SHARON — Local French pastry buffs do not mind a bit that the lines are sometimes long at the Blue Gate Farm Bakery in Sharon. After a few years of offering baked goods at a variety of area farmers’ markets, the bakery settled down and opened for business nearly a year ago.
Located on the Sharon side of the Housatonic River where Routes 7 and 4 meet, the bake shop is the work of pastry chef Bruce Young, along with his wife, Yobana, both owners of Blue Gate Farm in Warren. They paused for an interview on Thursday, March 21, after a busy day of preparation for Friday’s sales.
“We’re a small community in Warren,” said Bruce Young, who recalled the beginnings in 2020 at a farmers’ market behind the Warren General Store, later adding a similar farmers’ market in Washington Depot, and then others. Young grew up in Warren and he and Yobana still live there in his boyhood home that had been built by his father.
A Washington Montessori schoolteacher during the week, Yobana welcomes customers at the bakery on weekends. She also handles the bakery’s business details.
Transition from farmers’ markets to retail location came suddenly, according to Young, who recalled the day that he pulled into the gas station and convenience store that stands along Route 4 on the Sharon side of the river just west of Cornwall Bridge.
“I stopped for gas and ran into Liz Macaire, a long-time acquaintance,” he said. She pointed to the building across the road and recommended that he look at it. He remembered that she insisted that he needed to open his bakery there “immediately,” so 48 hours later, he was open for business.
“We haven’t had a slow day since we opened,” Young reported, pleased that the line of customers extends out the door, and that people are sometimes waiting in line before the bakery opens in the morning.
Baked goods are all baked on site. Breads include traditional, European, and the baguettes are done to French weight and size standards. Sourdough is naturally fermented. Multigrain and variations seasonally rotated.
Croissants are made on site. “I start with a scoop of flour, water and yeast, and very expensive French butter,” Young said. The French butter works the best for laminating pastry.
Hard rolls are made fresh every morning, Young said. “I cut and weigh and shape every one of them, about 85 each day.
“I’m pretty fast,” he added.
Young said that he arrives at the bakery each day at 3 a.m., working six days a week. The schedule is necessary in order to fill the bakery shelves with the variety that is sold on the busy weekends.
Area towns have their own designated rolls. “We always have a local roll,” he said. The Cornwall roll is topped with a pistachio ganache, for example.
On a Saturday, Young expects there to be seven types of breads available, and always baguettes. Blue Gate bakes varieties of tarts, and regional French specialty items, including short-crust pastry with black cherries, walnuts, or red plums as a few examples.
Delicate barquettes, shaped like small boats, are filled with lemon curd or fresh fruit as some of the choices. French caneles, local to the Bordeaux region, are a frequent feature.
“We have an astonishing variety,” Young said. “We do what we do best.”
The coffee comes from Sacred Grounds in Sherman. Choices include latte, cappuccino, or espresso. Hot chocolate is made with Lindt chocolate truffles topped with handmade marshmallows.
There is no indoor seating, but customers are welcome to find a spot outdoors to enjoy their purchases. Many summer season patrons walk over from the Housatonic Meadows campgrounds for warm pastries and coffee in the mornings, or some prefer the fresh breakfast sandwiches.
“I’ve been cooking since I was 14,” Young said. He lived in England for nine years working for a French chef whose father was a baker from whom he learned much. He noted that he has been largely self-taught and is always learning.
An unusual companion to a bakery operation, a design and décor note is added by Ivy’s Collective, stylishly occupying the other half of the building’s interior. In high spirits from having acquired pastry before the bakery sells out, visitors can shift gears and view an array of antiques and collectibles. Prices from a few dollars to higher. Ivy’s is owned by former New Yorkers, Ivy and Daniel Kramp, and managed by Liz Macaire, merging talents to create an ever-changing display in an unrushed country environment.
Both the Blue Gate Bakery and Ivy’s Collective are open Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. (the bakery closes earlier if things sell out).
Photo contributed
Sample baked goods offered by the Blue Gate Farm Bakery in Sharon. The rolls with the pistachio ganache (green) topping are called “Cornwall rolls.”
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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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