The land along the Saugatuck and the Sound was the homeland of Indigenous people long before the colonists, and the older colonial core of the area — the Bankside farms of the Greens Farms section — dates to the 1640s. But the Westport story turns on the river and the Revolution. The Saugatuck River shipping village grew into a busy little port, and that prosperity is why the British came: the 1777 landing at Compo and the running fight at Compo Hill put Westport on the map of the Revolution. In 1835 the town was formally incorporated as Westport, drawn from parts of Norwalk, Fairfield, and Weston around the harbor and the Post Road.
Through the nineteenth century Westport became famous for a humble crop — it was a noted onion-farming center, an "Onion Capital" whose fields and the Saugatuck wharves shipped produce out along the Sound. The railroad and the mills came, and then, around 1910, something unexpected: artists. Westport became one of America's great arts colonies, home to the Famous Artists School and, from 1931, the Westport Country Playhouse in a converted 1835 tannery. By the mid-twentieth century it had become an affluent New York commuter town — but the Sound, the Saugatuck, and the Minute Man were still right where they had always been.
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.
