Natural Supplements Company Helps to Grow the Local Economy

    By Colleen Gundlach What started as a small company with just five employees across the street from Lime Rock Park has grown to a worldwide business employing more than 50 people in the center of North Canaan. In a nondescript building on Railroad Street, the Vibrant Health company markets their food-based supplements throughout […]

Old-Time General Store Opens in Salisbury

White Hart Provisions   By Lindsey Pizzica Rotolo “Would you like a homemade soda?” is a question I have been asked zero times in my life, but that offering, and other nostalgic touches, is what welcomed me to White Hart Provisions in Salisbury last week. Stepping into the new general store and café at the […]

Torrington Yarn Bomb Brings Color, Art and Whimsy to the City

  By Julie Scharnberg   I read an article about yarn bombing that appeared in Yankee Magazine about four years ago and passed it around to some knitters, thinking, Who wouldn’t want to do this? How fun! Yarn bombing is a form of temporary street art where brightly colored yarn in any form—knitted, crocheted, woven, […]

The Winsted Diner, Where the Food Is Finer

  By Colleen Gundlach Tucked sideways next to the Odd Fellows Building, two doors up from the YMCA in Winsted, is a piece of local history that is often overlooked. The hand-carved wooden hot dog man in front is the only reason that a driver traveling through town would have reason to give it a […]

Rebuilding the American Chestnut Tree

Rescuing a Forest Icon   By Ruth Melville From Connecticut to Mississippi, along the Appalachian Mountains and into the Ohio Valley, the American chestnut tree, able to grow as big as 130 feet tall and 10 feet in diameter, once dominated the forest canopy. Although American chestnuts were almost wiped out by disease by 1950, […]

Mia Weiner Opens Pinacoteca Art Gallery in Bantam

By Ruth Melville Art lovers in northwest Connecticut now have a new and unusual gallery to visit. Norfolk resident Mia Weiner has recently opened Pinacoteca in Bantam, where she will show and sell European paintings and drawings from the 16th to 20th century. Although she has been a gallery owner and dealer for 35 years, […]

Lime Rock Park Gears Up for Seventh Decade

By Lindsey Pizzica Rotolo Driving down sleepy Route 112 on a weekday afternoon in May, the average motorist would never know that Lime Rock Park is absolutely humming with activity. I, for one, expected the track office to contain one or two part-time workers and the grounds to be relatively empty. Not exactly–the small track […]

Ellen Griesedieck’s Mural Project Celebrates the American Worker

By Ruth Melville Ellen Griesedieck thinks big. Her latest project has been 15 years in the making and is five stories tall. Griesedieck is the artist and driving force behind the American Mural Project. The three-dimensional mural, designed as a tribute to the working people of the United States, will eventually be 120 feet long, […]

West Street Grill: An Award-Winning Farm-to-Table Restaurant in Litchfield

By Babs Perkins Nestled inconspicuously beneath a striped awning at the lower end of the Litchfield town green, the West Street Grill has long been regarded as one of the area’s best restaurants. By no means a “secret” spot (it has had numerous mentions in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Litchfield County Times, The […]

Berkshire Mountain Distillers’ New Locale

By Babs Perkins Seven years ago Chris Weld bought a farm that would become home to the first legal distillery in Massachusetts since prohibition, Berkshire Mountain Distillers (BMD). Last fall he upped stakes and moved his award-winning operation out from the shadow of East Mountain in Sheffield and set up shop in a brand-new, custom-built […]