The Revolution burned through in July 1779, when Governor Tryon's raiders — the same force that torched Fairfield and Norwalk that month — put the Greens Farms church and much of the parish to the torch. The congregation rebuilt, as Connecticut parishes did, and the church that stands today carries the line forward; the village's Revolutionary chapter runs with its neighbors' in the same hard summer, a story told at length on our Westport and Minutemen pages.
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.
