Election officials report tepid response to early voting debut
Lisa Sheble, shown here depositing her ballot, was the first person in Salisbury to take advantage of early voting on Tuesday, March 26.
Karin Gerstel
Poll workers awaited the arrival of early voters at Cornwall Town Hall on Tuesday, March 26.Debra A. Aleksinas
Poll workers hand a blank ballot to Bunny McGuire, who became the fifth person to cast an early vote in North Canaan on Tuesday, March 26.Debra A. Aleksinas
Kent resident Rob Gerowe took advantage of early voting on Thursday, March 28 at town hall for the April 2 Presidential Preference Primary.Debra A. Aleksinas
Sharon registrars, from left, Marel Rogers, Patricia Chamberlain and BZ Coords reviewed early voting procedures as they awaited voters on Thursday March 28.Debra A. Aleksinas
From left, Falls Village poll workers Corinna Fleming, ballot clerk, Susan Kelsey, registrar, Dorothy Jacquemin, ballet clerk and Roxann Whitaker, moderator, review early voting paperwork as they awaited voters on Thursday, March 28.Debra A. AleksinasLatest News
Sharon’s forgotten animal pounds draw new attention
Alec Linden
Jun 10, 2026
Lynn Kearcher and her husband, Carl Chaiet, pull brush from within the pound’s walls just off Sharon Mountain Road. Kearcher said the boulder embedded in the slope at the back of the pound is a unique architectural feature.
Alec Linden
SHARON – While many think of the “pound” as a place for stray dogs, a century and a half ago town pounds were a fixture of life in rural Connecticut, used to temporarily contain wandering livestock. Today, a Sharon resident is working to restore one of those long-forgotten stone enclosures.
Lynn Kearcher, a town selectman pursuing the project independently, has spent months restoring an old-fashioned pound on Sharon Mountain Road in an effort to preserve a little-known piece of the town’s agrarian history.
“It’s a structure that links us to our past in what was a very important period,” she said June 4, while pulling brush from the pound’s low stone walls. The site, near the intersection of Sharon Mountain and Jackson Hill roads, is owned by three private landowners, all of whom have given permission for the effort.
The now-tidy plot looked very different just several months ago, Kearcher said. Since then, she, her husband, Carl Chaiet, and other volunteers have spent many hours clearing weeds and brush, while several community members donated money to hire Applewood Tree Care to remove several dead trees from the site.
Kearcher is continuing to raise money to restore the pound to an appearance she believes reflects the dignity such a vestige of town history deserves.
In pre-barbed wire days, when farms were more numerous and often smaller with limited means of monitoring livestock, New England towns built special corrals for animals on the loose. A resident known as the pound keeper rounded up rogue animals in a common pen. Farmers could either pay a fee to collect them or surrender them to the town, which could then auction the animals and keep the earnings.
Town pounds emerged in New England from the earliest days of livestock husbandry up until the late 19th century, and their importance in that era is hard to overstate, said history writer Matthew E. Thomas, author of a 2023 book on New England’s remaining animal pounds.
“You had to have a pound to be able to prevent all of these different livestock animals from escaping from their farms and wreaking havoc in neighbors’ property, which did not make for good neighborly dealing sometimes,” Thomas said.
“These are wonderful monuments to the past,” he added, noting that a runaway cow could wreck someone’s food stores for the hard winter ahead.
Thomas’s research identified approximately 170 known pounds intact today in New England, but he said he’s grateful to residents like Kearcher who show that there are likely many more lost to time in yards and woods across the region.
“It just makes it so much more meaningful to know that there are people out there that genuinely care about preserving our early American history,” he said.
Kearcher has identified two more suspected pounds nearby, with one hidden in the woods farther south on Sharon Road and the other sitting in a thicket next to Fairchild Road. Both are located on land owned by the Sharon Land Trust, which has given permission for future restoration.
The goal, Kearcher said, is to protect these sites with an ordinance that would herald them as artifacts of Sharon’s history, potentially dating back to the early 18th century. Kearcher has been communicating with the state archeologist to organize a visit that may shed some light on the specific stories of the structures.
For his part, Thomas said the pounds, while forgotten by many, are a strong reminder of a different way of living in the countryside: “A time,” he wrote, “when nearly all social, economic, religious and political issues were handled primarily at the local level.” In that bygone era, sometimes locking up a cow or pig for a few days was another means to keep the peace.
