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Northeast
Connecticut By Nancy and Richard Woodworth Few people realize that Connecticut's oft-overlooked "Quiet Corner" once was a fashionable summer resort of the Lenox-Newport ilk. Starting in the late 1870s, it was known as "Newport without the water." During its gilded days, wealthy New Yorkers and Bostonians summered in Pomfret and Woodstock on vast country estates with dreamlike names like Gwyn Careg, Courtlands and Glen Elsinore. John Addison Porter, a Hartford newspaper editor and Pomfret resident, wrote in 1896 that his town was "one of the natural garden spots of the state – the ideal peaceful New England landscape. It bears on its face the unmistakable signs of being the abode of people of culture. No town of its size in Connecticut represents more wealth, but this is used unostentatiously and is in perfectly good taste." The Depression and post-war priorities took their toll on the wealth, as did the move to the South of the textile mills upon which the local economy had been based. "The quiet corner was the neglected corner," says Nini Davis, regional tourism director whose husband is the area's state senator. "When the mills closed, many people here gave up." But not for long. Area officials and the National Park Service turned their efforts toward forming a National Heritage Corridor to preserve a region called "the last green valley" in the crowded megalopolis between Boston and Washington, D.C. President Clinton signed the bill so designating most of the area in 1994. Meanwhile, sleepy Putnam, once the area's leading mill town, rapidly turned into the antiques center of New England. The change stimulated both the locale's economy and its psyche. When Herb and Terry Kinsman moved back East from California to open the area's first B&B, "everybody thought we were crazy." Now there are more than 30 B&Bs and two inns. Adds restaurateur Jimmie Booth, who moved long ago from New York to her husband's family farm and launched the renowned Golden Lamb Buttery: "Everything's changing out here. We're not the quiet corner any more. The developers are building in all the woods around." Developers indeed are at work, but the change everyone talks about locally is relative. Northeast Connecticut remains the state's least-developed area. "The Street" in Pomfret carries much of the grace of a century ago. A low-key sophistication is lent by Pomfret, the Rectory, Hyde and Marianapolis preparatory schools and the headquarters of firms like Crabtree & Evelyn, one of the area's largest employers. The visitor has a rare opportunity to share in the good life here. You can stay in restored inns that once were the homes of the rich and famous. You can have bed and breakfast with the aristocracy in houses filled with family treasures. Your host may be an artist, a furniture maker, a pediatrician, a music lover, a marketing consultant or a carpenter. In no other area have we found the innkeepers and their facilities as a group so understated and so fascinating. You'll feel as if you're a character in a Currier & Ives etching in this area of rambling stone walls, rolling hills and fertile farmlands, languishing mill towns and tranquil villages. But get yourself going. As the antiquers have discovered, the Quiet Corner won't be quiet forever. Material excerpted from Inn Spots & Special Places in New England, by Nancy and Richard Woodworth. Copyright 2004. Wood Pond Press E-mail feedback to: Home
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