Darien Connecticut Vintage Retro Cotton Jersey Baby Bodysuit - Black Logo

The parish became a town the slow way. Middlesex Parish farmed and fished its stretch of coast under Stamford's wing for eighty years, rebuilt itself after the Revolution, and in 1820 — with Thaddeus Bell steering the separation through — incorporated on its own, taking the sailor's Panama name. The 1848 railroad then rewrote everything the Post Road had built: farms along the Sound became summer estates, the Gilded Age arrived by timetable, and in 1864 the merchant-philanthropist Benjamin Fitch gave the town a national first, founding Fitch's Home for Soldiers in Noroton Heights for the disabled veterans of the Civil War — the first home of its kind in the country. (Spell it "Darian" and the New Haven line will still stop there all the same.)

Fitch's Home for Soldiers, founded in Noroton Heights in 1864 by Benjamin Fitch, was the first home in the United States for disabled veterans and soldiers' orphans.

Why People Visit Darien Connecticut

• Visit the Mather Homestead on Stephen Mather Road, the 1778 farmhouse built by Deacon Joseph Mather and lived in by the Mather family ever since — birthplace of the family that produced Stephen Tyng Mather, the founding director of the U.S. National Park Service in 1916. The Homestead opened as a public museum in 2017.
• Visit the Bates-Scofield Homestead on the Boston Post Road, the c. 1736 saltbox-style colonial home that is the Darien Historical Society museum — with the 1827 Scofield Barn reunited to the house in 2008.
• Look for the Pond-Weed House on the Post Road at Hollow Tree Ridge — the c. 1696-1700 saltbox that is the oldest house in Darien.
• See the 1934 Arthur Gibson Hull Federal Arts Project mural at Darien Town Hall depicting the July 22, 1781 Tory raid on the Middlesex Parish Meetinghouse — dedicated by Whitney Museum director Juliana Force in 1935 as among the highest-quality Public Works Art Project paintings in the country.
• Visit Darien Library on the Post Road — founded 1894, current building opened 2009, one of the most-cited public libraries in Connecticut.
• Walk the Boston Post Road Historic District through Darien Center — the colonial-era stage road between Boston and New York that George Washington rode in 1789.
• Relax at Pear Tree Point Beach on the Five Mile River side of town — sandy beach, gentle water, harbor scenery on the Sound.
• Swim at Weed Beach on Noroton Bay — family-friendly shoreline with picnic lawns, tennis courts, and playgrounds.
• Walk Tilley Pond Park downtown — bridges, ducks, and easy paths a block from the Post Road.
• Stroll Cherry Lawn Park, the nature-trail park tucked into the residential streets north of downtown.
• Walk the historic Tokeneke neighborhood on the western shoreline — the 1899 estate association laid out around the Cedar Gate and Delafield-era estates south of the Post Road.
• Drive through Noroton Heights and Long Neck Point to see the late-19th- and early-20th-century summer-home neighborhoods that grew after the railroad opened the town to New York.
• Time a Metro-North trip from Grand Central to Darien Depot to see the commuter rhythm that has shaped the town since 1848 — the Mather family's century-and-a-half pattern of office in Manhattan, home on the Sound.