Shorelands Association

Enjoy scrolling through this sales brochure promoting the creation of Shorelands - a property "most advantageously located for the erection of homes of moderate cost for people of taste and refinement".

Below is a short history of Old Greenwich published by the Greenwich Historical society. visit their website for a wealth of information about Greenwich and its surrounding communities.

The historic community of Old Greenwich is the original Town of Greenwich. On July 18, 1640, local Native Americans, who had inhabited the land since the late Archaic Period, sold what was then a marshy wilderness, to a small group of settlers for the sum of 25 red coats, only a portion of which was delivered. The first founder was Captain Daniel Patrick. He was by reputation a freewheeling, unscrupulous rogue who had emigrated from the Netherlands with his Dutch wife, Anne Van Beyeren, after being appointed in 1630 by the new Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to be one of the first military commanders of the militia in the New World. The second, Robert Feake, was the son of a British goldsmith who had emigrated from England 10 years before and, by 1640, was a wealthy landowner in Watertown. The third settler was a young intrepid Englishwoman, Elizabeth Winthrop Feake, immortalized by Anya Seton in The Winthrop Woman. She was the niece of Governor John Winthrop and his formerly widowed daughter-in-law who had married Robert Feake after emigrating from England in 1631. Elizabeth Winthrop's particular purchase, which was an exceptional transaction for a woman at the time, was "Monakewego," a neck of land known today as Greenwich Point, but on maps of the period as “Elizabeth’s Neck.” A portion of these lands was subsequently transferred from Patrick and Feake to Jeffrey Ferris, an Englishman who is credited with naming the settlement “Greenwich” after the town of Greenwich in England.

“Greenwich” became the name for central Greenwich in 1848 when the first train station was constructed in town. It was changed because “Horseneck,” the former name for the downtown central area, was considered too provincial. Afterwards, the original community of Greenwich became “Greenwich, Old Town,” but when the train began stopping there in 1872, the community’s name was changed again to “Sound Beach” in order to attract summer tourists to the beaches. It reverted back to “Old Greenwich” in 1931 because there were no longer any public beaches to serve tourists disembarking from the train.