Through the colonial centuries it stayed a farming and fishing village on the Sound. The Ferris family held Elizabeth's Neck for more than a hundred and fifty years; small wharves shipped produce and shellfish toward the New York markets; and during the Revolution the open water that made the village prosperous also made it vulnerable, as raiders crossed the Sound in shallow “wheelboats” between the Connecticut shore and Loyalist Long Island. It was a modest, hardworking shoreline community, shaped from the beginning by the tides, the coves, and the long peninsula reaching out into the Sound.
Old Greenwich is the original Greenwich. In 1640 Robert Feake, Captain Daniel Patrick, and their companions bought the land along this stretch of Long Island Sound from the Siwanoy people — a transaction recorded, in the language of the day, as a sale for twenty-five coats, and one that, like so many of its kind, began the long dispossession of the people who had lived here first. The settlers laid out farms and a landing on the sheltered coves, and the Feake-Ferris House, built around 1645 and still standing, survives as one of the oldest houses in Connecticut. For generations this was simply the “Old Town,” the founding ground from which the rest of Greenwich would grow.
Why People Visit Old Greenwich
Old Greenwich offers the Connecticut Gold Coast at its most low-key — a real shore village with a beach peninsula, a pond park, and a handful of streets of shops, plus the quiet distinction of being where Greenwich began. Visitors come for Tod's Point and the Sound, the founding history, and the unhurried village pace, and stay for the beaches, the coves, and the deep-rooted New England feel. It is refined, historic, and genuinely Connecticut.
