1
Machamux: the shoreline before Westport
Before 1648
Long before English settlement, the land between the Saugatuck
River and Sasco Hill was home to Paugussett-affiliated peoples who
called the area Machamux, "the beautiful land." They fished the
tidal creeks, planted corn on the coastal flats, and gathered
shellfish along the same shore that later became Compo and Green's
Farms.
The names survived even when the people were displaced.
"Saugatuck" is itself an Algonquian word for the river's outlet,
and Compo, Owenoke, and Cockenoe all carry echoes of that first
language. When you stand at Sherwood Mill Pond at low tide, you
are looking at the kind of landscape that made this coast worth
settling in the first place: sheltered water, salt marsh, and easy
fishing.
See it today: Sherwood Mill Pond and the salt
marsh at Sherwood Island State Park still look much as they did
before the farms arrived.
2
The Bankside Farmers settle Green's Farms
1648
In 1648, five families from Fairfield — the "Bankside Farmers" —
received permission to farm the coastal land west of Sasco Creek.
Their settlement became Green's Farms, named for farmer John
Green, and it was the first permanent English community in what is
now Westport.
These were not adventurers. They were farmers who wanted flat,
salt-hay-rich land near the water, and they got it. Green's Farms
remained an outlying parish of Fairfield for nearly two centuries,
which is why so much of Westport's oldest history is technically
Fairfield history. The families — Sherwood, Frost, Andrews, Green,
Newton — left their names on roads, coves, and islands you drive
past every day.
See it today: The Green's Farms Burying Ground on
Green's Farms Road, with stones dating to the early 1700s.
3
The first meetinghouse at Green's Farms
1711
Green's Farms Congregational Church was organized in 1711 as the
parish's first meetinghouse, and for more than a century it
functioned as the town government as well as the church — running
the schools, collecting taxes, and settling disputes. It is the
oldest institution in Westport still operating.
In colonial Connecticut the parish was the unit of daily life, and
Green's Farms was the reason the coastal families never had to
ride all the way to Fairfield center on a Sunday. The current
church building dates from the 1850s, but the congregation's
continuous line back to 1711 is the longest thread in Westport's
story.
See it today: Green's Farms Congregational
Church, 71 Hillandale Road.
4
The British land at Compo Beach
April 25, 1777
On April 25, 1777, roughly 1,850 British and Loyalist troops under
Major General William Tryon landed at Compo Beach and marched
north to burn the Continental Army's supply depot at Danbury.
Local militia harried them back to the shore three days later in
the fight remembered as the Battle of Compo Hill.
The Danbury Raid was the largest British operation on Connecticut
soil during the Revolution, and Westport was its beginning and its
end. Tryon's men burned barns and homesteads on the way up Compo
Road; on the return, militia under Generals Benedict Arnold, David
Wooster, and Gold Selleck Silliman fought a running action from
Ridgefield back to Compo Hill. Wooster died of his wounds. The
British re-embarked under fire on April 28.
See it today: The Compo Beach cannons on Compo
Beach Road mark the landing site.
5
Westport becomes a town
May 28, 1835
Westport was incorporated on May 28, 1835 after Daniel Nash and
about 130 residents petitioned the Connecticut General Assembly to
unite pieces of Fairfield, Norwalk, and Weston into one town. The
Saugatuck River, once the boundary between Fairfield and Norwalk,
became Westport's spine instead of its border.
The argument for incorporation was commercial. The Village of
Saugatuck had grown into a working river port — wharves,
warehouses, a tavern, and market sloops running produce to New
York — and its merchants were tired of answering to three
different town governments. The name was plain description: the
westernmost port on that stretch of the Sound.
See it today: Saugatuck's riverfront along
Riverside Avenue and the Saugatuck Congregational Church, a
landmark since the 1830s.
6
The onion capital of America
1840s–1890s
Through the middle of the nineteenth century Westport was the
leading onion-growing town in the United States. Farmers in
Green's Farms and along Hillspoint Road shipped barrels of white
and red Southport-type onions from the Saugatuck wharves to New
York, and during the Civil War the Union Army bought Westport
onions by the ton.
Onions suited the coastal soil and the market boats, and for two
generations they made local farmers rich. Henry Burr Sherwood ran
the Compo Tide Mill and invented an onion-farming implement; his
1857 farm on Sherwood Mill Pond was one of many. Blight and
cheaper Western competition ended the boom by the 1890s, and
Westport's economy shifted to mills, factories, and — soon —
summer visitors.
See it today: The Mill Cove Historic District on
Hillspoint Road, including the old tide mill site.
7
A public library and Connecticut's first state park
1908 and 1914
The Westport Public Library was established in 1908, financed in
large part by industrialist E. T. Bedford, who also funded
schools, a fire station, and the YMCA. Six years later, in 1914,
the state began acquiring Sherwood Island, which became
Connecticut's first state park.
