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.
The story of Machamux remains central to the village's identity. The Common the Bankside Farmers laid out survives as a small landscaped park on Green's Farms Road, marked by the Machamux Boulder — a monument to the 1648 settlement — and the village still answers to its full run of names: Machamux, Bankside, Green's Farms, Greens Farms. Few places in Connecticut hold their whole history in so short a walk: boulder, Common, church, station, marsh, and Sound.
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.
