Examining Mohawk Mountain’s rich history
James Shay signed copies of his book “Mohawk Mountain Skl Area: The Birth of Snowmaking” after a talk at Hotchkiss Library of Sharon Feb. 2.
Matthew Kreta
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How hospice pioneers transformed end-of-life care in the Northwest Corner
Mary Talbot
Aug 05, 2026
On a winter day in the early 1970s, Peter Warner, a young man dying of leukemia, lay in bed at Sharon Hospital, waiting in agony for his next dose of pain medication. Hospital rules insisted he could have it only every four hours. Not a moment sooner.
His mother, Claudia Warner, watched the minutes tick by while her son suffered. She realized that medical care was failing him, not because it couldn’t cure him but because it couldn’t, or wouldn’t, ease his pain.
Spurred by her grief and frustration—and having glimpsed at Yale New Haven Hospital what a new approach called hospice could offer—Warner began to push for drastic change in how dying patients were treated in our region. Together with two Sharon Hospital nurses, Louisa Lafontan and Donna DiMartino, she pioneered hospice care in the Northwest Corner.
Lafontan, who had helped build Sharon Hospital’s intensive-care unit, mentored DiMartino, and the two became lifelong friends. Inspired by Florence Wald, then dean of the Yale School of Nursing, who had brought hospice care to Connecticut from England, both nurses saw how medicine’s relentless focus on cure overlooked something equally important. “Sometimes people [could not] be cured,” says DiMartino. “They just wanted to be cared for.”
“When Louisa came back and began to talk about hospice, my ears went up,” DiMartino recalls. “All of us as nurses began to see there was a need, and it was right in front of us.”
Claudia Warner created a steering committee on hospice care in the Northwest Corner and recruited Lafontan to lead it.
Change nevertheless unfolded slowly. Like the rest of the hospital staff, the nurses had been trained according to the traditional ethos of Western medicine: save lives, extend them, restart them if possible. “Death didn’t happen in hospitals,” DiMartino says. “It was not an accepted part of life back then.”
As education in hospice care spread—Lafontan led much of the training in the Northwest Corner—health care providers began to understand the importance of treating pain aggressively. “We learned that dosage and timing needed to be for the patient experience,” says DiMartino. At the end of life, addiction to pain medication is not the primary concern; pain management and well-being are.
Medical personnel and volunteers spoke with families, pharmacists, and clergy, toured funeral homes, and learned that dying involves communities as much as medicine.
Medicare’s hospice benefit, enacted in 1983, expanded access but also transformed hospice from a grassroots movement into a more institutionalized system. Lafontan continued training nurses and volunteers and helped bring hospice into long-term care facilities. DiMartino eventually became hospice director at the Salisbury Visiting Nurses Association (now part of the Visiting Nurse and Hospice of Litchfield County), where she trained younger nurses.
Most end-of-life care still happens at home, where family members become the default caregivers. Yet while most people hope to avoid dying in a hospital, not every family can provide round-the-clock care. For decades, Lafontan and DiMartino imagined a place to fill that gap—for their patients and themselves, when the time comes.
In September 2025, East Mountain House (EMH) opened in Lakeville, Connecticut, bringing that vision to life. Housed in a private residence, EMH allows residents to receive hospice support while trained caregivers provide the daily physical care families often struggle to manage alone.
When the two nurses toured the facility together, they were struck by how closely it matched what they had imagined. “We couldn’t have imagined a better place,” says DiMartino. “There are rooms for families to stay, and staff who provide the care, which is monumental.” Nurses from Visiting Nurse and Hospice of Litchfield County check in regularly.
After retiring from nursing, Lafontan and DiMartino became hospice volunteers themselves, sitting with patients, listening to their stories, and giving families a chance to rest.
Both women recall a man dying at home who had a photo of an aircraft carrier on his wall. When they first met him, “he was sort of shrunken up, sitting there in a chair,” recalls DiMartino. By coaxing him to talk about the image, she learned that he had been a pilot whose job was training others to land on the carrier. “I watched his body change into a man who had this great story to tell.”
“When you’re really present with a patient, you [see] them in the whole breadth of their life,” says DiMartino of the human connection intrinsic to hospice care. “The end is part of life, and we’ll all get there. But every person’s life has meaning. You just have to [listen] and you’ll find it.”
