More From Fairfield Connecticut
-
Fairfield Connecticut Vintage Retro Unisex Embroidered Cotton Polo - Black Logo
Regular price $48.00 USDRegular price -
Boy and Hound - Silhouette Art Giclée Unframed Art Print
Regular price From $34.00 USDRegular price -
Fairfield Connecticut Vintage Retro Cotton Canvas Tote Bag - White Logo
Regular price $28.00 USDRegular price -
Fairfield Connecticut Vintage Retro Unisex Cotton Jersey Tank Top - Black Logo
Regular price $28.00 USDRegular price
The four squares grew into a seat of government: Fairfield served as the county seat of Fairfield County from 1666 until 1853, its courthouse and green the legal center of southwestern Connecticut. The town lived on farming, fishing, and coastal trade, and its records carry one of New England’s notable early legal stories — in 1654 Mary Staples of Fairfield became the first woman tried for witchcraft in Connecticut, and was acquitted, thirty-eight years before the Salem trials began.
What’s with the Onions? For half a century, Fairfield’s fame was an onion. The Southport Globe Onion, bred on the coastal hills above Southport Harbor, became one of the most celebrated vegetables in America — by the 1840s onions were the town’s great crop, schooners raced them under sail to the New York markets, and during the Civil War the Union bought them by the hundred-thousand-bushel lot; General Grant reputedly refused to march without them. Then in 1894 cutworms and fungus turned the fields black almost overnight, and the industry died where it stood. The onion money had already built the harbor village and its streetscapes — and every fall Fairfield still drops a giant onion at its festival in the crop’s honor.
Why People Visit Fairfield Connecticut
Fairfield offers a deep colonial history, a National Register town green, the Federal-era Burr Mansion and surrounding streetscape, the Greenfield Hill village preserved intact from before the Revolution, an offshore lighthouse, four miles of Sound beaches, and the original Boston Post Road running through the middle of it all. Visitors come for the museum and the green, the Federal architecture along Beach Road, the Greenfield Hill drive in apple season, the Pequot Library, Jennings Beach in summer, and the simple shoreline pleasures of a town that was founded by the lawyer who wrote America's first constitution and rebuilt itself after the British burned it down. It is layered, walkable, and very Connecticut.
