Old Greenwich is the original Greenwich. In July 1640, Robert Feake, Captain Daniel Patrick, and Elizabeth Fones Feake came ashore and purchased the land between the Asamuck and Tatomuck brooks from the Siwanoy people who lived along this shore — the founding transaction of the town, made here, on this beach-village ground. The settlers laid out farms and a landing on the sheltered coves, and around 1645 the Feake-Ferris House rose beside Greenwich Cove at the gateway to the point. Believed the oldest house in town and among the oldest in Connecticut, it has been carefully restored in recent years — and it is still standing, on the way to the beach, nearly four centuries on.
The remarkable line in the founding record is Elizabeth's. The surviving purchase notes her own "particular purchase" of the peninsula — not her husband's, hers — at a time when a married woman holding land in her own name startled her neighbors. The maps did not mind: for over a hundred years the point appeared in colonial records as Elizabeth's Neck. Her early village sat on a contested edge of the map, too — for a time in the 1640s this coast lay under Dutch New Netherland, the working border between New Amsterdam's world and New England's, before Connecticut's side of the line prevailed. Elizabeth herself eventually moved on, but her Neck stayed in village hands: the Ferris family held it for more than a hundred and fifty years.
Why People Visit Old Greenwich
Old Greenwich offers the Connecticut Gold Coast at its most low-key — a real shore village with a beach peninsula, a pond park, and a handful of streets of shops, plus the quiet distinction of being where Greenwich began. Visitors come for Tod's Point and the Sound, the founding history, and the unhurried village pace, and stay for the beaches, the coves, and the deep-rooted New England feel. It is refined, historic, and genuinely Connecticut.
