Old Greenwich, Connecticut: Elizabeth's Neck

In 1640 Elizabeth Fones Feake bought this peninsula in her own name, and for more than a century the charts called it Elizabeth’s Neck.

Three stories posted across one week in September 2026 — a Winthrop widow who crossed the Atlantic anyway, the 1640 deed that put a married woman’s name on a New World peninsula in an age of coverture, and how a Dutch marriage, a Scottish banker and a town vote turned Elizabeth’s Neck into Tod’s Point. Each part below is the full post as published, with the reel it accompanied.

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Part I — A Woman. A Boat. 1640. · Part II — The Deed Says Elizabeth · Part III — The Name the Map Forgot

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Part I — Mon Sep 7, 2026 · A Woman. A Boat. 1640.

How did this beach come to belong to one woman in 1640?

Elizabeth Fones, widowed at twenty, crossed the Atlantic anyway and in 1640 sailed to the shining sands the Siwanoy called Monakewego.

Her name was Elizabeth Fones. She was born in England in 1610 into the orbit of the Winthrops — the family about to lead the great Puritan migration to Massachusetts — and at nineteen she married Governor John Winthrop’s son Henry.

Then her life broke apart. Henry sailed for the New World ahead of her, and on his first day in America he drowned. Elizabeth was a widow at twenty, with a newborn daughter, an ocean away from the grave.

She did what the strong-minded do: she crossed anyway. She joined the family in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and in time she rebuilt — marrying Robert Feake, a respected landowner, and raising a growing household on the edge of a very new England.

But the colony towns were crowded with rules and short on room, and the Feakes wanted ground of their own. So in the summer of 1640, Elizabeth, Robert, and Captain Daniel Patrick sailed down Long Island Sound, past the last English settlements, to a green shoreline between two tidal brooks — a long sandy point the Siwanoy called Monakewego. Shining sands.

You know it as Tod’s Point. She would come to know it as something no woman of her time was expected to have: hers.

The village that grew from that landing is Old Greenwich — the original settlement, the “Old Town,” where everything else began. And the reason a beach walk here passes the oldest house in town starts with what Elizabeth did next.

The purchase — and the deed with her name on it — is Part II.

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Part II — Wed Sep 9, 2026 · The Deed Says Elizabeth

The deed survives. It says the beach was hers.

The 1640 deed notes a “particular purchase” of Monakewego by Elizabeth herself, among the earliest property titles held by a woman in the New World.

In July 1640, Elizabeth Fones Feake, her husband Robert, and Captain Daniel Patrick came ashore between two tidal brooks — the Asamuck and the Tatomuck — and purchased the land from the Siwanoy people who lived along this shore. That purchase was the first settlement of what became Greenwich, and the village that grew around it has been called the Old Town ever since. Old Greenwich is not near where Greenwich began. It is where Greenwich began.

But the remarkable line is inside the deal. The surviving purchase record notes a “particular purchase” of the long peninsula the Siwanoy called Monakewego — shining sands — made by Elizabeth herself. Not her husband. Her. In 1640, that made her party to one of the earliest instances of a woman individually holding title to real property anywhere in the New World.

Her neighbors were scandalized that a married woman held land in her own name. The maps didn’t care. For more than a century, the peninsula appeared in records and charts as Elizabeth’s Neck.

Around 1645 she built a house at the gateway to her point, overlooking the cove. It is believed to be the oldest house in town — and it is still standing. You have probably driven past it on the way to the beach without knowing that the small saltbox by the water is where a woman who owned her own shoreline lived, three and a half centuries before that was ordinary.

Today her peninsula is the most loved ground in the village — the beach, the loop, the point. Almost nobody on it knows her name.

How her name vanished from the map: Part III.

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Part III — Sat Sep 12, 2026 · The Name the Map Forgot

Her name was on this beach for more than a century. Then it vanished.

A Dutch-law remarriage sent Elizabeth to Hell Gate; two centuries of Ferrises, then J. Kennedy Tod, then the town, renamed her neck Tod’s Point.

Elizabeth Fones Feake owned the shining-sands peninsula the Siwanoy called Monakewego, and the maps of colonial Connecticut called it what it was: Elizabeth’s Neck.

But her time on it was short. Her husband Robert’s health and mind failed, and he returned to England, leaving Elizabeth to run a frontier plantation alone with a houseful of children. She found a partner in William Hallett, the capable manager of the Feake lands — and, reportedly with Robert’s consent, she remarried under Dutch law, for in those years this coast sat on the very border between Dutch New Netherland and Puritan New England. The Dutch recognized the marriage. The English colonies would not. Rather than live where her family wasn’t recognized, Elizabeth left the village she had founded and built a new farm in Dutch territory near Hell Gate. Her powerful Winthrop cousins — one a governor — stood by her all her life.

The Neck stayed. It passed down through village generations, and in the 1880s a Scottish banker named J. Kennedy Tod bought the peninsula and gave it a new name — Innis Arden. By 1945 it belonged to the town, for everyone, and it became plain Greenwich Point. Tod, whose family held it for fifty-five years, kept his name on it. Elizabeth, who held it first, lost hers.

Her house is still there, at the gateway to the point — the oldest in the village, restored and standing after nearly 400 years. The beach beyond it is still the shining sands.

So the next time you make the loop at Tod’s Point, spare a thought for the original owner. You’re walking on Elizabeth’s Neck.

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Old Greenwich · Connecticut History · Women’s History · Long Island Sound · Colonial New England · Village Life