To learn more about the origins of hospice in our region and hear an oral history with Louisa Lafontan and Donna DiMartino, visit
eastmountainhouse.org/history-of-hospice/
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Annual choral performance probes the nation’s identity with bluegrass and a call for tolerance
Alec Linden
Aug 05, 2026
The Litchfield County Choral Union performs “Everyday Wonders: The Girl from Aleppo” during its annual concert at the Norfolk Music Shed on Aug. 2.
Photo by Alec Linden
NORFOLK — Any great weekend in Norfolk ends with music, and such was the case on Sunday evening, Aug. 2, when the Litchfield County Choral Union (LCCU) took over the historic digs of the Music Shed for a novel performance that traced the United States’ complicated lineage through the lenses of patriotic anthem, Americana and global music traditions, all carried by the soaring voice of a 69-strong choir.
As a capstone event for the town’s summer festival, called Weekend in Norfolk, the time-honored singing group, composed of choral singers from across the region, held its annual concert inside the redwood and cedar lined hall of the building. The iconic structure was built in 1906 with the direct purpose of housing the choir, which itself was founded seven years prior. Although the Music Shed’s usage has diversified since then, notably as the primary venue for the Yale School of Music’s Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, the LCCU still hosts its summer performance at its historic home.
Titled “From Roots to Promise: Singing America at 250,” this year’s program was designed as a nod to the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In his introduction included in the concert pamphlet, LCCU Music Director Gabriel Löfvall, an accomplished conductor in his second season with the group, asks, “At 250, who are we as a country? Are we fulfilling the ideals upon which our democracy was founded?”
Löfvall said his curation of the evening’s program was meant to use diverse musical traditions to explore those questions.
Sunday’s performance notably featured accompaniment by a full bluegrass band, complete with fiddle, banjo, mandolin, guitar, upright bass, percussion, fife and piano.
Speaking amid an excited buzz during an after-show reception outside the venue, Löfvall said that “The World Beloved: A Bluegrass Mass,” one of the show’s two centerpieces, is the only work he’s aware of that combines choral music with Appalachian folk traditions.
The piece was composed about two decades ago by Carol Barnett with the libretto — or lyrics — written by Marisha Chamberlain. Löfvall said he enjoyed developing the 30-minute piece with the choir and the bluegrass band, given that it represents an unlikely combination of ideas coming together to produce something new and unique, which he said is representative of the strengths of this country.
“The instruments [Barnett] uses are bluegrass, but the idiom is very complex,” he said, with the term idiom referring to the choral writing. Despite the stereotype that choral music doesn’t necessarily call for barn dances, when it comes to this piece, “it makes you tap your foot,” Löfvall said.
The other centerpiece was Cecilia McDowall’s 2018 “Everyday Wonders: The Girl from Aleppo,” with text by Kevin Crossley, which traces the true story of a Kurdish teenager with cerebral palsy named Nujeen Mustafa when war forced her to flee from her homeland to Europe.
Löfvall, himself an immigrant from Argentina, said that the piece represents to him a vision of the future potential of the United States, and an affirmation of its history as a place where people from around the world interact and exchange ideas.
“I’m always fascinated by the American experiment,” he said, and when it works, “it’s thanks to tolerance and everyone bringing in their best.”
The rest of the performance was bookended with an opening of “Sweet is the Work,” written by Norfolk composer Robbins Battell who died in 1895. The group performs the piece each year in honor of the composer, who inspired the founding of the LCCU.
It was followed by William Billings’ Revolution Era patriotic song “Chester”—“It represents to me the birth of America,” Löfvall said.
The program was capped with a performance of Paul Halley’s “Freedom Trilogy,” composed in 1994, which blends Gregorian prayer song, South African chant and the famed hymn “Amazing Grace.”
The performance closed to an extended standing ovation before the audience slowly filtered out to a reception with refreshments waiting outside just below the Music Shed’s broad facade.
As he fielded congratulations from all angles, LCCU President Felix Graham-Jones said, “That’s what we do for fun in the summer, isn’t it!”
