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 twentieth century brought the estates and the school. Standard Oil's E. T. Bedford, the village's great benefactor, kept his farm here and gave Westport its YMCA; the 1925 Bolton School grew into Greens Farms Academy, whose 42-acre campus looks over the marsh and the Sound; and the farms themselves became the quiet shoreline neighborhood the New York Times once bounded by Hillspoint Road, the Post Road, and the Fairfield line. In 2020 the census finally drew the village on the map as its own place — 372 years after the Pequot name told everyone where it was.
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.