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Sharon Housing Trust, BOE discuss shared water infrastructure options
Aly Morrissey
Jun 10, 2026
SHARON – Representatives from the Sharon Housing Trust appeared before the Board of Education June 8, seeking assistance with a water supply issue that could affect plans to convert the former Sharon Community Center into four affordable apartments.
Architect and Housing Trust board member Andrew Ferentinos said engineers determined the building’s planned fire sprinkler system will require a dedicated water line. The Housing Trust had intended to connect the building to water service from neighboring properties it owns, but discovered the existing infrastructure lacks sufficient capacity.
Ferentinos outlined three possible solutions, including trenching across Route 44 to connect directly to the water main, replacing the existing line between Sharon Center School and the community center, or tapping into the school’s water service before the school’s meter. A decision may be needed by the end of June because the state is expected to pave Route 44 in August.
During the discussion, contractor Will Case said the school’s water service appears to be supplied by an aging two-inch pipe that may eventually need replacement. He suggested any future upgrade could provide additional capacity for both properties.
Board members raised questions about liability, insurance and costs. Housing Trust representatives said the organization would pay for any work needed to support the project. No decision was made, and further engineering analysis and discussion are expected later this month.
In the meantime,BOE decided to allow Case to dig two test pits this weekend to check for ledge – or solid bedrock – and to more closely examine the existing pipes. Further discussion is expected to be held during a special BOE meeting later this month as plans would need to be finalized and in motion by early July, according to Ferentinos.
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Travels with Gary
Geoffrey Olans
Jun 10, 2026
Gary Hufner, left, and Geoff Olans
Madi Long
‘Excuse me, Gary!” “No, EX-CUSE me, Geoff!” That sarcastically polite exchange captures a key aspect of my relationship with Gary Hufner, my co-driver at The Lakeville Journal Company. En route to our deliveries, our conversations are typically punctuated by friendly jibes, jousting and…peals of laughter.
If you’ve seen a solidly-built middle-aged man with a toothy grin and two days of grayish stubble wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a Tractor Supply baseball cap, you may have seen Gary. If you’ve seen someone matching this description bounding along outside of La Bonne’s with a bundle of newspapers, you’ve definitely seen him.
When I first met Gary about a year and a half ago, we seemed to have little in common. I’m a fan of podcasts; Gary hates them. I like lively roundtable conversations about politics and philosophy; he rolls his eyes at the mere mention. My go-to is singer-songwriter music and jazz; he gets restless if he’s not listening to bluegrass, country or Americana. Hmmm. Tricky.
Yet surprisingly, this odd-couple dynamic has worked amazingly well. Despite (or possibly because of) our feisty exchanges, we enjoy each other’s company and have become good friends. We’ve certainly learned a ton from one another: Because of me, Gary is more aware of the importance of the Strait of Hormuz, what Mulligatawny Soup is, and who Wendell Barry is. Because of him, I’ve learned much more about the history, backroads and personalities of this wonderful area we live in.
One day, driving south on Route 41 from The Hotchkiss School to Sharon, Gary pointed west to two trees in the middle of a large field, Mudge Pond shimmering in the far distance. “Know about Twin Oaks?” he asked. “No, what’s to know?” I responded. He then recounted the story of two iconic oak trees, integral to one of the most cherished vistas in Litchfield County, Connecticut, that had been around since before the American Revolution. The two original trees, he explained, were felled in storms and replaced with much younger ones by the Sharon Land Trust in 2013.
Another day, driving south on Route 7 towards Kent, a mile and a half south of Cornwall Bridge, Gary alerted me to a colossal moss-covered boulder that juts out onto the left side of the road. “As a prank, local teenagers put a little stick between the chin of the boulder and the ground to scare drivers into thinking that a megaton weight could easily come crashing down on them!”
I’ve driven both these roads for years and, until recently, was never aware of these little details, little details that can make a big difference into one’s understanding of a place.
Gary gets into some funny situations.
For instance, there is an older woman at a cafe on our route who goes gaga every time she sees Gary. With a very pronounced New York City accent, she holds court like the local mayor and goes out of her way to make sure that everyone within earshot has been introduced. Given their mutual affection, she once joked that maybe she and Gary should date. But Gary, playing along, said he’d need to see her financials first.
As we make our way along our delivery routes every Wednesday and Thursday, Gary and I come into contact with scores of people and we do our best to learn and remember their names. But there will always be that awkward and embarrassing moment when we come upon someone whose name we desperately want to remember but can’t. Gary’s gambit for not getting tied up in this knot is sleight of hand. “Oh, hi,” he’ll say, “good to see you! I always forget how to spell your last name.” This approach has backfired, of course, as when the answer he once got was “S-M-I-T-H!”
