Falls Village

 WELCOME TO FALLS VILLAGE.

Think of Falls Village as a video that someone paused around 1850 and never came back to play again.

The website of the Town of Canaan-Falls Village explains the frozen-in-time quality:

Once there was a dream that Falls Village would become an industrial mecca. It would be fueled with an abundance of hydropower thanks to the miles of stone canals running along the Housatonic River and the great Falls. Those canals (along with much of Falls Village) were built up over the course of several years. In 1851, the canals finally opened. The crowds cheered, the water flowed, and everything leaked…..Thanks to that dream and the fact that it died, Falls Village lives on, much as it was in 1851.

THE FALLS VILLAGE INN

But before I get to Falls Village, I feel I have to at least attempt to explain on a very basic level what the deal is with the Canaans. Falls Village is one of several villages in the town of Canaan. (One of these is called South Canaan.) But because it is the town center, people who live or work in Falls Village will refer to Falls Village as if it is a town in itself - or in other words, as if the town of Canaan and the village of Falls Village are the same. 

North Canaan is a separate town, located north of Canaan (this cannot always be assumed in Connecticut; East Hampton can be found 30 miles west of Hampton), which contains a village called Canaan as well as other sections called Canaan Valley and East Canaan. Just as Canaan and Falls Village are sometimes used interchangeably, so North Canaan and Canaan (i.e. the village of Canaan) can also mean the same thing. (The United States Post Office could use this part of Connecticut for a PSA about why it's so important to put the right Zip Code on your letters.)

But wait, I'm not done. Because about an hour and a half south of this confusion, there is New Canaan. New Canaan began not as a town or a village, but a parish on the Norwalk-Stamford border. The people who went to church in Canaan Parish lived in one of those two cites until their new town was incorporated in 1801. But by that time, the name Canaan was already taken by the aforementioned Litchfield County town, so the Fairfield County parishioners had to settle for New Canaan. (Possibly the only example to date of anyone from New Canaan ever not getting what they wanted on the first try.)

THIS TRAIN CAR, AND THE OLD DEPOT ON RAILROAD STREET, RECALL FALLS VILLAGE'S PAST

Now, back to Falls Village. Before the Housatonic Railroad came to town in 1841, the settlement was actually called Canaan Falls. (I know, the hilarity never ends.) Falls Village was the name given to the train station, and eventually it came to refer to the whole town.

TOWN OF CANAAN OFFICES

In terms of area, Canaan (or Falls Village, if you prefer) is fairly large, at 33 square miles. But the Falls Village District, the national historic district where I took these pictures, is only about 70 acres, consisting of "the half dozen square blocks that were built up in the middle of the 19th century as a result of Falls Village being selected as a station stop when the Housatonic Railroad was put through in the late 1830s/ early 1840s."

THE DAVID M. HUNT MEMORIAL LIBRARY, 1891

The historic district can feel almost eerily remote. Though it fills up on occasion for events, like the annual summer car show that crowds Main Street with classic vehicles and moseying spectators, on a normal day it is intensely quiet. 

THE FORMER FALLS VILLAGE SAVINGS BANK BUILDING 

Because it's set off of Route 7, the main road through the area, you could drive past this town center many times without realizing it was there. In that sense, it is the opposite of a tourist magnet like nearby Kent, where Route 7 runs straight through the middle of town.

TOYMAKERS CAFE, IN A FORMER HARDWARE STORE

It reminds me a bit of small towns in the West or Midwest that suddenly spring up as you drive towards them then abruptly end, giving way to emptiness. But because this is Connecticut, there is no sense of frontier newness here, and the surrounding countryside is hilly and lush. This is an isolated village, but it does not stand in an open space surrounded by flat fields or ice-blue mountains or endless straight highways. Instead, it hides between waterfalls and winding roads.

 BEEBE HILL SCHOOL

And yes, there is a one-room schoolhouse. The Beebe Hill School was built in 1918 to replace an earlier school building that burned down.

The Other Corner

The northeast is the "Quiet Corner"; the only corner of Connecticut, as far as I know, that has a name. The southeast corner, where I live, is known for its history and casinos and longstanding ties to the sea, but in travel articles about the state, it’s often ignored. (The Neglected Corner.) The southwest corner, where I grew up, is known mainly for being near New York. (The Hedge Fund Corner, perhaps.) Recently I found myself staring at a map of the northwestern tip of the rectangle and wondering just what, exactly, was up there. I asked my Mom, who still lives in the southwest, but she had no idea either. So we set out in search of the mysteries of what I began to call "the Other Corner."

