What made the shore was the oyster. Through the nineteenth century, the Long Island Sound beds off this coast grew into some of the most productive oyster grounds on Earth, and the Five Mile River filled with the low, broad-decked sloops of the trade. Oystering here was a craft and a calendar — dredging the beds under sail, culling on deck, shucking by lantern light — and it reached its peak in the decades after the Civil War, when the village's wealth came up from the bottom of the Sound a bushel at a time.
The village has one gloriously improbable chapter: the first business computer was born here. In the old Farrell estate stables on Highland Avenue — "The Barn," part of the Rock Ledge estate listed on the National Register in 1977 — engineers of the Remington Rand Corporation developed the Remington Rand 409, the prototype that carried computing out of the laboratory and into the office, in the years when General Douglas MacArthur chaired the company's board. The stables became the Rowayton Community Center and Library in 1966; the village kept the story.
Why People Visit Rowayton
Rowayton offers the Connecticut shore at its most relaxed and characterful — sailing, art, and quiet beaches in a village that has kept its scale and its salt-water soul. Visitors come for the harbor and the shore parks and stay for the unhurried, distilled village that Norwalk keeps at its edge.
