Narragansett oral history tells us that this land is an ancient occupation site for people ruled over by one great sachem residing further south. The first written historical accounts related to Greene Farm are those of Giovanni da Verranzano, an Italian navigator, who visited the west shore of Narragansett Bay for fifteen days in 1524. During the early 1600s many Dutch, French, and English came to this coastline looking for furs, and in 1620 English colonists in Massachusetts established steady contact with the Narragansett tribe living there. The first European occupant of Greene Farm was Surgeon John Greene (1590-1659) and his family, who had emigrated to the colonies from England in 1635. They left Providence, RI, eight miles up the shore, with a group of religious dissidents led by Samuel Gorton, purchasing ninety square miles of land from the Narragansett sachem. Gorton and his followers received a patent for the land from the Earl of Warwick, but this did not appease the Narragansett sub-tribe living there nor the Massachusetts Bay Colony, both of who contested the settlement of “Warwick.”

The Greene family established a manor-farmstead on 660 acres of the Warwick tract, of which 150 acres remain intact today. Five generations of Greenes owned the estate until 1782, when John Brown (1736-1803), a wealthy, powerful Providence merchant, bought it. The farm was then worked by tenant farmers, with Brown using it as his preferred country retreat. Brown’s grandson, Governor John Brown Francis (1791-1864), returned to the property, where he and his descendants remain until today.