About Taming, and Nearly Wrecking, Litchfield County

Among the six people recognized  by the Northwest Connecticut Arts Council this year for contributions to Litchfield County was historian Peter C. Vermilyea. He teaches at Housatonic Valley Regional High School and Western Connecticut State University, and he writes books about history that are a pleasure to read.

His most recent, “The Hidden History of Litchfield County,” is a breezy and  entertaining account of a part of Connecticut that struck early colonists as a rocky wilderness, “a perfect safe haven for Patriot supplies during the Revolution.”    

Settlers  moving into these Northwest Hills encountered mountains, swamps and rivers, Vermilyea wrote. And as communities gathered, people clearly needed more than Indian paths to move goods across the landscape. Hacking through the woods just did not cut it anymore.

Isolated and wild, “it was a scary, scary place to live,” Vermilyea says. There was crime, there were tales of witchcraft, and “it was a hotbed of counterfeiting.”

And there was development, first with farming, cattle and mills, then “highways,” which aided an iron industry and the  factories that turned out clocks and musical instruments.

That iron industry, however, laid bare thousands of acres of forest. By 1800, Vermilyea says, the air was so polluted  people could not see the sun. And by 1840 “We would not have seen any trees from the high school.” Were it not for repeated forays into the hills by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s and early ’40s “renewing the country’s natural resources,” by planting many, many thousands of red pine, European larch, white spruce and Scotch pine, these great hills would look very different now.

Vermilyea is pleasant and open, with the lean look that athletes have. He grew up reading history books from his grandmother’s library, and most memorably he recalls “Time-Life’s History of World War II,” histories of the Civil War and a National Geographic with pullout maps of the Civil War. His parents liked to mine an old foundation with a metal detector and Vermilyea would help unearth old wrenches, scissors, a butter knife, nuts and bolts. “I bet they are still in my parents’ garage.”

After high school, Gettysburg College was a perfect fit, and there he learned that “history is not facts; it’s about ideas and different ways to view the past.”

He knows not everyone loves history, but he finds that most people love local history. Learning that Route 7 started out as an Indian trail intrigues people, and his book is full of references to local landmarks and their significance. He also writes about the Congregational Church and how, at one time, residents could join another church, but they still were obliged to financially support the Congregational church in town. 

He writes about the Great Awakening, the Underground Railroad, the rise and fall of various industries from iron making to chair making; he writes about ways Litchfield County towns took care of the impoverished; how children were educated. And he reports on activities surrounding the Civil War and of the 30 young men drafted to serve from Sharon,  all but one hired his replacement. 

He wrote “Hidden History of Litchfield County,” hoping that it would sell 50 to 100 copies, enough to cover the cost of the photo rights used as illustrations.  He has done much better than that, he says. 

“Hidden History of Litchfield County” is printed by The History Press, www.historypress.net. It is available on Amazon, and the Scoville Memorial Library in Salisbury has a copy.