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.
Long before the resorts and the regattas, this was the country of the coastal Algonquian people of the Norwalk shore, who fished the coves and river mouths and gathered shellfish along the Sound — and who left the village its name: Rowayton, worn through spellings like Roaton and Rhoeton on the old deeds. The Five Mile River, the tidal inlet that still defines the place, carried their canoes before it carried anything else.
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.
