Fairhaven Celebrates Renovations To Its Phoenix Rail Trail

Earlier this fall, the community of Fairhaven gathered for a ribbon-cutting on Main Street for the re-opening of their newly renovated Phoenix Rail Trail, the town’s portion of the South Coast Greenway.

The 5-mile trail extends east from downtown Fairhaven into Mattapoisett, where an extension that opened in 2022 runs along beach dunes of Mattapoisett Harbor.

The Phoenix Rail Trail is one of the older rail trails in Massachusetts, and a renovation project this year resurfaced the trail, added accessibility improvements, and enhanced several road crossings in Fairhaven’s downtown with new raised crosswalks with flashing crosswalk beacon lights (see photo above).

The Fairhaven Green Lanterns, a local gardening club focused on improving the town’s public spaces, also contributed new trail signs and plantings.

The work was funded with a 2025 MassTrails grant and state Community Preservation Act funding.

Will Gardner, the founder of SouthCoast Places for People, told StreetsblogMASS that when the trail was originally proposed in the late 1990s, “there was a very vocal group of opponents who sued to prevent the trail from happening. The complaints were that it was going to cause traffic and bring crime and that parking would be a mess.”

Those fears never came to pass. Today, Gardner says, the trail has become an unambiguous point of pride for the town.

“Seniors love the trail, and it seems like every real estate listing for the downtown area mentions how close it is,” he said.