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.
Two estates shaped the village that visitors know today. In the 1880s the banker and railroad financier J. Kennedy Tod built his “Innis Arden” estate out on Elizabeth's Neck, with a stone mansion, a boathouse, and gardens along the peninsula; in 1945 the town acquired the property, and Tod's Point became Greenwich Point Park — the beloved town beach, with its tidal ponds, walled garden, and holly grove, that locals still simply call “the Point.” Inland, the pond and lawns of Binney Park were given to the village in 1928 by Edwin Binney, the co-inventor of the Crayola crayon, who summered nearby.
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.
