Before it was Greens Farms, this stretch of the Long Island Sound shoreline was Machamux — "the beautiful land" — the name the Pequot gave the salt marsh, the meadows, and the water between the tidal creeks. The name has outlived nearly everything else: the old deeds also tried Bankside and Unquowa, but Machamux is the one the village kept carving into stone. Even the map keeps the memory: the census place, the road, the station, and the academy all still answer to the farmers' name.
The twentieth century brought the estates and the school. Standard Oil's E. T. Bedford, the village's great benefactor, kept his farm here and gave Westport its YMCA; the 1925 Bolton School grew into Greens Farms Academy, whose 42-acre campus looks over the marsh and the Sound; and the farms themselves became the quiet shoreline neighborhood the New York Times once bounded by Hillspoint Road, the Post Road, and the Fairfield line. In 2020 the census finally drew the village on the map as its own place — 372 years after the Pequot name told everyone where it was.
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.
