nearby. Today the original building still serves the town as its library. In the early 20th century progress arrived to re-stitch the town economically with the outer world, first in 1906 in the form of a trolley line that traversed North Stonington on its way from Westerly to Norwich. The trolley line ran for 15 years, until bankrupted by the opening of the Route 2 highway for automobiles on the old Westerly-Norwich stage road. In 1933–1934 Route 184 was put through along the route of the old New London-Providence Turnpike. Its extra heavy underlayers of gravel has never required repair. For a generation this highway was the primary automobile route to Providence and Boston along the southern coast of New England. North Stonington and modern challenges: 1940s and beyond The establishment of paved highways through the town in the 1920s and 1930s laid the foundation for the rapid population growth and dramatic economic changes wrought after World War II in North Stonington and elsewhere in New London County. During the 1950s and 1960s, North Stonington became a bedroom community for the postwar defense industry and military community of southeastern Connecticut, including such companies as Electric Boat, Pfizer, and Underwater Sound Laboratory. As a result, the town added 600 inhabitants during the 1950s (with the construction of the Cedar Ridge development) and three times that amount in the 1960s (with the opening of the Kingswood/Meadow Wood development near The Village). The town became readily accessible to anywhere in late 1964, when Interstate 95 was built and two exits were opened in North Stonington. Starting in the 1970s, a number of "tech parks" opened in North Stonington's southeastern corner, adjacent to I-95. The dramatic growth in the town's population had a direct impact on the size of the school system; whereas in the late 1950s the average graduating class ran in the teens, by 1965 it had more than doubled to 42, and was 51 in 1968. School population since then has mirrored that of the town's gradual increase, and the graduating class of 2006 was 65, although Wheeler remains one of the smallest high schools in Connecticut. The town's rapid residential growth led to the development in 1963 of planning and zoning restrictions and guidelines as citizens became increasingly anxious about the potential for overdevelopment destroying the rural nature of the town. Population growth in the past thirty years has continued,