All-American

In the year 2000, the Lower Naugatuck Valley became the All-American Valley. The National Civic League awards ten cities each year with the title of All-America City, but they're not always cities; sometimes they're neighborhoods, or, in this case, small regions. Over 600 communities have been designated All-America Cities (the lack of an "n" there really bugs me, I have to say) since the program began in 1949.

I don't know whether anyone in Connecticut ever refers to the area this way in conversation, though there is a business in Seymour called the All-American Valley General Store. And there's a proud sign on Route 8, which I see every time I drive past and then forget a second later.

But I was thinking about the designation as I walked around Ansonia the other day. The town really did look perfectly All-American, all of a sudden, or perhaps it always has.

Road Trip

I went to the Valley a while ago, for one of my Patch summer travel thingies. (Or is it thingys? They both look so wrong. What? No, I will not speak like an adult and use a real word instead.) Anyway, this was one of my favorite stories to do. I knew there would be a lot of wacky stuff on this little road trip, because I researched it. But it was much better than I'd expected, and much better than that old image of the Valley I'd been carrying around. And now that I've disposed of that, I have room for the old license plates and other sundry antiques I want to go back to Seymour and buy from this amazing store. If you want to read about my short tour of the Lower Naugatuck Valley, it's here..

I Went To the Valley. And It Wasn't Scary.

When I was young "The Valley" used to be a place you wouldn't go to, you'd just drive through it on the way to somewhere else. It was (we thought) an industrial wasteland that was icky in implicit and unspecified ways, and in which your cell phone signal would mysteriously disappear. But I went there, not just through it on Route 8, but I stopped. In Waterbury, Beacon Falls, Oxford, Seymour, and Derby. And I drove through Middlebury, Ansonia, and I don't even know what other little towns. Not on the highway but on the back roads. And it was interesting. And beautiful. I don't know if the area has improved over the past 10-20 years, or if we were wrong all along. (We lived in Fairfield County; we were probably wrong.)I saw thing like the footbridge above.

And these silos, and farmland, and winding roads and ice cream stands and all those thing you think exist only in the Quiet Corner or Litchfield County.

And bins full of metal letters. You can't say anything bad about a place where there are bins of metal letters.

And history, a lot of it, casually standing around, just part of the landscape.

History within history, even, like the blackboard in this picture I took through a broken window of the one room schoolhouse above. I wish I had gotten off Route 8 and peered through some broken windows years ago.