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Trees removed from cemetery after storm, clearing space for Town Hall generator
Patrick L. Sullivan
Aug 05, 2026
Work began last week to clean up the fallen basswood trees at Town Hall in Salisbury. The July 4 storm took down several trees that landed in the cemetery.
Photo by Patrick L. Sullivan
SALISBURY — Members of the town highway crew joined John Swanson of Swanson Tree Removal last week to clear the large basswood trees that fell into the cemetery behind Town Hall during the July 4 storm, which caused widespread damage and left many residents and businesses without power for days.
Several of the large trees crashed into The Old Burial Ground during the storm, destroying part of the fence and knocking over at least two headstones.
On Friday, July 31, crews fed tree limbs into a wood chipper while Swanson stationed himself in a cherry picker to take down large branches. First Selectman Curtis Rand, Selectman Kitty Kiefer and Jean McMillen also observed from a safe distance.
During a July 20 Board of Selectmen meeting, Rand said the planned tree removal could solve a longstanding problem: finding a location for a generator at Town Hall. After the July 4 storm knocked out power in Salisbury for up to three days, the need for a generator at Town Hall became apparent.
Although officials had previously discussed purchasing a generator, they had not moved forward without identifying a practical location for it.
With a now-clear space on the Factory Street side of Town Hall, a generator can now be put in.
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Cornwall kids have a whale of a time at town hall
Allison Gollenberg
Aug 05, 2026
A visit from the traveling Whalemobile brought Cornwall kids an opportunity to sit inside a replica humpback whale named Nile. The event drew a dozen local children and their families eager to learn more about the mammal.
Photo by Allison Gollenberg
CORNWALL — With a whoosh, Nile the inflatable humpback whale filled a room in Town Hall as kids lined up for a chance to see what the inside of a whale looks like on Thursday, July 30 from 1 to 3 p.m.
The Whalemobile is a traveling education program created by lifelong whale lover and environmental educator Cynde McInnis. Based in Massachusetts, the program has traveled to schools and libraries as far west as Illinois and as far south as Maryland, McInnis said.
Inside the life-sized replica whale, children sat beneath a diagram of whale anatomy while Whalemobile educator Misty Baker guided them through lessons on whale biology, behavior and conservation. Baker passed around real sperm whale teeth and baleen plates, explaining how baleen filters tiny prey such as krill from seawater.
“What’s inside of a whale?” Baker asked, tracing a laser pointer across the whale’s ceiling. “Hearts, organs, blood. That’s the same stuff that’s inside of you, too,” she said.
The presentation also highlighted whales’ role in the planet’s ecosystem. Baker explained that tiny marine plants called phytoplankton feed on nutrients from whale waste and produce about half of the oxygen humans breathe. She added that studying whale waste also helps scientists understand what whales are eating and the health of the ocean.
McInnis said she hopes the program inspires children to care about the planet around them.
“First and foremost, we hope they learn that whales are awesome,” McInnis said. “Because the kids are going to grow up and care about the things they get excited about.”
The program also focuses on teaching kids habits that protect the planet, like using reusable water bottles and picking up trash.
Nile, the inflatable whale, was custom-built by a company in Minnesota and is named and modeled after a real whale that has been sighted off the coast of Massachusetts for almost 40 years. McInnis first spotted Nile herself in 1995 and has seen her nearly every year since during her frequent whale-watching tours.
Asked how she can tell Nile apart from other whales, McInnis said the answer lies in the tail. Whales have patterns on their tails like fingerprints, and Nile’s has a line in the shape of the Nile River.
The Whalemobile’s stop in Cornwall was organized by the library, held at Town Hall, and paid for by the Cornwall Foundation, library director Margaret Haske said.
The library’s Children’s Program Coordinator Eiseley Kotchoubey said this is just one of many kid’s programs the library has offered this summer.The programs have covered a wide range of topics, including an art exhibit in a bus, a magic show and nature talks.
Haske said she hopes events like this get kids excited about visiting the library.
“It’s very educational and I hope they learned quite a bit about whales,” Haske said. “I hope they enjoyed it, and I hope it sparks their interest in being in the library.”
