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 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.
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.
