Southport: Federal-Era Port Village
Near Bridgeport Stamford, Connecticut
Southport is one of the best-preserved Federal-period villages on Long Island Sound, and it owes its survival to geography. The harbor was ideal for schooners in the early eighteen hundreds, and the village grew fat on the onion trade. Fairfield County onions went by boat to New York markets by the millions of bushels.
Captains and merchants built handsome Federal and Greek Revival houses along Harbor and Pequot roads, and when the railroad arrived in the eighteen forties it bypassed Southport's center, so the village never redeveloped. Factories never came. The result is a remarkably intact streetscape of sea-captain homes and counting houses from the late seventeen hundreds through the eighteen hundreds, now a National Historic District, still residential, still quiet, the commercial energy of two centuries gone as completely as the onion farms.
