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.
The Revolution burned through in July 1779, when Governor Tryon's raiders — the same force that torched Fairfield and Norwalk that month — put the Greens Farms church and much of the parish to the torch. The congregation rebuilt, as Connecticut parishes did, and the church that stands today carries the line forward; the village's Revolutionary chapter runs with its neighbors' in the same hard summer, a story told at length on our Westport and Minutemen pages.
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.
