A year of car parades and protests on town Greens

Although this was a year when large indoor gatherings were discouraged because of COVID-19, there were plenty of outdoor gatherings, including protests in all the area towns against injustice toward Black Americans.

The protests were often large and always peaceful. Everyone wore face masks.

Unusually, many of the protesters were teens and college students; unusual because, often in the Northwest Corner, protests are mostly attended by retirees, including many who participated in historic anti-war and civil rights protests of the mid and early 20th century.

Not all the gatherings last year were protests about police brutality and civil rights. There was also a protest in Salisbury related to proposed cuts to postal service; and there was a memorial service on the Salisbury Green led by state Rep. Maria Horn following the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. 

A new wrinkle on group gatherings this year were car parades, which allowed groups to express strong feelings while remaining in the relative safety (from COVID-19) of their cars and trucks. There were memorial parades and birthday parades. Groups of teachers drove by the homes of students to wave and let the youngest among them know they weren’t forgotten. There were graduation parades in spring, including the ceremony at Lime Rock Park for the Class of 2020 at Housatonic Valley Regional High School.

And there was a traditional Northwest Corner car parade: Lime Rock Park couldn’t hold its normal Labor Day weekend historic and vintage car festival, but car owners from the area turned out for the annual parade that normally kicks off the vintage festivities. 

Litchfield County residents came together on the Salisbury Green in front of The White Hart in May to protest police action following the murder of George Floyd, who was killed during an arrest in Minnesota on May 25, 2020. Photo by Alexander Wilburn

Photo by Alexander Wilburn

Litchfield County residents came together on the Salisbury Green in front of The White Hart in May to protest police action following the murder of George Floyd, who was killed during an arrest in Minnesota on May 25, 2020. Photo by Alexander Wilburn

Latest News

Employment Opportunities

LJMN Media, publisher of The Lakeville Journal (first published in 1897) and The Millerton News (first published in 1932), is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit news organization.

We seek to help readers make more informed decisions through comprehensive news coverage of communities in Northwest Connecticut and Eastern Dutchess County in New York.

Keep ReadingShow less
Selectmen suspend town clerk’s salary during absence

North Canaan Town Hall

Photo by Riley Klein

NORTH CANAAN — “If you’re not coming to work, why would you get paid?”

Selectman Craig Whiting asked his fellow selectmen this pointed question during a special meeting of the Board on March 12 discussing Town Clerk Jean Jacquier, who has been absent from work for more than a month. She was not present at the meeting.

Keep ReadingShow less
Dan Howe’s time machine
Dan Howe at the Kearcher-Monsell Gallery at Housatonic Valley Regional High School.
Natalia Zukerman

“Every picture begins with just a collection of good shapes,” said painter and illustrator Dan Howe, standing amid his paintings and drawings at the Kearcher-Monsell Gallery at Housatonic Valley Regional High School. The exhibit, which opened on Friday, March 7, and runs through April 10, spans decades and influences, from magazine illustration to portrait commissions to imagined worlds pulled from childhood nostalgia. The works — some luminous and grand, others intimate and quiet — show an artist whose technique is steeped in history, but whose sensibility is wholly his own.

Born in Madison, Wisconsin, and trained at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, Howe’s artistic foundation was built on rigorous, old-school principles. “Back then, art school was like boot camp,” he recalled. “You took figure drawing five days a week, three hours a day. They tried to weed people out, but it was good training.” That discipline led him to study under Tom Lovell, a renowned illustrator from the golden age of magazine art. “Lovell always said, ‘No amount of detail can save a picture that’s commonplace in design.’”

Keep ReadingShow less