And the town still belongs to its minutemen. H. Daniel Webster, a young sculptor who settled in Westport in 1906, modeled his militiaman on First Selectman Lewis P. Wakeman; Tiffany & Co. cast the bronze, and on June 17, 1910 — Bunker Hill Day, chosen deliberately — over a thousand people came by road, train, and trolley for a clambake, a parade, and the unveiling above the beach the town had secured for the public in 1902. A pair of government cannons, placed at Compo in 1901, already guarded the shore. Webster's statue is one of only four known minuteman monuments in the country, it appears on the town flag, and Westporters still dress him for the seasons — a Santa cap in December, rabbit ears at Easter.
Then came the onions. From the 1840s to about 1890 Westport was the leading onion-growing center in the country — the fields ran down to the water, and the Southport Globe varieties bred on these hills commanded top prices in New York. Market boats left weekly with a deck full of barrels and came home with a season's fortune; during the Civil War, Army quartermasters bought Westport's pickled onions by the barrel to fight scurvy in the camps. Blight, cutworms, and western competition ended the boom by the 1890s, and one by one the onion fields were sold off to New Yorkers for summer places — the first draft of the town Westport would become.
Why People Visit Westport Connecticut
Westport draws people who love the shore, the arts, and a good story. It is a Revolutionary-War landing site with a Minute Man on the beach, a colonial shipping village turned arts colony, and a Long Island Sound shoreline of beaches, river, and marsh. Visitors come for the rare mix — history you can stand on at Compo, theater and music in the summer, and a refined New England coast an easy train ride from New York.
