AMENIA — A well-appointed automotive service establishment with accommodating staff is ready to serve the area’s automotive repair needs. Citywide Automotive North, located at 3387 Route 343, has been open for business since Feb. 1, following a few months of building renovation.
“I grew up around the automotive industry,” said owner and chief mechanic Toby Kiernan during a conversation on Wednesday, Feb. 26.
Getting the building ready to open included “a ton of cleaning,” Kiernan said, along with painting the interior, carpeting the offices and applying epoxy to the shop floor.
Services offered to the community include 24-hour towing service, all automotive mechanicals, body repair and auto sales, Kiernan said. Services also include oil changes, brake service and tires. The tow services offer a flatbed tow truck and a standard wrecker tow.
Citywide Automotive is equipped and experienced with all makes and models of vehicles, including high end luxury and classic cars. Electric vehicles, however, are not a specialty.
Kiernan’s uncle, Peter Kiernan, brings 45 years of auto repair experience to the business, delighting in serving as a personable volunteer assistant in the shop.
“We love it here,” Peter Kiernan said of the town. He divides his time between Amenia and his home in Florida.
Completing work on a car belonging to a veteran, Peter Kiernan set about giving the car a washing, a small, and yet appreciated, reward for that customer’s military service.
“It’s the least I could do,” he said.
While customers wait for their vehicles, there will be time to admire the classic cars Pete Kiernan has lovingly restored to their original glory.
“The cars are most certainly his pride and joy,” Toby Kiernan said of his uncle’s cars.
“My uncle Pete is my mentor in the automotive industry and business. What I am doing here I could not do without his knowledge and support,” Toby said.
Citywide Automotive North has opened its wide doors in Amenia, ready to serve the community’s automotive needs. Owner Toby Kiernan, foreground, is ably assisted by his uncle, Peter Kiernan, in the full-service enterprise, conveniently situated on Route 343.Leila Hawken
Veterans and senior citizens receive a 10% discount on service.
“We come from a long line of veterans who served. We support our troops and first responders as much as possible in appreciation for their service,” Toby Kiernan said.
“My uncle loves to BBQ,” Kiernan said, and there is plenty of room. Once the weather gets warm, on Fridays at lunch time Citywide Automotive expects to have the grill going, welcoming all comers for a festive free lunch.
Toby Kiernan recognized the challenges in finding qualified shop workers today, He said that as the shop gets busier, they expect to contact the local BOCES training program to find help and to explore ways that they might help to mentor the next generation of expert mechanics.
Hours of operation are Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturdays 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. The business is closed on Sundays. Towing services are open 24 hours. To contact Citywide Automotive, phone 845-789-1300.
“We appreciate the people we’ve met from Amenia and surrounding towns. They have been kind, helpful and courteous. We are happy to be in business here,” Toby Kiernan said.
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Marge Parkhurst with a collection of historic nails recovered from wall cavities during restoration work.
“At first it just looked like old paint,” said Parkhurst, who has been painting and restoring historic homes in Litchfield County for decades. “Until I realized it was a stencil, a beautiful pattern that repeated.”
She kept going carefully — a wet sponge, hot water, a little fabric softener — peeling back until she could see it clearly. A climbing vine emerged, applied in vertical runs to give the wall the look of wallpaper. Someone had signed it. The signature was faint, tucked above the baseboard in the corner, not fully legible. But the date was clear: 1870.
Parkhurst, owner of Cottage & Country Painting Co., has worked in enough old houses to develop a practiced eye for what they conceal — understanding that layers of paint, paper and plaster in a 19th-century New England home form a kind of compressed archive of the people who lived there.
The stencil bore a strong resemblance to what historians call Moses Eaton-type stenciling — a tradition of itinerant craftsmen who traveled New England in the early 1800s with portable kits of cut-pattern stencils. Their trade flourished because imported wallpaper was expensive. Stenciling offered the same visual effect at a fraction of the cost.
“These stencilers typically worked for a combination of cash, food and lodging,” Parkhurst said. “Their compensation was modest by any standard.” She paused, “He was a tradesman. But the work he left behind — that’s art.”
The vine pattern was dull with age but still legible. One section had survived intact beneath the layers of paper. The homeowners chose not to paint over it — instead building a wooden frame around it, a small window into 1870.
“Preservation means protecting something to prevent further deterioration,” she said. “Restoration means returning something to a previous state. In that room, we preserved what was there.”
This bottle is from the Hartmann Brewing Company of Bridgeport, CT, found inside a wall of a former railroad outbuilding relocated from Canaan to Colebrook CT. The bottle was sealed with a glass stopper held by a wire, inside was a grocery list written on the back of an envelope postmarked 1915. Photo courtesy of Marge Parkhurst/Cottage & Country Painting Company
A Station’s Secrets
Not every discovery is decorative. Some are written into the bones of a building.
Parkhurst’s own home in Colebrook is a former railroad outbuilding moved from Canaan in 1920. Scraping the trim revealed it had once been sage green — and beneath that, a warm orange-brown soaked into the wood grain. “Old paint was made more like a stain back in the 1800s,” she said. “It penetrated the wood rather than sitting on top of it — so there’s never a shine.”
Up in the attic, eye bolts still anchored in the framing mark where cables stabilized the building during its move a century ago.
The most memorable find came by accident. Cutting open a wall under the stairs, she found a clear glass bottle sealed with a glass stopper held by a rusted wire. The label read: Hartmann Brewing Co., Bridgeport, Conn. It took days of careful oiling to free the stopper. Inside: a handwritten list of sandwiches and drinks, a postage stamp still attached. Not treasure. But a treasure just the same.
“I worked for days to get that thing open — and it was just somebody’s lunch order.”
Newspapers stuffed into wall cavities, hand-wrought nails, paint layers thin as stain — over 50 years, Parkhurst has cataloged the details that tell a trained eye when a house was built and by whom. Litchfield County’s architecture is unusually varied: Georgian and Federal-style houses on Litchfield’s Main Street, industrial buildings along the rivers in Torrington and Winsted. “Each town has its own fingerprint,” she said.
The most consequential mistake she sees is changing a home’s character. “When you paint over stained woodwork, you hide the details. You can’t get them back.” She has talked more than a few owners out of it. Some have listened.
Not long ago, Parkhurst and her grandchildren gathered a few small objects, wrote a letter and tucked it into a wall of her Colebrook home. Someone will find it — a record of people who were once here.
“Walls still surprise me,” she said. “If you look hard enough, you can find buried treasure.”
In a county full of houses whose walls hold untold stories — stenciled by traveling tradesmen, nailed together by farmers, papered over by housewives following the fashions — Marge Parkhurst has spent a lifetime reminding us that history doesn’t only live in museums. Sometimes it’s hiding just behind the wallpaper.
Marge Parkhurst is the owner of Cottage & Country Painting Co. She can be reached at marge@cottageandcountryct.com or 860-379-4748.
Sarah Belzer is a writer, editor and creative director whose career has crossed journalism, advertising, film and cultural commentary. Managing Editor of The American Rant and founder of Jump Advertising, she has spent three decades shaping narratives for media and national and global brands.
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