Flashback: Weir Farm National Historic Site

Last week, when national parks (and many more crucial federally funded programs across the United States) shut down, I started thinking about Connecticut's solitary national park. (Which is a National Historic Site, if you want to get all correct about it.) Weir Farm National Historic Site in Wilton is very tiny as national parks go. You can walk through it for a little while and feel like you're in an untouched wilderness, but pretty soon you realize you're basically in someone's backyard. As if to compensate for that, the property is intensely scenic, like a special concentration of Connecticut's natural beauty in a part of the state that is, compared to other areas, sorely lacking in such amenities.

These pictures are from sometime around 2004 or 2005. Since you can't go to Weir Farm at the moment, or even look at the website, I figured I'd post a little flashback.

Georgetown

You know how Mystic is a village comprised of portions of two different towns? Well, I'll see your Mystic and raise you Georgetown, a village comprised of portions of four different towns. It's located where the corners of Redding, Ridgefield, Weston, and Wilton meet. I grew up 20 minutes from here - "here" being Main Street, Georgetown - and actually drove through Georgetown every time I took Route 7 (about 5 minutes west of here) to the Danbury Mall. Which was pretty often. But I never knew this.

I also never knew that this little central shopping/dining (mostly dining) area existed. It's quite small, just a few blocks. It combines the hilly, little-river-runs-behind it look of Chester or New Preston with ramshackle old mills that seem to belong further east.

When I discovered all this, my mind was slightly blown. But not for long, because it's just like Connecticut to hide a cute village minutes from a major local route, and have that village contain four separate municipalities. To lazily quote Wikipedia:

Georgetown residents officially live in and pay local taxes to one of these four towns, but typically identify themselves as living in Georgetown. Georgetown has its own fire district, which also serves the surrounding rural areas not traditionally included in Georgetown, and its own ZIP code (06829).

I don't actually know if this is as uniquely Connecticut as it seems. I may be living in a physical, cultural, and political Connecti-bubble at the moment. In any case, Georgetown! Who knew?

Before a Fall

It's not fall yet, I keep reminding myself, attempting to cling to what remains of summer. There's still another 18 days before the autumnal equinox, the official first day of the season, and twelve before Rosh Hashanah, the New Year that always feels like a new season to me, and who knows how many days before the first cold morning. But it doesn't matter. It's September, and there are school buses everywhere, with actual school children in them, and no matter what I say to myself, it's basically fall.

Fall has the same seasonal pressures of summer, only it's even worse because it's more fleeting. Even the shortest of summers will drag languorously for a little while, but fall is always in a hurry. You can miss the leaves changing if you don't pay attention; you can entirely skip that brief window where cider is everywhere and end up surrounded by hot chocolate without realizing what hit you. 

The four seasons contain close to the same number of days, but fall feels the shortest. It's probably a Connecticut thing, but it seems to me that summer lasts three to four months if you're lucky, winter six or seven, spring at least two but occasionally (ugh) three, and fall has to fight to schedule itself into the few weeks that are left.

Fall brings its own set of expectations and pressures, revolving around things like baking pies and going on scenic drives and finding the perfect sweater-coat. Much like the first day of school, fall means another chance to get it right this time, but a short chance, easily flubbed.

Luckily the only schools I will be anywhere near this fall are ones like the 1834 Hurlbutt Street School in Wilton, above, which no children have to go back to anymore.

Lambert Corners

Sometimes you have plans, all sorts of interesting plans, work to do and places to go and things to see. But fate says to you, "Sorry. Actually, instead of all that, you're just going to be spending a lot of time in Norwalk." But all was not lost, because the last two days of having to go to Norwalk involved the area near the border with Wilton.

I temped in Wilton once, what feels like a million years ago. On my lunch break I'd either walk down Danbury Road to Dunkin' Donuts, which is really putting oneself at a greater risk for vehicular homicide than any cup of coffee is worth, or I'd drive around, up steep snowy hills past icy ponds, looking for I knew not what. It was sort of like writing this blog, except back then it would never have occurred to me to that anyone would blog about Connecticut, of all things. I never found much during those lunches. But it turns out that one of the simplest, best Wilton finds was right there on the road I took to work every morning. In all those months of bleary starts to dull days, I simply didn't see it.