These two dates mark the moment Westport stopped thinking of
itself as a farm town. Bedford's philanthropy built the civic
center; Sherwood Island turned the shore into public ground. The
park took decades to assemble parcel by parcel, but the 1914
purchase is the reason a 238-acre stretch of Westport beach and
salt marsh belongs to everyone.
See it today: Sherwood Island State Park, reached
by the Sherwood Island Connector off I-95.
8
The Minute Man statue and the artists' arrival
1910
In 1910 Westport unveiled the Minute Man statue at Compo Road
South and Compo Beach Road, sculpted by H. Daniel Webster to honor
the militia of 1777. That same decade, painters and illustrators
discovered the town, and Westport began its second life as one of
America's best-known artists' colonies.
The statue faces the beach where the British came ashore, rifle at
rest. Around it, the town was filling with people who had come for
light, cheap farmhouses, and the train to New York. In thirty
years the population doubled to about 8,000, and Westport's
reputation as a creative refuge — illustrators, cartoonists,
novelists, playwrights — was set.
See it today: The Minute Man statue at the Compo
Road South rotary.
9
Compo Beach and the Fitzgeralds
1919–1927
Compo Beach became a public resort in this decade: a bathing
pavilion opened in 1919, and by 1927 a full beach compound with
dining and dance halls, bathhouses, and lifeguards was complete.
In the summer of 1920 F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald rented a
cottage on Compo Road South, where Fitzgerald worked on
The Beautiful and Damned.
The Fitzgeralds stayed only a few months, but their Westport
summer has become part of the town's legend — some local
historians argue the Compo shoreline, not Long Island, is the real
setting behind The Great Gatsby. Meanwhile the Miramar, a
1920s speakeasy on Hillspoint Road, made sure the Jazz Age was
well supplied.
See it today: Compo Beach, still the town beach,
and the Wakeman cottage site on Compo Road South.
10
Westport Country Playhouse opens
1931
Broadway producer Lawrence Langner converted a nineteenth-century
tannery on Post Road East into a summer theater, and the Westport
Country Playhouse opened in 1931. It became one of the country's
most respected summer stages, and later, under Joanne Woodward's
leadership, a year-round professional theater.
The Playhouse gave the artists' colony a public face. For decades,
Broadway and Hollywood names tried out new work in a red barn in
Westport before taking it to New York. It also cemented the town's
identity: a place where serious creative work happened forty-five
minutes from Grand Central.
See it today: Westport Country Playhouse, 25
Powers Court.
11
Famous Artists School and the post-war boom
1948–1970
In 1948 illustrator Albert Dorne and Norman Rockwell's circle
founded the Famous Artists School in Westport, a correspondence
course that made the town's name synonymous with commercial art
nationwide. After World War II the population more than tripled,
and Westport became a full commuter suburb of New York.
The Famous Writers School followed, and for a generation
Westport's return address appeared in magazine advertisements
across America. At the same time, the farms that had survived the
onion collapse were sold for house lots, the Merritt Parkway and
I-95 shortened the trip to the city, and the town's modern shape —
leafy, residential, expensive — arrived.
See it today: The Westport Museum for History
& Culture at the Wheeler House, 25 Avery Place, holds the
Famous Artists archive.
12
Longshore, Levitt, and Westport today
1960–present
In 1960 the town bought the private Longshore Club and turned its
golf course, pool, and shoreline into a public park. The Levitt
Pavilion opened on the Saugatuck riverbank in 1974 with free
summer concerts, and long-time residents Paul Newman and Joanne
Woodward became the town's most visible neighbors and benefactors.
Westport today has roughly 28,000 year-round residents, two
Metro-North stations, and a downtown that has rebuilt itself
around the river more than once. What has not changed is the
geography that started everything: a sheltered river, a broad
beach, and farmland that turned out to be perfect for houses.
See it today: Longshore Club Park, the Levitt
Pavilion, and the Saugatuck riverwalk downtown.
Westport, Connecticut: quick facts
| County |
Fairfield County, Connecticut |
| First settled |
1648, Bankside Farmers at Green's Farms |
| Incorporated |
May 28, 1835, from Fairfield, Norwalk, and Weston |
| Revolutionary War |
British landing at Compo Beach, April 25, 1777 (Danbury
Raid)
|
| Nineteenth-century economy |
Onion farming and Saugatuck River shipping |
| Landmarks |
Compo Beach, Sherwood Island State Park, Westport Country
Playhouse, Minute Man statue, Longshore Club Park
|
| Local history museum |
Westport Museum for History & Culture, Wheeler House, 25
Avery Place
|