East Haddam in Winter

GOODSPEED OPERA HOUSE

It's not quite winter yet, technically, but Connecticut is absolutely covered in wreaths and ribbons and lights. One of the prettiest places to see some very tasteful seasonal decorations - and honestly, just one of the prettiest places year round - is East Haddam. I wrote a little about the town in my post on Connecticut's best bridges (the swing bridge over the Connecticut River here is one of the state's most iconic) but I've never gotten around to giving it a post of its own. (Though I have mentioned some of its attractions, like Devil's Hopyard.) So here is beautiful downtown East Haddam, looking perfect as usual, on a frigid December day.

GOODSPEED OPERA HOUSE 

EAST HADDAM SWING BRIDGE

GELSTON HOUSE

CONNECTICUT RIVER

ANTIQUES DEALER ON MAIN STREET

RIVER VIEW CEMETERY, EST. 1773

NATHAN HALE SCHOOLHOUSE, 1750

RIVER VIEW CEMETERY

BOARDMAN HOUSE INN

EAST HADDAM TOWN OFFICES

BOARDMAN HOUSE, 1875

5 of Connecticut's Best Bridges

EAST HADDAM SWING BRIDGE

I have a bit of a love-hate thing with bridges. Some bridges, I find terrifying (there's no logic to it, but having skyway or spillway or causeway in the name doesn't help.) Other bridges are a pleasure to cross. And then there are the bridges I'd drive a day out of my way to avoid - I mean seriously, who invented this nightmare - but love watching other people traverse on YouTube.

But even though I usually wish I could magically transport my car to the opposite riverbank using the power of my mind, I can't deny the appeal of a bridge. It's not just that they literally take you to places you'd otherwise need a boat to reach, or that they symbolically represent the connection between sometimes very different places. It's also that they often look striking, lending a place an atmosphere it wouldn't otherwise have, and that they're a built-in alert message to bored drivers: Hey, something new and different might waiting for you right over there, on the other side.

I chose these five Connecticut bridges with some very simple criteria: they had to be attractive to look at - as you're crossing them as well as from below; they had to have some interesting facts, trivia, or history associated with them; and they had to lead to a place (or places) worth visiting in its own right. I could have chosen many other bridges with different points to recommend them, such as walkability or age, so if you have a different favorite, do leave a comment below.

East Haddam Swing Bridge (Connecticut River, East Haddam - Haddam)

It's not often that traffic comes to a dead halt at a seemingly random time of day and no one minds because the cause for the hold-up is so darn charming. It pretty much only happens when a line of fuzzy ducklings are crossing the road or when the East Haddam Swing Bridge is swinging. The truss bridge carrying Route 82 across the Connecticut opened to traffic in 1913. Since then, it has pivoted to allow boats to pass, while trapping motorists either in the quiet beauty of Haddam or in East Haddam's intensely picturesque town center.* According to East Haddam's website, which lists the bridge as an attraction, the "899-foot long bridge is reputed to be the longest of its type in the world." And its timing isn't quite random; it "opens to recreational traffic on the hour and half hour and on-demand for commercial barge traffic."

On the Haddam side, you'll find small villages where the distant past feels like just a little while ago and hidden history everywhere you turn. In East Haddam, there's the Goodspeed Opera House (I recently saw my first Goodspeed production and highly recommend the experience), Nathan Hale Schoolhouse, restaurants, independent shops, historic homes, and quite a lot more.

Mystic River Bascule Bridge (Mystic River, Groton - Stonington)

In a town (which is actually not a town) full of  tourist destinations, you might think a small drawbridge wouldn't earn the status of a beloved attraction. In Mystic, you'd be mistaken. People come from all over to watch the bascule bridge connecting the Groton and Stonington sides of Mystic go up, letting water traffic pass by and creating a waiting line of vehicles and pedestrians, then go down again. This 1920 bridge carried streetcars in its first few years of use; though those are gone, the bridge retains the look of a curiosity from another age.

There's an ice cream shop perfectly situated for bridge-watching, and downtown Mystic both east and west of the river is usually bustling with people shopping for everything from books to accessories or visiting one of a long list of highly rated restaurants. That's all as nice as it sounds, but as in many parts of Connecticut, the best part might just be wandering the waterfront and its historic neighborhoods. (Make sure to get off of Route 1 and see the side streets.) If you're exploring the area near the bridge itself, I strongly recommend leaving your car and walking; other major highlights like Mystic Seaport and Mystic Aquarium, as well as Olde Mistick Village, are slightly further away.

Route 185 Bridge (Farmington River, Simsbury)

The bridge that carries Route 185, aka Hartford Road, across the Farmington River is officially named the Bataan Corregidor Memorial Bridge, but I've never heard anyone call it that. I've never heard anyone call it anything. It's not grand or long or high. It's not ornate or particularly old (it dates from 1947.) Yet as soon as you spot it, you're instantly struck with a sense of calm and an appreciation for the simplicity of the countryside. This is not one of the scary bridges. And Simsbury is not exactly the countryside - it's a large suburb, and Route 185 is the domain of numerous stressed-out commuters. But the town is a perfect example of how rural and suburban can blend so nicely in Hartford County, and this humble green steel bridge seems to tie it all together.