Lambert Corners is a collection of nine historic buildings (of the oh-so-adorable variety) re-purposed for commercial use. Wilton does this really well, as it happens. So many years later, on a morning when I had no temp job to go to, I stopped at Lambert Corners and lingered there for a few minutes. All around me heavy traffic, presumably made up of tired commuters like I used to be, moved at a crawling pace. But here, before the shops and offices opened, the historic buildings were ensconced in a little oasis of cool, damp calm.

6 Useful (Well, Maybe Not) Facts About Cannondale

1. It's in Wilton. (Thanks for parking those cars there, whoever you are, you made this picture so much more Fairfield County.)

2. It consists of more than Cannon Crossing, the shopping center made up of cute historic buildings like the schoolhouse above, and the Cannondale station, which is on Metro North's Danbury Branch. People (not very many of them) still live in Cannondale; it's an honest to goodness Census-Designated Place.

3. The 19th century buildings in Cannon Crossing were restored by vaudeville, Broadway, and Hollywood actress June Havoc.

In her 60s Ms. Havoc ventured outside show business by creating Cannon Crossing, a Connecticut real estate venture that included antiques, crafts and gift shops and a restaurant in 19th-century buildings that she had restored. She sold her jewelry and other possessions to buy the eight-acre property, in Wilton, and declared it her greatest passion until she sold it in 1989.

Somebody seriously needs to make a movie about this woman. I barely knew any of this stuff, and I certainly would never have connected her with Wilton!

4. The Cannon name comes from the Cannon family, who lived here and opened a store in the late 18th century. The railroad station arrived in 1852 and a Post Office about twenty years later. The area was then called Cannon Station, or Cannon's Station, which was changed to Cannon, or Cannon's, then back to Cannon Station again. At this point people grew concerned that confusion might arise between Cannon and nearby Canaan, so in 1915 the Post Office officially began using the name Cannondale. There is no longer a Post Office in Cannondale, but the name finally stuck. (The part about Canaan comes from Wikipedia, though, so do with that what you will.)

5. These gas pumps are not merely neat-looking, they're significant. They "convey" the "long-time commercial role of Cannondale."

Convenient freight access allowed the Cannondale store to increase the volume and diversity of its offerings, and the increased foot and wagon traffic around the adjacent depot represented a substantial increase in the store's share of the local market.

The turbine is significant too!

Freight access also stimulated a host of processing enterprises, of which scant physical signs remains except for the gristmill, dam, and the now-removed turbine which powered the mill.

6. The area was originally called Pimpewaug, but the Wilton Historical Society says that was "fortunately changed" by white settlers in 1726. At that time white settlers had already been in the area for twenty years, though, so presumably they'd been calling it Pimpewaug and snickering into the cuffs of their poufy sleeves.

(They also would have been completely flummoxed by the business in this picture, which provides "Veterinary Acupuncture and Chinese Herbals.")

Planes, Trains, and Corn Cribs

They say there's nothing so boring as someone else talking about their dreams, but that's just a chance I'll have to take.

My sleeping subconscious has an airport, and a subway station, and a highway. They are not real locations, but each time they appear in my dreams (which is often - in dreams I am usually in transit) they always look the same. The airport is something that might have been called futuristic in the 1980s; it has a lot of oblong curves and gleaming white plastic. All the flights are international and I think there's only one gate. It would be entirely useless as a real airport. The subway station is somewhere in the East 60s - I don't know how I know this with such certainty, but I do. It is vast, sprawling out in all directions and comprised of many different levels, which are connected by stairs. The highest of these levels is sort of a balcony with a domed roof, like an old fashioned shopping arcade. I am always hurrying up or down the stairs in search of my train. The planes and subways in my dreams can go to all sorts of places, but the highway always leads towards Providence. (Though I never get there. I always get lost on the way.) There is sometimes a train (the real , above-ground kind), which goes to an undefined pretty coastal town on Long Island. And on the rare occasion a bus turns up, it always goes to Kansas City. Which I suppose some would define as a nightmare...

Anyway, I do not have dreams about towns themselves. In my head, towns and cities apparently exist only as homes for terminals and transport hubs. But the other night I dreamed of a no-name, non-existent Connecticut town. Though I was asleep I knew this was a generic, all-purpose town, a universal stand-in just like my airport and subway station. In the morning I remembered the town only sketchily. It had a Main Street full of shops, though I never went in them, and it was maybe somewhat rural. I don't know; it's gone.

But when I woke up I was thinking of corn cribs. Did my phantom town have re-purposed corn cribs, like this little shoe repair place in Wilton? Historically preserved corn cribs? Legitimate working corn cribs, actually full of corn? I may never know...