What’s with the Onions? For half a century, Fairfield’s fame was an onion. The Southport Globe Onion, bred on the coastal hills above Southport Harbor, became one of the most celebrated vegetables in America — by the 1840s onions were the town’s great crop, schooners raced them under sail to the New York markets, and during the Civil War the Union bought them by the hundred-thousand-bushel lot; General Grant reputedly refused to march without them. Then in 1894 cutworms and fungus turned the fields black almost overnight, and the industry died where it stood. The onion money had already built the harbor village and its streetscapes — and every fall Fairfield still drops a giant onion at its festival in the crop’s honor.
The twentieth century turned Fairfield toward New York: Metro-North made it an hour’s commute, Fairfield University opened in 1942 and Sacred Heart University in 1963, and the four miles of Sound-front beaches — Jennings, Penfield, Sasco — became the summer heart of town. On Greenfield Hill the dogwoods that Timothy Dwight praised in his 1794 epic poem “Greenfield Hill” still bloom each May, and along the shore the tide keeps sorting sand, shells, and the odd worn fragment of the town’s long story — beachcombers have been reading Fairfield’s history out of its sand for generations.
Why People Visit Fairfield Connecticut
Fairfield offers a deep colonial history, a National Register town green, the Federal-era Burr Mansion and surrounding streetscape, the Greenfield Hill village preserved intact from before the Revolution, an offshore lighthouse, four miles of Sound beaches, and the original Boston Post Road running through the middle of it all. Visitors come for the museum and the green, the Federal architecture along Beach Road, the Greenfield Hill drive in apple season, the Pequot Library, Jennings Beach in summer, and the simple shoreline pleasures of a town that was founded by the lawyer who wrote America's first constitution and rebuilt itself after the British burned it down. It is layered, walkable, and very Connecticut.
