Ye Olde Town Pound

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you may remember when I learned about Sabbath Day Houses. This circular stone wall in Sterling also fits into the category of "crazy things you never knew Colonial New Englanders did, that actually seen rather ingenious upon reflection." This is, or was, a town pound.

Pounds were once a common feature of New England towns. Their purpose was containing stray livestock - cows, sheep, pigs, etc. - which had wandered from their owners' property. Rogue animals would be corralled into the pound and kept there, overseen by a Pound Keeper, until their owners came to retrieve them - for a fee. Yup, your goat could be impounded.

This is not the only remaining town pound in Connecticut, but it is the only one I've seen. The others I've heard of are in Hebron, Goshen, Eastford, and Lebanon, although Connecticut being what it is, I wouldn't be surprised if there were many more. There are also roads named Town Pound or Old Town Pound in Hampton, Hartland, and likely other towns. (The only other pound I've seen is in Glocester, Rhode Island. That pound is more of a triangular shape, and dates from 1749; the town claims it is "the oldest pound in America.") There are others in Rhode Island, as well as in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, and Vermont.

If you know of another local town pound, please let me know in the comments. I might have to do a full Connecticut town pound round-up someday.

All Together Now

One thing Connecticut loves to do, when we're not jogging in shorts in sub-zero temperatures or arguing about zoning, is to gather up a bunch of historic buildings as if they were so many ceramic figurines and display them all together in a collection.

In Waterford, pictured above, three buildings stand on Jordan Green, a.k.a. Jordan Park, on Rope Ferry Road. The former Waterford Library arrived on the plot of land (yes, there is land somewhere under all that snow and ice) in 1961. It now houses the offices of the Waterford Historical Society. In 1972 the 1740 Jordan Schoolhouse (the red structure) arrived, followed by the 1838 Beebe-Phillips House in 1974. There's also a corn crib. (I do love corn cribs.)

In East Hartford, Martin Park on Burnside Avenue holds an old blacksmith shop, schoolhouse, and historic house. The Historical Society of East Hartford offers tours.

Wilton just had to be better than everyone else and create two of these groupings of historic buildings. Lambert Corners on Danbury Road has nine super cute little structures, now mostly commercial buildings, and Cannon Crossing in the Cannondale section of town is a destination due to the Schoolhouse at Cannondale restaurant (yes, in an old schoolhouse) and shops like Penny Ha'Penny. The Wilton Historical Society leads walking tours.

Stratford's Boothe Memorial Park and Museum, which overlooks the Housatonic River, is the oddest and possibly the largest of these complexes. It has to be visited to be appreciated, but it includes an old Merritt Parkway tollbooth, a "technocratic cathedral," a railroad station, and chickens.

Norwalk's contribution to the oeuvre is the Mill Hill Complex or Mill Hill Historic Park on East Wall Street, which the Norwalk Historical Society calls a "preserved slice of 18th- and 19th-century Norwalk life." It features a wee law office and a cemetery, and special events are held on the grounds.

In Granby, the Salmon Brook Historical Society has corralled a tobacco barn, a mail hut, and a state line marker (among other things) onto their property on Salmon Brook Road. Flea markets and shows take place here, and its range of buildings make it one of my favorites.

And then, of course, there is the "ghost town" of Johnsonville in East Haddam. Johnsonville is different from the rest because 1) it's a failed tourist attraction and not a historical society or town park, and 2) you're not technically allowed to go there. But I count it because it highlights so nicely the absurdity of the drive to wrangle unrelated historic buildings into one spot.

You could argue that Mystic Seaport is the original, grand version of these comparably tiny attractions; the "Museum of America and the Sea" began importing historic buildings from across New England in the 1940s.

I'm not aware of any other such museum complexes (or, as I prefer to call them, little building collections), but I would not be surprised if at least a few more were hiding in plain sight in other Connecticut cities and towns.

Camp Bethel, Haddam

One of my favorite Connecticut exploring experiences ever was the day last January when I wandered through an empty, snowy Plainville Campground. Since then, I've been on the lookout for similar sites throughout the state.

This one, located on the Connecticut River in Haddam, is called Camp Bethel. It dates back to 1878. It was built by the Life and Advent Union, which the modern-day Camp Bethel website describes as "a small American Protestant denomination. There were times in the early years that as many as 10,000 people would gather on this property for a couple of weeks in the summertime...They came from as far away as Maine to the Carolinas by boat, train and horse drawn wagons. They stayed in tents and later built small cottages on the camp sites. Some of the current cottages were built in the 1890’s and early twentieth century in the typical Victorian style of the period."

