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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.
What made the shore was the oyster. Through the nineteenth century, the Long Island Sound beds off this coast grew into some of the most productive oyster grounds on Earth, and the Five Mile River filled with the low, broad-decked sloops of the trade. Oystering here was a craft and a calendar — dredging the beds under sail, culling on deck, shucking by lantern light — and it reached its peak in the decades after the Civil War, when the village's wealth came up from the bottom of the Sound a bushel at a time.
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.
