Before it was Greens Farms, this stretch of the Long Island Sound shoreline was Machamux — "the beautiful land" — the name the Pequot gave the salt marsh, the meadows, and the water between the tidal creeks. The name has outlived nearly everything else: the old deeds also tried Bankside and Unquowa, but Machamux is the one the village kept carving into stone. Even the map keeps the memory: the census place, the road, the station, and the academy all still answer to the farmers' name.
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
Greens Farms offers calm beaches, salt-marsh nature, and village charm steeped in the deepest colonial history on the Westport shore. Visitors come for the first-state-park beach at Sherwood Island and stay for the sense of a place that has held its name — the beautiful land — for nearly four centuries.
