From the year of his birth in 1888 until his early twenties, Eugene O'Neill spent his summers, first in a nearby cottage and then in this cottage on the Thames River. His father James O'Neill, a famous actor in the late 19th century, purchased the property in 1884 with money he earned playing the title role in The Count of Monte Cristo, hence the cottage's name. The family were here only summers because the father was touring with his theater company and the family went with him, or to boarding school. It was, Eugene O'Neill once wrote, the only home he ever knew.

New London made a tremendous impression on America's foremost playwright. He had a love/hate relationship with the small coastal city, but he never forgot it. He used incidents, locations, and people from the city in many of his plays and he set two of them directly in the Monte Cristo Cottage: his only comedy Ah! Wilderness and his famous, semi-autobiographical Long Day's Journey Into Night.

Some say the ghosts of that tormented family still haunt the cottage. In addition to the Nobel Prize for Literature, O'Neill won four Pulitzer Prizes, something no other playwright has done.

The Monte Cristo Cottage, a Registered National Landmark, is owned and operated by the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center located in nearby Waterford.