The remarkable line in the founding record is Elizabeth's. The surviving purchase notes her own "particular purchase" of the peninsula — not her husband's, hers — at a time when a married woman holding land in her own name startled her neighbors. The maps did not mind: for over a hundred years the point appeared in colonial records as Elizabeth's Neck. Her early village sat on a contested edge of the map, too — for a time in the 1640s this coast lay under Dutch New Netherland, the working border between New Amsterdam's world and New England's, before Connecticut's side of the line prevailed. Elizabeth herself eventually moved on, but her Neck stayed in village hands: the Ferris family held it for more than a hundred and fifty years.
Through the colonial centuries this stayed a farming and fishing village on the Sound. Small wharves shipped produce and shellfish toward the New York markets; oystermen worked the coves; and during the Revolution the open water that made the village prosperous also made it vulnerable, as raiders crossed the Sound in shallow "wheelboats" between the Connecticut shore and Loyalist Long Island. It was a modest, hardworking shoreline community, shaped from the beginning by the tides, the coves, and the long peninsula reaching out into the Sound.
Why People Visit Old Greenwich
Old Greenwich offers the Connecticut Gold Coast at its most low-key — a real shore village with a beach peninsula, a pond park, and a handful of streets of shops, plus the quiet distinction of being where Greenwich began. Visitors come for Tod's Point and the Sound, the founding history, and the unhurried village pace, and stay for the beaches, the coves, and the deep-rooted New England feel. It is refined, historic, and genuinely Connecticut.