The main (if not the only) reason people normally visit this bridge on purpose is located in the little park across from Nod Road. It's easy to drive over the bridge multiple times and completely miss this attraction, despite it being very, very big. It's the Pinchot Sycamore, and at 23 feet, 7 inches in circumference, it's Connecticut's largest tree. After you see the tree, cross the bridge to Hopmeadow Street to find Simsbury's historic and bustling downtown. Or head to Rosedale Farms and Vineyards, a favorite of photographers looking for that perfect winery shot. And then, of course, there's the Route 185 Bridge's more famous relative, the gorgeous Old Drake Hill Flower Bridge. Simsbury is a great place to walk, and if you're biking, it might be even better.

West Cornwall Covered Bridge (Housatonic River, Cornwall - Sharon)

Perhaps the most picture-ready of Connecticut's covered bridges, and right up there with those in other New England states too, this barn-red wooden covered lattice truss bridge crosses the Housatonic River in Litchfield County. Though this bridge was built in the late 19th century (and modernized in the 1960s and '70s), a series of earlier bridges have connected the small towns of Cornwall and Sharon (West Cornwall is a part of Cornwall) since sometime in the late 1700s. At 15 feet wide, the bridge can only accommodate one car at a time, so drivers on Route 128 (also called the Sharon-Goshen Turnpike) have to take turns. This works out remarkably well, considering how dangerous it seems when you first encounter the system, and adds to the quaintness of the whole experience.

The area surrounding the bridge is simply beautiful (the phrase "unspoiled by time" may pop into your mind as you drive.) On the Cornwall side, you can still see the building once used as the toll house (which I mentioned in my post about the toll house in Plymouth.) It now houses one of a handful of businesses clustered together on these pleasantly curving roads. Drive the other way, towards the New York border, and you'll reach the center of Sharon,* a classic Connecticut small town laid out so its buildings charmingly line up around the green and continue temptingly down little side-streets.

Arrigoni Bridge (Connecticut River, Portland - Middletown)

The delicate, sky-blue Arrigoni Bridge often comes up in rush-hour traffic reports, but when it's not bothering delayed central Connecticut commuters, it's a lovely landmark that can be appreciated from many vantage points. Completed in 1938, this through arch bridge connects a city known for college students and cupcakes to a town that mostly remains off the tourist radar. Its gently curving steel outline seems to float above Route 17 and Route 66 as they cross the water, and at almost 50 feet wide, it manages to evoke the wide-open sort of river crossing you might expect to find in the Midwest rather than spanning the Connecticut River.

Portland, small in population and not-so-small in area, boasts some architectural surprises (two octagon houses in a row!) and looks like a graceful mix of old river city, comfortably blue collar town, and former industrial center. (The main concern was the brownstone quarries, which provided the raw material for landmark buildings in numerous major East Coast cities.) On the other side of the bridge is Middletown, home of Wesleyan University and numerous cultural institutions. For specifics, click to see why I included Middletown in a previous "Top Five" - 5 Underrated Small Connecticut Cities. From the riverfront near Middletown's broad, welcoming Main Street, you can see traffic crossing the Arrigoni Bridge up above. And you'll also see the bridge if you glance up from Route 9 at that strange moment when it morphs unexpectedly from a highway to a local road complete with traffic lights. This arrangement may be changed eventually, because it is ridiculous, but for now, it's a uniquely weird Connecticut driving experience.


*The town centers of both East Haddam and Sharon are high on my list of places to write proper blog posts about in the future!

Devil's Hopyard

Connecticut's early Puritan settlers would have banned, shunned, or possibly killed me, but I am endlessly fascinated by them. Much of my interest boils down to how freaking serious they were about it all. Say what you will about their rigidity, intolerance, and capacity for cruelty, but you have to be at least a little amazed by how literally they believed in concepts that now seem bizarre to the point of absurdity. Whenever you think they must have been kidding, or exaggerating, you realize that no: they really meant it. They really believed a witch could use her dark magic to make another woman's butter un-churnable; they really thought it evidence of bestiality when a sow gave birth to a piglet that resembled the man accused.

And though we now smile at place names like Satan's Kingdom State Recreation Area and Devil's Den Preserve, the people who named those spots were not amused. When they spoke of the devil they weren't being cute or metaphorical, they were referring to an actual being with whom you might enter into a compact, and whose hooves could cause round holes to form in the rocks beneath the waterfall at what is now Devil's Hopyard State Park in East Haddam.

I didn't look for these pothole formations (created by stones and eddies, not an angry devil, as the legend says) as I stood beside Chapman Falls. I just watched the Eightmile River glide smoothly along before tumbling sixty feet down and coming to rest again at the bottom of the rocks, glistening black in the sun.

You can do a lot of things at Devil's Hopyard: hiking, camping, fishing, and so on. I'm sure these activities are nice too. But because I haven't done them, I will only suggest that you go and stare at the waterfall. (Park at the first lot you encounter entering the park from the north on Hopyard Road.) Go at a time when the flat rocks below the plunging river won't be crowded with other visitors, and you will be the only one standing on the covered bridge. Listen to the roar of the falls and think about Puritans and devils; or, if you're a normal person, think about whatever it is that normal people think about. I don't know what that might be, but I'm sure Devil's Hopyard is the ideal place to ponder it.

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.

Almost-Summer Snapshots

I took a train - not this train - from Essex.


Up to Chester, then down to Deep River, on these old tracks.


Then there was a boat that went up the Connecticut River.


Past Hadlyme and East Haddam.


On the upper deck a flag was flying...Happy Memorial Day Weekend!