Peace returned the town to its river. The Saugatuck River shipping village grew into a busy little port — sloops and schooners working Long Island Sound to New York — and in 1835 the villagers decided their harbor deserved its own government: led by Daniel Nash, 130 residents petitioned to incorporate a new town, drawn from parts of Norwalk, Fairfield, and Weston, and Westport was born on May 28, 1835. The village kept its salt-water character; the 1884 swing bridge across the Saugatuck — known to everyone as the Cribari Bridge — still turns beside the old shipping quarter, and the Bridge Street district beside it is on the National Register.
Then came the onions. From the 1840s to about 1890 Westport was the leading onion-growing center in the country — the fields ran down to the water, and the Southport Globe varieties bred on these hills commanded top prices in New York. Market boats left weekly with a deck full of barrels and came home with a season's fortune; during the Civil War, Army quartermasters bought Westport's pickled onions by the barrel to fight scurvy in the camps. Blight, cutworms, and western competition ended the boom by the 1890s, and one by one the onion fields were sold off to New Yorkers for summer places — the first draft of the town Westport would become.
Why People Visit Westport Connecticut
Westport draws people who love the shore, the arts, and a good story. It is a Revolutionary-War landing site with a Minute Man on the beach, a colonial shipping village turned arts colony, and a Long Island Sound shoreline of beaches, river, and marsh. Visitors come for the rare mix — history you can stand on at Compo, theater and music in the summer, and a refined New England coast an easy train ride from New York.
