The railroad changed everything. When the New Haven line put a station here in 1872, the village took the name of its beach and became “Sound Beach,” and the trains brought a new kind of visitor. Through the late nineteenth century the shore filled with summer hotels and seaside cottages, and wealthy New Yorkers discovered the coves and the sand. The handsome Old Greenwich Railroad Station, built about 1894 and now on the National Register, dates from those resort years — the depot that tied this quiet corner of the Sound to the city forty-some miles down the line.
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.
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.
