Thank you!
Your support is sustaining the future of local news in our communities.

Marge Parkhurst, the preservation detective

Marge Parkhurst, the preservation detective

Marge Parkhurst with a collection of historic nails recovered from wall cavities during restoration work.

Photo courtesy of Marge Parkhurst/Cottage & Country Painting Company
Walls still surprise me. If you look hard enough, you can find buried treasure.
Marge Parkhurst

After nearly 50 years of painting some of Litchfield County’s oldest homes and landmark properties, Marge Parkhurst has developed an eye for the past—reading the clues left behind in stenciled vines, forgotten bottles and newspapers tucked into walls, each revealing a small but vivid piece of Connecticut history.

Parkhurst was stripping wallpaper in a farmhouse in Colebrook — the kind of historic home she has spent decades restoring — when she noticed something odd. Three layers of paper had already come off — each one a different era’s idea of decoration — and beneath them, just barely visible under dull, off-white plaster, a pattern emerged.

“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.”

This bottle is from the Hartmann Brewing Company of Bridgeport, CT, found inside a wall of a former railroad outbuilding relocated from Canaan to Colebrook CT. The bottle was sealed with a glass stopper held by a wire, inside was a grocery list written on the back of an envelope postmarked 1915. 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.

Marge Parkhurst is the owner of Cottage & Country Painting Co. She can be reached at marge@cottageandcountryct.com or 860-379-4748.

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.

Latest News

Motorcycle crash near Route 7 prompts Life Star landing at HVRHS

Motorcycle crash near Route 7 prompts Life Star landing at HVRHS

A Life Star helicopter lands on the front lawn of Housatonic Valley Regional High School on Saturday, May 16, to transport a motorcycle crash victim to a hospital.

Aly Morrissey

LIME ROCK — A motorcycle crash involving a car temporarily shut down a section of Route 112 near the intersection with Route 7 on Saturday afternoon, drawing a large emergency response and prompting a Life Star helicopter landing at Housatonic Valley Regional High School.

Emergency responders at the scene confirmed the incident involved a motorcycle and passenger vehicle. Route 7 was closed from Dugway Road to the intersection of Routes 7 and 112 while crews responded.

Keep ReadingShow less
Van strikes utility pole, closes Route 112 for hours

Traffic was diverted near Wells Hill Road after a crash closed part of Route 112 Friday afternoon.

By James H. Clark

A van crashed into a utility pole on Route 112 near Wells Hill Road Friday afternoon, leaving the driver hospitalized in serious condition and forcing the highway to close for several hours.

The crash was reported at approximately 3:20 p.m., according to Connecticut State Police Troop B.

Keep ReadingShow less
Voices from our Salisbury community about the housing we need for a healthy, economically vibrant future

Renee Wilcox

If you’ve ever wandered through Paley’s Farm Market, you probably know Renee Wilcox. For thirty years, she has been greeting you with unmistakable warmth—always ready with a smile. Renee grew up in Millerton, but it was in Salisbury that her family found something they’d never had before: a true sense of home. In 2003, she and her husband Bill were living in Millerton, but Bill—a volunteer with the Lakeville Hose Company—was already part of Salisbury life. When the Salisbury Housing Trust finished eight new homes on East Main Street (Dunham Drive), Renee and Bill were the first to sign on.

The story of those houses is really a story about the best parts of our community. Richard Dunham and his wife, Inge, along with the Housing Trust board, poured years of energy and hope into the project. Renee can’t help but light up when she talks about the people who helped her family settle in. Digby Brown came by to install appliances and bathroom cabinets; Barbara Niles spent hours painting; Carl Williams assembled bunk beds for the kids. Rick Cantele, at Salisbury Bank, helped them with their finances so they could qualify for a mortgage, while neighbors arrived at their door with fruit baskets and welcoming words.

Keep ReadingShow less
google preferred source

Want more of our stories on Google? Click here to make us a Preferred Source.

Trade Secrets: a glamorous garden event with a deeper mission

Heavy stone garden ornaments, a specialty of Judy Milne Antiques from Kingston, at Trade Secrets 2025.

Christine Bates

Tucked away on Porter Street in downtown Lakeville, Project SAGE is an unassuming building from a street view. But cross the threshold a week before Trade Secrets — one of the region’s biggest gardening events, long associated with Martha Stewart and glamorous plants of all varieties — and you’ll find a bustling world of employees and volunteers getting ready for the organization’s most important event of the year.

“It’s not usually like this,’ laughed Project SAGE director Kristen van Ginhoven. “But with Trade Secrets just around the corner, it’s definitely like this.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Local filmmaker turns spotlight back on Hollywood’s Mermaid

Esther Williams in “Million Dollar Mermaid” (1952).

Provided

For decades, Esther Williams was one of Hollywood’s brightest stars, but the swimming sensation of the silver screen has largely faded from public memory — a disappearance that intrigued Millerton filmmaker Brian Gersten and inspired him to revisit her legacy.

As a millennial, Gersten grew up largely unaware of Williams’ influential career. His teen years in Chicago were spent with friends who obsessed over movies, spending hours at their local independent video store,and watching anything that caught their eye. Somehow, though, they never ventured into the glossy world of synchronized-swimming musicals of the 1940s and ‘50s.

Keep ReadingShow less
Summer exhibition opens at Wassaic Project

Nate King, “When I Was Younger And Now That I’m Older,” 2026, Digital projection, digital animation, photography.

photo courtesy Nate King

The Wassaic Project, the 8,000-square-foot, seven-story former grain elevator transformed into a vibrant arts space, opens its 2026 Summer Exhibition, “Because, now is the time of monsters,” on Saturday, May 16, from 3-6 p.m. at Maxon Mills, launching a season-long presentation featuring 39 artists working across installation, performance, video and sculpture.

The opening celebration will include an afternoon of exhibitions and live programming throughout the historic mill building and its surrounding spaces. Gallery and Art Nest hours run from 12-6 p.m., with special presentations scheduled throughout the day.

Keep ReadingShow less
google preferred source

Want more of our stories on Google? Click here to make us a Preferred Source.

google preferred source

Want more of our stories on Google? Click here to make us a Preferred Source.