New York still tolls its bridges and tunnels.

Massachusetts still tolls the Mass Pike.

Connecticut just doesn't.

8. No Trucks on the Merritt

Connecticut's Merritt Parkway bans commercial trucks, a rule that surprises drivers who expect any limited-access road to allow them.

Wealthy Fairfield County landowners struck that deal with the state in the 1930s, agreeing to the road only if it stayed a parkway, not a highway.

No trucks meant no truck traffic through their towns.

Connecticut has enforced that rule ever since.

Architect George Dunkelberger designed 69 bridges for the parkway, each one different, with stone facings and Art Deco details cut into the concrete.

The road opened in 1938.

It's been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1991, so those bridges can't be swapped for plain concrete overpasses even now.

Out-of-state drivers hear "parkway" and assume it's just a scenic nickname for the highway, not a legal category that keeps commercial trucks off entirely.

Connecticut residents have to explain that the name is the whole reason no eighteen-wheeler ever passes them on this stretch.

9. Which Connecticut You Mean

Outsiders stereotype Connecticut as one long stretch of Greenwich mansions and hedge fund money, and residents from anywhere else in the state get tired of correcting it.

The state ties for the most income inequality in the country, according to a Connecticut Mirror analysis of state data.

Fairfield County's income per person runs more than double Windham County's, a gap wide enough to describe two different states.

Drive an hour inland from Greenwich, and the mansions give way to old mill towns, dairy farms, and small main streets that never saw hedge fund money.

That Connecticut exists too.

It covers many more of the state's towns than the stereotype does.

10. Why We're Nutmeggers

Connecticut residents call themselves Nutmeggers, and the nickname confuses almost every outsider who hears it, since Connecticut doesn't grow nutmeg.

The most common story blames traveling Yankee peddlers.

Legend says they sold wooden nutmegs carved to look real, cheating buyers who never got around to grating a nutmeg.

Historians doubt it happened at that scale.

Some think Southern buyers just didn't know nutmeg needed grating and blamed the seller when the whole seed did nothing in a pot.

Nobody can prove either version.

The name stuck anyway, official nickname or not.

Electric Bill Nobody Believes

Connecticut residents open their electric bill and forward it to family in other states just to prove it's real.

Connecticut had the second-highest average electric bill in the country in 2025, trailing only Hawaii.

The average Connecticut household paid $2,485 for the year, compared with $1,748 nationally.

That's not a typo.

Part of the reason is geography, since Eversource and United Illuminating buy power from outside New England and pass the delivery cost along.

The grid itself adds to it because the state has to keep upgrading lines that storms keep knocking down.

Neither company generates its own electricity.