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North Canaan mourns loss of three community leaders
Christian Murray
Jun 10, 2026
Madi Long
NORTH CANAAN – Town officials paid tribute last week to three longtime residents who have died recently, remembering their decades of civic engagement that left a mark on the community.
Over the course of the last month, North Canaan has lost Peter Brown, Bill Hower and Nick Gandolfo, all of whom dedicated years of service to local boards, organizations and community efforts.
“We all in the Town of North Canaan are grieving the loss of many people,” First Selectman Jesse Bunce wrote on the town Facebook page, referring to the three men.
Brown, who died at age 70, served on the Planning and Zoning Commission for nearly 25 years, including more than two decades as vice chairman. Bunce said Brown also operated Lone Oak Campsites with his brother, Barry, and was known for supporting charitable causes, including motorcycle fundraising rides and other community events.
Brown, as a child, grew up on a farm in East Canaan that his parents converted into what became Lone Oak Campsites. In the 1990s, he and Barry purchased the campground from their parents. The campground was sold in 2024.
“Very seldom do you find a person that pretty much everybody in town loved,” Bunce said in an interview. “Peter’s one of those guys.”
Meanwhile, Hower, who was 66-years-old at the time of his death, was involved in North Canaan’s economic development efforts for roughly 25 years. He was a longtime local business person, who worked in the automotive industry, primarily through his family business, Jim’s Garage.
According to Bunce, Hower had recently approached town officials about helping boost the local economy.
“He was a great asset to the town,” Bunce said.
Also remembered was Gandolfo, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran of the Korean War, who was a familiar presence at Memorial Day ceremonies and veterans events. He served in Korea from 1952 to 1953 and participated in several battles and combat operations.
Bunce said Gandolfo, who died at the age of 94, served on multiple town boards and committees, participated in Boy Scout activities and remained active in community affairs throughout his life.
In announcing Gandolfo’s death, Bunce noted that he was among the town’s last remaining veterans from before the Vietnam War era and had become a fixture of North Canaan’s Memorial Day parade.
“There are few, if any, in North Canaan who don’t have a memory of him,” Bunce wrote. “His dedication, kindness and unwavering commitment to this town will not be forgotten.”
Bunce said each of the men contributed to North Canaan in different ways, but all shared a commitment to bettering the town.
“As our community continues to face a number of recent losses, now is a time for us to come together — to support one another, to share our memories and to honor the remarkable lives of those who paved the path before us,” he said.
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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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