European settlement came by way of Norwalk, founded in 1651, and the western shore where the Five Mile River met the Sound became a village of rocky farms and small wharves. For two hundred years it was known simply as Five Mile River — a working hamlet of shipwrights and oystermen, with a shipyard at what is now Pinkney Park and, by 1848, a hotel for the summer boarders who had begun to find the shore. The streetcar arrived in 1890, stitching the hamlet to South Norwalk and opening the summer trade wide.
The village has one gloriously improbable chapter: the first business computer was born here. In the old Farrell estate stables on Highland Avenue — "The Barn," part of the Rock Ledge estate listed on the National Register in 1977 — engineers of the Remington Rand Corporation developed the Remington Rand 409, the prototype that carried computing out of the laboratory and into the office, in the years when General Douglas MacArthur chaired the company's board. The stables became the Rowayton Community Center and Library in 1966; the village kept the story.
Why People Visit Rowayton
Rowayton offers the Connecticut shore at its most relaxed and characterful — sailing, art, and quiet beaches in a village that has kept its scale and its salt-water soul. Visitors come for the harbor and the shore parks and stay for the unhurried, distilled village that Norwalk keeps at its edge.