We drove north from Westport through wooded hills and big box store strip malls and road construction. A tractor supply store appeared and soon enough the suburban sameness was replaced with tiny farms and the Housatonic River began to snake slowly along beside the road. We passed a yellow Cow Crossing sign, shortly followed, comfortingly, by cows.

None of this was new. I’d been to Kent, where the sign announces that you are welcome but you kind of sense that you’re really not, and to preppy Litchfield, where people’s heads swivel around like oscillating fans when an outsider walks into a café. This wasn’t the Corner yet.

A little further north, things began to get odd, in the best possible way. A large stone chimney rose from the ground, surrounded by a circle of grass. It was only a remnant of this region’s industrial past, what’s left of the 1800’s Kent Iron Furnace, but it looked like some sort of mystical ancient monument.

We drove into West Cornwall, which has an old red-painted covered bridge. (You’d think this would be in nearby Cornwall Bridge, but you’d be wrong.) The bridge was dark inside and just wide enough for one vehicle at a time. The town was so perfect and diminutive that we cooed over it as if it was a toy town on a store shelf.

Multiple Cornwalls and numerous Canaans, all pocket-sized and adorable, overlapped in ways incomprehensible to non-locals. In Falls Village, technically another Canaan (don’t ask), the houses were elegant in a way that contemporary buildings never are, as if the town had an ordinance against extras and flourishes. We tried to explore but the gently inclining roads formed triangles which led us back to where we started. It was like they were purposely keeping us from something, vigilantly protecting what was hidden around the next turn.

The Housatonic reappeared on the other side of the road, no longer placid but flowing swiftly. The views became more expansive and the hills less thickly wooded. Now we were really in the corner of the map.

We turned east where Connecticut borders New York and Massachusetts and drove until we arrived at Haystack Mountain State Park. We drove up a one-way road, and up and up, wondering what would happen if someone came down. But no one did. When the road ended we walked, first along a soft path of dead leaves under a canopy of trees, then up an increasingly steep hill, then up stone steps two feet high. After half an hour, we were over 1,700 feet above sea level, staring up at a sturdy stone tower. A staircase curved around the inside of the cylinder; the upper level had a peaked wooden roof and a 360 degree panorama of the Berkshires. We felt thoroughly alone, but for some reason we whispered.

We drove on, intending to complete the Corner by continuing west, and then suddenly we were lost. Deeply, profoundly lost, the kind of lost you can only get in your home state on a clear day with a map on your lap. If it wasn’t all so pretty, so serene and leafy and empty, I would almost have suspected a plot. If I lived in a place like this, in one of the grand yet understated white houses that occasionally interrupted the defensive line of trees beside the road, would I want people to be able to find it?

We had been lost for so long that I couldn’t believe we hadn’t crossed a state line, when suddenly we were found. Or rather, we found something: a whole city (or in this case, a city wrapped in a town) sprang up seemingly out of the earth. Winsted, with its broad main street (widened after the devastating Great Flood of 1955 destroyed the original) looked like an Ohio River town taken apart and transported to New England to be reassembled. We passed a movie theatre, a post office, coffee shops, neat lamp-posts with banners in a row. I stared as if I’d never seen such things in my life.

We abandoned the Corner plan and zigzagged up to Riverton, which appeared to be waiting for a 4th of July parade. Flags waved proudly on both sides of the main street and the smart buildings practically begged to be draped in bunting. Even a disused factory looked distinguished. We entered the adorable white-painted General Store (really a convenience store-slash-small deli), where we looked similar enough to the other people, but heads swiveled and we could not have felt more out of place. The attitude, like the architecture, was vintage Western Connecticut: a subtle but unmistakable dismissal. We accepted their judgment, and started back.

So I’d answered some of my questions about the Other Corner, but now I had more. I wanted to learn what roads I’d been on when I was lost. I wanted to know what gave the stone structures and silent woods and deceptive roads their mysterious feeling. I wanted to figure out what was so good up there that they didn’t want me to find it.