Parked in front of the Sharon Package Store, one of the more than fifty retail accounts we deliver newspapers to, Gary showed me a video of a farm engine he’d picked up the previous weekend. When not working for the Journal, Gary is buying, selling, repairing and collecting antique machinery and gadgetry, mainly but not exclusively farm related. This would include tractors, hit-and-miss engines, corn grinders, ice tongs, egg scales, mangles, etc. There’s a water motor from the 1890s sitting outside the front entrance of the Lakeville Journal Company’s office in Falls Village that once powered our printing press. He’d like to try to get it going again.
I often ask Gary to be my teacher, especially when it comes to farming and machinery. One day my question to him was pretty basic: “So, how does a 4-stroke engine work?” “All you really need to know is this,” he answered, “intake-compression-power-exhaust.” I couldn’t be sure whether he was describing a 4-stroke engine or the nature of our topsy-turvy relationship!
Geoffrey Olans delivers The Lakeville Journal and The Millerton to retail outlets on Wednesday, Thursday, and the occasional Friday. He lives in Millerton.
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Let's hear it - June 11, 2026
Lakeville Journal
Jun 10, 2026
This Week
Region One officials are beginning a yearlong study of how its schools are organized. The study is expected to look at long-term questions around enrollment, costs and how schools serve students across the region. Consolidation is not the only question, but it is likely to be one of the most closely watched.
What should matter most as Region One studies the future of its schools: cost, educational opportunity, town identity, travel time or something else?
Send your responses to publisher@lakevillejournal.com by Monday, June 8 at 10 a.m. or comment on Facebook or Instagram.
We’ll publish a selection in next week’s paper.
Last Week’s Question
Where do you shop for groceries?
How do price, selection, distance, hours,
or transportation shape where you go?
“Mostly Stop & Shop in Canaan - the cost of the gas to get to and from anywhere else completely negates any savings from going somewhere less expensive, unless I happen to be going that way already.”
— Ashlee Baldwin, North Canaan
“Big Y in Great Barrington, Stop and Shop in Canaan for anything quick, and BJs in Torrington/Costco in Waterbury for bulk stuff.”
— Wintress Ross
“We shop at LaBonne’s Markets here in Salisbury. It’s convenient and their employees are all very friendly and always helpful. Their meat and seafood are top quality and the available products in every department are too. I tend to plan our meals around their weekly flyer and it works very well for the two of us.”
— Barbara Marshall, Salisbury
“Guido’s in Great Barrington because you can’t beat the quality of foods and staff. Farmer’s Market and farm stands for produce and local meats. The Local in West Cornwall for produce and local meats. For a few items in between Guido’s runs, we go to Sharon Farm Market or Kent IGA depending on what other errands I’m running.
— Michelle Shipp Schatz-Mullins, Cornwall
“I live in Sharon so I visit Sharon Market 3 times a week for cold cuts, bread, prepared foods or a sandwich. I also shop at LaBonne’s in Salisbury twice a month. For major shopping I go to Stop & Shop in either Canaan or Torrington”
— Johnny Martin, Sharon
“Aldi’s is definitely worth the drive, what costs over $150 at Big Y or Stop & Shop is usually around $50 there.”
— Tony Baker
“Canaan Stop & Shop and once a month trip to BJ’s. Plus, I will bike to LaBonne’s for something special.”
— Roxi Foster, Falls Village
“TriCorner FEED in Millerton. As single mom and head of household they are a life saver with their income based sliding scale memberships. Plus everything is local and fresh and they do a good latte!”
— Ali DeProdocini, Salisbury
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Trump’s smash and grab of the Treasury
James Speyer
On the very first day of his second term, Donald Trump pardoned all of the “J6ers” — those Trump supporters who, at his behest, sought on January 6, 2021 to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to Joe Biden by laying siege to the Capitol and violently attacking the Capitol police defending it. Hundreds of these traitors were convicted of felonies and imprisoned.
The pardons were a monstrous and unparalleled breach of the public trust and poured salt on the gaping wound the country suffered on that darkest of days for our democracy.
On May 18, 2026, Trump plumbed even greater depths of depravity. Through his acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — that thug with a law license who had previously served as Trump’s criminal defense attorney — he announced the creation of a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, which he subsequently made clear was intended to reward the pardoned J6ers. Even some Republicans could not contain their disgust. Senator Mitch McConnell, for example, described it as a “slush fund to pay people who assault cops” and called it “morally wrong” and “utterly stupid.”
