FALLS VILLAGE — The National FFA Organization is developing the next generation of leaders.
Each year, FFA chapters around the country celebrate National FFA Week. It’s a time to share what FFA is and the impact it has on members every day.
The FFA mission is to make a positive difference in the lives of students by developing their potential for premier leadership, personal growth and career success through agricultural education. FFA helps members discover their talent through hands-on experiences, which give members the tools to achieve real-world success.
A combined 850,823 students from throughout the United States, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands have chosen to be a part of FFA. Of those members,116 are from our chapter. Each year these numbers grow as more young people become a part of the organization. FFA was chartered in 1928 as the Future Farmers of America.
The organization changed its name from the Future Farmers of America to the National FFA Organization. The name changed because FFA is not only for future farmers, but it is for any and all students despite what their plans are for the future. It is an organization that provides countless opportunities and develops leadership skills that can carry over to all careers.
Housatonic Valley FFA (HVFFA) members are involved in local, statewide and national events throughout the year. This past summer, students attended the Washington Leadership Conference (WLC), the Sound School chapter exchange, and the Alumni Picnic hosted at Laurelbrook Farm. While at WLC, students spent the week with fellow FFA members from all over the U.S. to develop leadership skills and ways to help their community.
This summer, HVFFA partnered with the Sound School in New Haven for a chapter exchange program. Members from our chapter were invited on a deep fishing excursion, and in exchange, we gave their chapter members a tour of agriculture in our part of the state. The Housatonic Valley FFA Alumni Association sponsors both of these summer activities.
HVFFA also has many activities and events throughout the school year to help members learn and grow. Students prepare for and compete in numerous state competitions called Career Development Events (CDEs) and Leadership Development Events (LDEs). This past November, the Ag Communications team (Anne Moran, Simon Markow, Hannah Johnson and Chris Crane) and Creed speaker (Riley Mahaffey) competed at the National FFA Convention representing Connecticut.
In addition, students attend IMAGE, COLT, JLC, State FFA Convention, and the National FFA Convention. We give back to our community by helping with the Falls Village Car Show, volunteering at the Big E and the Goshen Fair, and sponsoring a rabies clinic over the summer.
HVFFA chapter members are looking forward to spring competitions, conferences and our annual ag open house. We appreciate all the ways that the community supports our program.
Lauren Sorrell is a student reporter at HVRHS and a member of HVFFA.
Submitted
Melanie Rundall and Tyler Anderson worked at the FFA Holiday Store at HVRHS this past winter.
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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.”
A collection of historic nails recovered during restoration work.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.
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. Marge Parkhurst is the owner of Cottage & Country Painting Co. She can be reached at marge@cottageandcountryct.com or 860-379-4748.
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