Today, the 467-acre campground is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is still used by Christian groups of various denominations. Every year in August, a ten-day Campmeeting is held here, and I imagine there must be moments when it all feels very 19th century, if you can avoid looking at the newer buildings and the cars.

Though I visited after the official end of the season, the property wasn't entirely abandoned; a few wandering people and parked vehicles remained. This made the atmosphere seem slightly less "Victorian fairytale" than Plainville Campground did last winter. Still, Haddam - where you can buy shad along the roadside and it seems like every house is a bit of preserved 18th century perfection - is a little magical all on its own. And Camp Bethel, with its little white chapel and Gothic cabins perched on the riverbank, is a world apart.

Johnsonville

This story ends in East Haddam but it starts in Waterford, as a surprising number of stories do.

While running an errand in Waterford not long ago, I confused Parkway North with Parkway South (if you know Waterford, you will now either nod knowingly or laugh at me) and had to turn around at the dead end by the Wal-mart. As I was doing this I noticed a sad-looking little brick building that I instantly knew was a historic schoolhouse. And yet I'd spent years researching and writing about Waterford history (as well as driving down strange dead ends all over town) and this was a schoolhouse I'd never encountered. All because I try as hard as possible to avoid shopping at Wal-mart, I never realized that the old Gilead Schoolhouse was sitting there on Parkway North all this time.

But later, while I was reading about the Gilead Schoolhouse (Gilead was a section of town named for its situation "beyond Jordan," another Waterford village), I found something even better. Though most of Gilead disappeared as the area was developed (got to have a Wal-mart, right?) one lost building was not torn down. It was disassembled, driven 30 miles away, and put back together.

This was the Gilead Chapel, the Carpenter Gothic confection above, which was moved to Johnsonville in East Haddam in 1969.

Johnsonville was, first, a 19th century mill village. The Moodus and Salmon rivers provided the power for mills producing twine, which is how the village of Moodus in East Haddam got the nickname "The Twine Capital of America."

In the 1960s Raymond Schmitt, founder of aerospace company AGC, purchased the land and set about turning the place into a tourist attraction by restoring the village and importing historic buildings from other Connecticut towns. (The people of Waterford, for their part, were none too happy about this.) Visitors could be married in the chapel, examine the recreated "historic" interiors of the barbershop, and gawk at oddities like a steamboat that Schmitt had transported to East Haddam and docked in Johnsonville's millpond.

Today, Johnsonville is often called a "ghost town" or an "abandoned village," but it's probably more accurate to say it's a small section of a rural/suburban town with a concentration of empty historic structures. Not that it isn't slightly eerie and very cool - I highly encourage anyone to drive through East Haddam to see it - but, during the day at least, it's not exactly as spooky as it's sometimes made to seem. Though most of the buildings are cordoned off and all are plastered with warning signs, they are still basically part of a residential neighborhood.


Anyway, when I went to look at the chapel I got a surprise, in the form of a matching schoolhouse across the lawn.

The school was found in Canterbury.(About 40 miles away.)

It, like the rest of the village, stands empty, in what appears to be less than perfect but hardly terrible shape, in a positively lovely part of Connecticut, waiting for that rare combination: someone with money and imagination.

So many things could be done with this pre-assembled curiosity of a town. Tourist attraction, history museum, shopping center à la Cannondale, park à la Boothe Memorial, the list goes on. Personally I vote for subsidized housing for writers, but that's just me...

For anyone curious about Johnsonville, here are some links I accumulated while writing this post:

Johnsonville on Damned CT.
A Johnsonville virtual tour.
A look inside the buildings from the questionable reality show Abandoned, Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3 (4:00 - wait, whaaaat?!)
A nice glimpse at Connecticut in the 1880s, with an appearance by East Haddam's mills, from the Connecticut Historical Society.
Memories of Johnsonville in the Courant.
A brief look at the Twine Capital of America on YouTube.

Russian Village

This is the St. Sergius Chapel in Russian Village in Southbury.

There's a place called Russian Village in Southbury because in 1925, a small group of Russian immigrants bought some land deep in the woods here, where the birch trees reminded them of their homeland.

They planned a colony, named Churaevka after a fictitious Siberian village in a novel by author and professor George Grebentschikoff. Led by Grebentschikoff and Count Ilya Tolstoy, son of Leo Tolstoy, the group of artists and writers who had fled the aftermath of the Russian revolution turned this place into a summer retreat and center of Russian culture.