The fate of the slush fund is unclear. After some initial Republican pushback, Blanche told Congress that he does not intend to move forward with it, but he refused to put that pledge in writing. Even after Blanche’s comments, Trump told the press he “loves” the slush fund and “think[s] it’s so important.” Senate Republicans, meanwhile, killed a proposed bill that would have abolished the fund. So the matter is far from dead, and it remains important to understand why this unholy scheme is so rotten, even apart from the moral indefensibility of enriching cop-beating traitors.
Under the Constitution, only Congress holds the power of the purse, and the slush fund has not been sanctioned by Congress. So where do Trump and Blanche intend to get the money to pay the J6ers? The answer is that they devised a scheme to circumvent the constitutional bar on appropriations unapproved by Congress and pay the J6ers out of the United States Treasury, with our taxpayer dollars.
This plan is probably themost brazen act of corruption in presidential history. It is based on a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States. Here’s how it works and why it’s illegal:
According to Blanche, the money for the slush fund will come out of what’s known as the Judgment Fund of the Department ofJustice. On a regular basis, Congress appropriates money to this Fund to enable DOJ to pay out court-ordered judgments and settlements. Congress granted DOJ a certain amount of limited discretion to disburse these funds, in order to avoid having to make a separate appropriation for each of the thousands of judgments or settlements it pays out each year.
But, by statute, to receive money from the Judgment Fund, a claimant must have a valid court order or a “compromise settlement” of a lawsuit. So Trump and Blanche came up with a lawsuit: Trump sued the IRS over the (admittedly) unlawful release of his tax returns and claimed $10 billion in damages. Then they purported to “settle” this claim for $1.776 billion, theoretically unlocking the money available in the Judgment Fund.
The problem with this scheme — and why it’s illegal— is that the lawsuit and the ensuing “settlement” were entirely bogus.
The lawsuit was a sham from the outset. Under the Constitution, federal courts can only adjudicate actual “cases” or “controversies.” This requires a bona fide dispute between two distinct, adversarial parties. Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS lacked the necessary adversity of interest, because he controls his opponent. As he has said repeatedly, “I’m sort of suing myself.” Since there was no true case or controversy, there was no lawsuit that the court could adjudicate.
Moreover, even if this supposed lawsuit qualified as a case or controversy, it would still be utterly meritless and could not warrant any payout. The Justice Department had compelling defenses to it, including that it was barred by the statute of limitations because Trump brought it too many years past thedate his returns were disclosed. But instead of asserting any defense, the Department chose to lay down.
The $1.776 billion “settlement” of this bogus, collusive lawsuit is necessarily equally bogus and collusive. There cannot be a “compromise settlement” if there is no valid dispute to be compromised.
The bad faith, sham nature of the “settlement” is underscored by the fact that the returns of thousands of other taxpayers were also disclosed simultaneously with Trump’s returns, and many of those taxpayers also sued. Rather than settling those cases for any amounts (much less billions), the DOJ has vigorously fought attempts at recovery.
The amount of the “settlement” also highlights the phoniness of the entire undertaking. The notion that Trump should obtain control of almost $2 billion to dispense as he pleases because his tax returns were unlawfully disclosed is absurd on its face. Trump and Blanche have not even tried to justify this obscene amount.
By cooking up an ersatz lawsuit and “resolving” it with an equally ersatz “settlement,” the Trump/Blanche scheme violates the statute governing the Judgment Fund. Instead of a legitimate claim to taxpayer funds to resolve an actual dispute, this scheme instead defrauds the government and loots the Treasury.
It also constitutes a fraud on the court. Lawyers are under a sworn duty not to file lawsuits for improper or bad faith purposes. The only reason Trump filed his lawsuit was to create a false veneer of legitimacy for his claimto Judgment Fund dollars.
Judges do not like being unwittingly enlisted in fraudulent schemes. That explains why Judge Kathleen Williams, who presides over the lawsuit, has ordered Trump and the Justice Department to explain their conduct, and has ordered briefing on whether it should be considered a fraud on the court.
Regardless of any action Judge Williams takes, the fact remains that Trump and Blanche appear to have organized a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States Treasury out of nearly $2 billion. Every lawyer involved in this sordid venture should be investigated for potential disbarment, and all involved should be investigated for potential criminal prosecution. There will be no such prosecutions in this administration. But there very well may be in the next: the statute of limitations won’t expire on this crime until 2031.
James Speyer is a lawyer and a volunteer with Lawyers Defending American Democracy. He lives in Sharon.