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.
The name caught up with the history in 1931, when Sound Beach was rechristened Old Greenwich — a recognition that this was, after all, the oldest part of the town. Through the mid-twentieth century it grew into the affluent commuter village it is now, a Metro-North ride from Manhattan, its small downtown gathered along Sound Beach Avenue. Yet the colonial homes, the old depot, the Point, and Binney Park endured, and the village kept the unhurried, deep-rooted feel of a place that has been lived in for nearly four centuries.
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.