They constructed this tiny Russian Orthodox chapel and a cluster of cottages. They ran a Russian-language print shop. Residents were artists, writers, and dancers; visitors included composer Sergei Rachmaninoff and actor Michael Chekov.

Churaevka is no longer a primarily Russian enclave, but it still exists as a small community off I-84. I mean right next to I-84, yet practically impossible (unlike most of Connecticut's cool little spots) to stumble upon when lost.

Its streets are named Russian Village Road, Kiev Drive, and Tolstoy Lane. The cottages have been modified for year-round habitation, but the layout has changed little since Grebentschikoff first surveyed the land in the 1920s.

It was strictly a summer place, back then, but there's something curiously magnetic about it in the winter. As in, when I took these pictures it was 14 degrees out and I forgot my gloves in the car and I didn't even mind.

Plainville Campground

Although I have enough experience to trust that Connecticut will always provide me with beautiful, strange, surprising, hidden (or not), inspiring places to see, I sometimes start to doubt. What if I've seen everything?

But whenever that happens (it's infrequent, but it happens) I end up (for example) wandering alone on the snow-covered unpaved roads of a 19th century religious revival campground in Plainville. I end up not caring if I get lost in little lanes where little cottages of every color face every which way. I will never see everything.

The campground dates from 1865. It began as a Methodist camp meeting site.

At first, it was just a collection of tents, in and around which people from all over the area would meet in the summers for days of praying and singing.

The cottages were built later, in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Over time, the summer gatherings became a little less religious revival and a little more fun summer getaway.

The Methodist Church sold the property to the Plainville Campground Association in 1957.

The urban renewal of the 1970s almost saw these houses torn down.

Thankfully, enough people recognized the historic value of this place, and that didn't happen.

The campground was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.

There was something amazingly strange about strolling the snowy streets of this self-contained explosion of whimsy. It was unlike anything I've experienced in Connecticut (or outside of it.)

I was not surprised.

(The Courant has more on Methodists and preservationists. Historic Buildings of Connecticut has more on the cottages and their past, as well as lovely pictures in summer. And you can live here - but only for half the year. And you have to go to church.)

North Branford

Once when I was 18 some random dude on the street in New York asked me where I'd been all his life. I have the same question for North Branford.

I thought the town would be just like Branford, which it is north of, or Durham, which it is south of. And it is a little like those places. But it has its own unique North Branford-y thing happening. And it's not one of those towns people talk about. I would never have thought it could be an untapped vein of strangeness, or a sudden source of happiness, like finding $20 in your other coat.

Oh, and in case you wondering what the heck that thing in the picture is, I will tell you. It's North Branford's first gas station. The website of the Totoket Historical Society, which maintains this and more of the town's historic buildings, says: "It dates back to the 1920s...It is a small, hexagonal shaped building with windows on an angle so that the attendant could look up and down the road for customers while seated inside."

It does not say that this is the oldest gas station in Connecticut or the oldest preserved gas station in Connecticut or the only surviving gas station in Connecticut of this type. But I can find no other structure claiming to be any of these things, so...this might be it.

And now that I've written that I will start seeing hexagonal pre-1920s gas stations in their original condition everywhere I go.

(By the way the lovely barn behind the gas station is a museum.)

Chasing Waterfalls

I was watching CT-N one day, as you do (oh, you don't?) and in between programs, where there is usually that creepy shot of the back of a woman's head or that sped-up footage of cars on a highway along with rotating names of some (but frustratingly not all) of Connecticut's towns, there was a very pretty image of a park. The park's name, Mill Pond, was visible on a sign. I looked it up, wondering where it was (every town has a mill pond, doesn't it?) and found it was in Newington.

But more importantly I discovered that in Newington, in this very park, there is...no, wait...it's worth the ellipses...THE NATION'S SMALLEST NATURAL WATERFALL.

I am not usually one to collect visits to the smallest this or the biggest that, or to get caught up in trying to find the first or the best. Occasionally I am compelled to, but usually the thought of it just makes me tired, and I'm happy to leave superlatives to the millions of people who do it far better than I could.

But this was different. How, I wondered, do you even know your waterfall is the smallest? Might not some other town somewhere have a smaller waterfall, and just not mention it? Or what about in big rugged states, like Idaho or Maine, where a mini-waterfall could lurk within some enormous swath of state park or BLM land for eons before anyone saw it, let alone thought to measure it? How do you even measure a waterfall? How did I not know this was here?

