Machamux — the beautiful land, since 1648. 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 what are now Frost Point and the Fairfield town line. In 1648 the Town of Fairfield sanctioned five English farmers to "sit down and inhabit at Machamux," and they bought their home lots from the Pequot — Thomas Newton, Henry Gray, John Green, Daniel Frost, and Francis Andrews, remembered ever after as the Bankside Farmers because they settled on the banks of the Sound. Theirs was the first English settlement in what would become Westport, and Greens Farms remains its oldest neighborhood.
The settlers 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 — the religious society that has continued unbroken for more than three centuries as the Green's Farms Congregational Church, today in its 1853 meeting house on Hillandale Road. The Bankside settlement was renamed Green's Farms in 1732 in honor of John Green, its largest landholder, and Frost Point still carries Daniel Frost's name. During the Revolutionary War, British troops raided the parish and burned the meeting house along with houses and barns; Deacon Ebenezer Jesup saved the church's communion service by hiding it in his well, the congregation met in private homes for nearly ten years, and a new church rose in 1789 — the community rebuilding rather than scattering.
Why People Visit Greens Farms Connecticut
Greens Farms offers calm beaches, a nature preserve, and village charm steeped in colonial history. Visitors come for the quiet shoreline, the first-state-park beach at Sherwood Island, and the sense of a place that has held its name and its character since 1648. It is a subtle, restful corner of coastal Connecticut, balanced between the salt marsh and three and a half centuries of heritage.