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Fire damages second floor of Kent home, draws multiple fire crews
Ruth Epstein
Aug 05, 2026
A fire at 190 Bulls Bridge Road in South Kent destroyed the second floor of the two-bedroom house.
Photo by Ruth Epstein
SOUTH KENT – A fire broke out Saturday afternoon at a home on Bulls Bridge Road, causing extensive damage to the second floor but resulting in no serious injuries, according to the Kent Volunteer Fire Department.
Fire Chief Tim Sneller said firefighters received a report of a house fire at 190 Bulls Bridge Road at about 4 p.m. The department’s first engine arrived on scene approximately 13 minutes later.
Sneller said two occupants were treated at the site, as was one firefighter. The home is owned by Joseph Sario.
“We pushed up the stairs with a hose line in order to knock the fire down,” Sneller said. “It was a good save.”
Additional crews assisted with ventilation and salvage operations while also addressing overheating within the structure. Sneller said firefighters had no difficulty maintaining a water supply using tanker trucks.
The blaze was extinguished quickly. Kent firefighters were back at the firehouse by 5:30 p.m. The cause of the fire has yet to be determined.
Fire departments from Gaylordsville, Sherman, Warren, Cornwall, Northville, New Milford (Water Witch), Dover and Wassaic responded to assist at the scene.
“Even Pawling ended up at our firehouse,” Sneller said of the team effort.
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Enrollments and governance must be priorities in Region One ‘organizational study’
Terry Cowgill
As a longtime observer of local politics and Northwest Corner demographics, I was interested to see Patrick Sullivan’s June 1 story reporting that the Region One Board of Education had voted recently “to move forward with a broad organizational study that could shape the future of education in the Northwest Corner.”
“The purpose of this organizational study is to evaluate the Region’s K–8 structure to ensure long-term educational excellence, equity, and fiscal sustainability,” Region One Superintendent Melony Brady-Shanley told The Journal.
In an earlier interview with the Journal, Brady-Shanley emphasized that no decisions have been made, but confirmed that the study could include discussions about regionalization and potential school consolidation — contentious subjects for years among Region One towns.
It is a subject that I’ve been keenly interested in for some time. I covered Region One, the first regional school district in New England, for nearly four years as a reporter for this newspaper, and my wife and I had two children who happily attended the district’s schools before moving on to four-year colleges.
But if you’ve been paying attention, you know that Region One’s enrollment numbers have been on a downward trajectory for more than three decades — not because of the quality of the educational product, but as a result of regionwide demographic trends that pose significant challenges for the future of Region One and districts like it.
In the last 20 years alone, the declines have been staggering. As of October 2007, Housatonic Valley Regional High School reported having 561 students. Going back even farther, the late former Housatonic Valley Regional High School principal and beloved local historian Ed Kirby told the Republican American newspaper that in the 1970s, there were approximately 780 students attending the school.
At the end of the 2024-25 school year, there were 316 and only 300 in 2025-26. According to the New England School Development Council, enrollment is expected to drop to 284 by the 2029–30 school year. To be fair, NESDEC’s predictions aren’t always spot-on. Still, it’s safe to say that there will be fewer bodies in the classrooms of our community’s high school in four years and that, as a result, per-student costs will continue to rise accordingly.
The situation is largely the same among the K-8 schools in the district’s six towns. Twenty years ago, Region One’s two smallest schools, Lee Kellogg in Falls Village and Cornwall Consolidated, had 101 and 129 students respectively.
As recently as 1998, Cornwall had nearly 200. This year Cornwall had 85 and Kellogg 69. In June, Kellogg graduated an 8th-grade class of two students. Yes, that’s a “2” with no zeroes. NESDEC forecasts some modest gains for those schools next year, but the long-term outlook remains bleak.
And it’s not just in our corner of our state. According to a recent CT Insider analysis of state Department of Education data, public school enrollment in Connecticut is at its lowest in at least 20 years, even as the number of high-needs and special-education students has risen over the same period of time. Consequently, much of the savings that could have been achieved through lower enrollments are offset by the rising expenses of educating these higher-need students, either on-campus or at pricey out-of-district private schools.