I don't think the residents of Newington care about such things. They are just happy to have this waterfall; they built it an observation deck, drew it on their town seal, and hold an annual festival in its honor. It's 16 feet high, if you're wondering; it doesn't look all that small, to be honest. Daredevils aren't lining up to walk across it on wires or anything, but still. If I hadn't known what it was I would not have thought it especially diminutive.

But it's very pretty. And as I was walking over to it from the parking lot, I had one of those brief little moments where you say to yourself (if you don't, you should), "Huh. Connecticut. It's really nice here."

(About the title of this post, I couldn't resist using it, but until now I had no idea how awful the lyrics to that song were. There was a time when you couldn't escape it, yet I never really listened to the words. Even if you think you know them, look them up - I swear, they're even more terrible than you remember.)

Agony

It's getting so that finding random stone towers in Connecticut isn't even startling, it's just, oh yeah, another tower. This one is in Guilford.

I sent this picture to my mom and she wrote back, "Rapunzel could live there!" So then I had Agony stuck in my head for hours. I don't love all of Into the Woods, but Agony is fantastic and Agony Reprise might be better.

Anyway.

I would never have known this existed if Ryan Hanrahan, the NBC Connecticut meteorologist and reporter who also blogs about weather here, hadn't mentioned it on Twitter. It's not the sort of landmark you'd normally encounter on your own if you don't live in Guilford, because it's located literally in someone's backyard. I felt bad driving up to it, on their driveway, and walking up closer, on their lawn. I didn't try to read the plaque because it would have required me to climb up their children's playscape.

But I know it was originally a water tower and it used to look like this. Built in the mid-19th century to supply water for the fountain on Simeon Chittendon's "imposing summer estate with landscaped grounds, a fountain, and a deer park later given over to peacocks," it was used "during World War II and in 1955...as an aircraft warning Station, manned day and night by volunteers." (There's more here; it's fascinating.)

And as I was driving to the tower, I noticed a house with a cellar so remarkable it had its own plaque. This turned out to be the Regicide Cellar, where "In June 1661, William Leete, then Governor of New Haven Colony concealed for three days Whalley and Goffe, two of the judges who signed the death warrant of Charles I of England."

Someday, I'm going to have to write a post on how much of early Connecticut history involves hiding people in things. Once I get through all the towers...

And Things That Go Bump In The Night

In the darkness of late Wednesday night slash early Thursday morning, the wind blew so loud that I thought all of Connecticut must have woken up around midnight and again at maybe 3:15 and then at 4:00 just like I did, waiting for the crunch of something falling, something being destroyed. For me, thankfully, the damage brought by this storm was not like last time. It consisted only of part of a day without power, and that brief night of fear.

Which was nothing like the terror experienced one night in the summer of 1754 by the residents of the small village of Windham. (This is a well-known story, but sometimes those are so good they're worth telling again.)

1754 was a scary moment in Connecticut. There was so much to be afraid of: the French, the Indians, the complete lack of Dunkin Donuts. So when the people of Windham heard an otherworldly shrieking noise in the darkness that seemed to come from all directions, they naturally assumed that either they were under attack or the Day of Judgement had arrived. Women and children screamed, and rumors flew. Grabbing whatever weapons they could find, the men of Windham (some of them totally nekkid-ass nekkid) ran outside and hastily assembled to fight...nothing.

When the sun came up, and everyone had trudged home relieved and ashamed, the source of the terrifying clamor was discovered. A whole mess of frogs, victims of illness or low water levels or some sort of amphibian turf war, lay dead around a nearby pond. It was the ultimate 18th century facepalm moment.

But the people of Windham owned it, mostly. (They had little choice, as everyone in all the surrounding towns now laughed at them constantly.) Bank notes depicting the "battle of the frogs" were printed. A poem was written. There was an operetta. And thirteen years ago, when a bridge had to be built over the Willimantic River, what design could have been chosen other than one incorporating four 11-foot frogs?

Oh yeah, they're sitting on spools of thread. Because Willimantic is Thread City.

Tilting

I'm starting to think there's no point in knowing where I'm going, or planning anything, ever. Because it's always when I'm lost that I find the most remarkable things. Here I wasn't lost, exactly, but I didn't know where I was going, and I didn't know what town I was in, and I was looking for something that was definitely not a windmill. And oh, look, there's a windmill. The Frederic Bronson Windmill, to be specific, built in 1894 in the Greenfield Hill section of Fairfield. It's about 100 feet tall. It once harnessed the force of the wind to pump well-water up from below for use on the Bronson estate. (Also it looked pretty.) It is now a cell tower, and it still looks pretty. And now I have to plan some other things which will no doubt be derailed by discoveries of distracting objects...