Through The Garden Gate—November 2015

November is Elemental   By Leslie Watkins Earth, wind, fire and water—without any one of these elements, there is no life and no garden. While each plays its part in supporting life on earth, soil is most closely associated with gardening. The living soil, so easily taken for granted, is a seething eight-inches of bacteria, […]

Documentary Film Describes Norfolk

Local photographer premiers film at Norfolk Library   By Lindsey Pizzica Rotolo The prolific photographer and writer Christopher Little delighted hundreds of Norfolkians last month with his 40-minute documentary chronicling a year in the life of our town. Showings at the Norfolk Country Club and the Norfolk Library packed the respective houses. Over 400 people […]

New Resident Brings Age-Old Craft to Town

Carving Stone: Adam Paul Heller   By Lindsey Pizzica Rotolo “I wish I was a slave to an age-old trade…” begins “Down in the Valley”, a song by the indie folk band The Head & the Heart. The song expresses a deep yearning to get back to your roots, and lead a more primitive existence. In […]

Photographs by Bruce Frisch Going on Display in Venice

Photos of Renowned Indian Artist to Accompany Retrospective   By Ruth Melville Bruce Frisch’s photographs are well known to readers of Norfolk Now. He is the paper’s staff photographer, and his pictures enliven every issue. He also exhibits his work at the annual Norfolk Artists and Friends show, always including some spectacular nature shots taken […]

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 […]

New Innkeepers at the Manor House

The Power of Intention   By Lindsey Pizzica Rotolo Three years ago, the new Manor House Innkeeper Sheila Blanchette was spending her days in a cubicle crunching numbers for EBSCO Publishing in Ipswich, Mass., and writing a novel at night about an accountant who daydreamed of becoming an innkeeper. Her protagonist’s lifelong dream soon became […]

Norfolk Then…

John Jay, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (1789-1795), dined at this house in Norfolk. The John Jay Papers are housed at Columbia University, and in Jay’s diary for October 12, 1790, he wrote “went to Norfolk – dined at the widow Wilcox’s […]

It’s Only Natural—October 2015

Lichen Communities on Bald-Topped Mountains By Hans M. Carlson Until roughly 13,000 years ago, glaciers scoured and sculpted New England’s hills into the ridges, domes and cliffs we find so familiar today. The melting ice deposited soils in some places, but much of the post-glacial landscape was scraped, barren and rocky. Even in the thinnest […]

Norfolk Firefighters Receive State Recognition

By Ruth Melville In honor of Firefighters Day, held every year on September 6, the State of Connecticut chose this year to recognize the fine work of the Norfolk Volunteer Fire Department (NVFD). On the quiet, sunny late afternoon of September 4, the members of the NVFD, resplendent in their dress uniforms, gathered behind the […]

Rare Visitor Summers in Norfolk

A pair of sandhill cranes spent the summer in Norfolk, according to reports that have filtered in over the past months. On September 22, photographer Savage Frieze captured this one on film on private land in Norfolk’s northwest quadrant. It is an adult Lesser sandhill crane in summer plumage. The birds are famous for the elaborate dancing […]