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.
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.
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.
