In 1648, five English families — the Bankside Farmers, as the records call them — settled along this shore under Fairfield's wing, drawn by the fertile meadows and the salt hay. Their settlement became the oldest neighborhood of what is now Westport, and their farms gave the place its eventual name: the lands of John Green among them. They laid out a Common south of Clapboard Hill, built the area's first schoolhouse there in 1703, and in 1711 raised the first meeting house of the West Parish of Fairfield — a congregation that has continued unbroken for more than three centuries.
Two centuries after the Bankside landing, the shoreline gave Connecticut a different kind of landmark. At Sherwood Island — named for the Sherwood family who farmed it — the state's first land purchases in 1914 began what would become, after a long public battle over access and funding, Connecticut's first state park, fully opened in 1937: 238 acres of beach, marsh, and shade trees that taught the state what public shoreline could be. At the island's point stands Connecticut's 9/11 Living Memorial, on the spot where, on that clear morning, the smoke was visible down the Sound.
Why People Visit Greens Farms
Greens Farms offers calm beaches, salt-marsh nature, and village charm steeped in the deepest colonial history on the Westport shore. Visitors come for the first-state-park beach at Sherwood Island and stay for the sense of a place that has held its name — the beautiful land — for nearly four centuries.
