Why was Old Greenwich once called Sound Beach? Because for fifty-nine years, it was. When the railroad put a station here in 1872, the village took the name of its shoreline and became "Sound Beach" — a summer-resort brand for a summer-resort age. It kept the name until 1931, when the village asked for its history back and was rechristened Old Greenwich, a plain statement of fact: this was the oldest part of the town, the founding ground everything else grew from. Three names in three centuries — the Old Town, Sound Beach, Old Greenwich — and all three describe the same few streets between the brooks and the Sound.
Old Greenwich is the original Greenwich. In July 1640, Robert Feake, Captain Daniel Patrick, and Elizabeth Fones Feake came ashore and purchased the land between the Asamuck and Tatomuck brooks from the Siwanoy people who lived along this shore — the founding transaction of the town, made here, on this beach-village ground. The settlers laid out farms and a landing on the sheltered coves, and around 1645 the Feake-Ferris House rose beside Greenwich Cove at the gateway to the point. Believed the oldest house in town and among the oldest in Connecticut, it has been carefully restored in recent years — and it is still standing, on the way to the beach, nearly four centuries on.
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.
