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.
Two centuries on, the shoreline gave Connecticut a different kind of landmark: Sherwood Island, where the state's first land purchases in 1914 created what would become, after a long public battle, Connecticut's first state park — 238 acres of beach, salt marsh, and woodland on the Sound, right in the Greens Farms section of Westport. A quiet shoreline enclave with three and a half centuries behind it, Greens Farms still holds the promise of the name the Pequot gave it.
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.
