Through the colonial centuries this stayed a farming and fishing village on the Sound. Small wharves shipped produce and shellfish toward the New York markets; oystermen worked the coves; 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.
The railroad-era resort years gave the village its Victorian layer. Through the late nineteenth century the shore filled with summer hotels and seaside cottages, and city families discovered the coves and the sand. The handsome depot of about 1894 — now on the National Register — dates from those years, the tie that bound this quiet corner of the Sound to Manhattan forty-some miles down the line, and the reason the village center grew up along Sound Beach Avenue between the station and the water.
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.