The drop in enrollment here in the Northwest Corner has been steeper for a host of reasons. We share the typical causes for declining enrollments here in Connecticut and elsewhere in New England: lower birth rates, high housing costs and a growing interest in nontraditional schooling in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
So as we ponder what to do about this crisis — and I don’t think it’s too strong a word — what should the Region One Board of Education consider as it conducts this organizational study?
The first obvious step would be closing or consolidating the K-8 schools with the smallest enrollments. At the low end is the Kellogg School. The aging building on Main Street was built in the 1950s and was renovated in both the 70s and 90s.
It would make sense to close that school and bus its students six miles or so down Route 7 to Cornwall, which has a much more modern building and plenty of excess capacity. Or some of the Falls Village students could be bused to North Canaan, which would be a shorter bus ride for some of the Kellogg students. These towns could form a new K-8 school district or Falls Village could simply tuition its students into the other towns. The former arrangement would allow Falls Villagers at least some representation on the new school board.
Unfortunately, my experience covering the town for this newspaper from 2005 to 2008 makes me highly skeptical that Falls Villagers would ever approve of such a plan.
In letters to the editor and in public statements on social media, they have largely resisted any arrangement that would result in the closing of their beloved but tiny school, which I recall 20 years ago was the most expensive comprehensive public school in the state (as of the 2024-25 school year, Sharon Center School was the leader at $48,747 per student). Cornwall, which is nearly as expensive, would surely welcome the Falls Village students and the revenue they would bring with them.
Newcomers to the region might wonder why the Region One Board couldn’t simply close one of the schools and reassign its students, or at least put the matter to a district-wide referendum. This points to a barrier in the way the district is organized.
Most regional school districts in Connecticut are fully regionalized, meaning that all the schools within the district’s borders are governed by the same board of education. A few, including Region One and Region 7, have high schools and services such as special education that are fully regionalized, but beyond that, the individual town elementary schools are left to govern themselves.
As the Region One website acknowledges, “Each of the towns in the region (Falls Village/Canaan, Cornwall, Kent, North Canaan, Salisbury/Lakeville, and Sharon) has its own K-8 elementary school governed by an autonomous board of education.”
This arrangement is virtually unheard of in any of the other states I have lived in or worked in as a journalist. The late Jack Mahoney, a Massachusetts native who led Housatonic as principal for a dozen years, once told me of this decentralized structure, “Ours is the most expensive way to do it.”
Each of Region One’s six K-8 schools have their own paid clerks for their local boards of education. Their budgets are prepared and reviewed independent of Region One, and approved or rejected by town residents in separate votes. Some, including Salisbury Central, even have on-staff specialists who manage the K-8 schools’ finances.
In a fully regionalized regional school district, such as the newly formed Region 20 in Litchfield, budgets, board functions and financial staff for individual schools are overseen by a single board of education at the regional level, thereby reducing redundancies and streamlining operations.
For example, 30 years ago when the fully regionalized Webutuck Central School District still operated two small elementary schools in Millerton and Amenia, NY, those two schools eventually shared a single building principal who split her time between the two locations. That kind of cost-saving arrangement is all but impossible in a region split into six separate K-8 districts.
Our current hyper-localized arrangement not only equates to higher taxes for residents, but it renders Region One essentially powerless to consolidate low-enrollment schools and become more efficient.
Finally, in its organizational study, the Region One Board of Education might want to take another look at how the district is funded on the local level. For as long as anyone can remember, taxes needed to fund the regional school district have been assessed against individual towns based almost entirely on the number of students they had enrolled in the high school during the previous school year.
One Falls Village resident so objected to this method of taxation that she filed a lawsuit, insisting that it unfairly punishes less wealthy towns. In 2000, former Falls Village First Selectman Gabriel Seymour unsuccessfully sued the Region One Board of Education over its per-student method of taxing member towns.
Residents and public officials in North Canaan have long complained that their town carries the highest burden for funding Region One simply because it sends the most students, while much wealthier Salisbury has a roughly 30% higher population but sends fewer students to Housatonic and, consequently, pays a significantly smaller share of the Region One budget than North Canaan.
The Region One board certainly has a laborious task in front of it. It will be hard work that will surely include lots of public input. The only certainty is that no one will like every aspect of the final product.
Terry Cowgill is a resident of the Lakeville section of Salisbury.