The twentieth century brought the estates and the school. Standard Oil's E. T. Bedford, the village's great benefactor, kept his farm here and gave Westport its YMCA; the 1925 Bolton School grew into Greens Farms Academy, whose 42-acre campus looks over the marsh and the Sound; and the farms themselves became the quiet shoreline neighborhood the New York Times once bounded by Hillspoint Road, the Post Road, and the Fairfield line. In 2020 the census finally drew the village on the map as its own place — 372 years after the Pequot name told everyone where it was.
In 1648, five English families — the Bankside Farmers, as the records call them — settled along this shore under Fairfield's wing, drawn by the fertile meadows and the salt hay. Their settlement became the oldest neighborhood of what is now Westport, and their farms gave the place its eventual name: the lands of John Green among them. They laid out a Common south of Clapboard Hill, built the area's first schoolhouse there in 1703, and in 1711 raised the first meeting house of the West Parish of Fairfield — a congregation that has continued unbroken for more than three centuries.
Why People Visit Greens Farms
- Spend a beach day at Sherwood Island State Park — Connecticut's first state park — and walk out to the point for the 9/11 Living Memorial's long view down the Sound.
- Find the Machamux Boulder on the old Common along Green's Farms Road — the 1648 settlement marked in stone.
- See the Greens Farms Congregational Church, the parish that rebuilt after 1779 and never broke its line.
- Swim the town side at Burying Hill Beach, the small crescent with the big history in its name.
- Walk or fish the marsh edges where the onion boats once loaded, and watch the ospreys work New Creek.
- Ride the New Haven Line to the little Green's Farms station and arrive the way a century of villagers did.
