Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Greens Farms lived as an agricultural and maritime community. Salt marshes and tidal creeks shaped the working day; farmers shipped onions, potatoes, and market crops down the creeks and along the Sound to New York; and when the railroad came through, the little station on New Creek Road put the farms an errand away from the city — a convenience that would, in time, remake the place entirely.
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.
