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The stone after cleaning. The half-faded epitaph is visible at the bottom.
Photo by Brent Kallstrom
KENT — A cluster of headstones in Kent’s oldest cemetery links the town’s first doctor, a Mayflower pilgrim, a family mystery and a centuries-old tragedy. There, the unexpected discovery of two young daughters of a Revolutionary War surgeon, marked by a sorrowful epitaph, helped a Maryland family complete its ancestral story.
Attendees of an Oct. 10 grave cleaning demonstration at Good Hill Cemetery led by Kent Historical Society Curator Marge Smith were treated to a bit of intrigue halfway through working on a stone presumed to belong to Dr. Oliver Fuller, Kent’s first practicing doctor and a veteran of the Revolutionary War.
As the engravings on the soft brownstone became clearer, the group realized the double headstone did not commemorate the doctor and his wife as they had expected, but two much younger souls: Lois and Rhoda Ann Fuller, who died two days apart in June of 1793. Lois was 12 and Rhoda Ann was 11 at the time of their deaths.
Kent cemetery Sexton Brent Kallstrom, who also heads the local American Legion post, said the group was struck by the grave’s elegance and detail, including a moving elegy written at the bottom of the stone, of which only pieces could be made out due to weathering by time and weed whackers.
A grave belonging to Alice Fuller, the doctor’s first wife and father of his three sons who died in 1776, was found nearby, similarly ornate. Also nearby was Fuller’s own headstone, which was comparatively plain to the others, bearing an 1817 date of death. Fuller’s second wife, Lois and Rhoda Ann’s mother, was nowhere to be found at the cemetery, nor was the girls’ older sister Alice.
“It just really brings a tear to your eye,” Kallstrom said of the inscription on the stone, of which a draft interpretation can be found at the end of this article.
While the cause of death for the girls is unknown, smallpox was rampant at the time and could be to blame.
Kallstrom explained that finding the headstone of the two girls was the result of a slew of coincidences: Smith’s demonstration needed a stone, and because the Cemetery Committee, Historical Society and the Daughters of the American Revolution are jointly preparing an identification project for all of Kent’s Revolutionary War veteran graves in anticipation of the nation’s 250th anniversary, it was decided that a yet-uncleaned revolutionary war serviceman’s grave would be used for the event.
As it happened, Kallstrom had recently received a message from Franki Coughlin, a resident of Huntingtown, Maryland, and member of the John Hanson chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, inquiring about the grave of her ancestor: Dr. Oliver Fuller, who is a direct descendant, as is she, of English-born Edward Fuller who came to the new world on the Mayflower. Kallstrom figured it would be the perfect demonstration grave for the cleaning seminar.
Coughlin wrote a genealogical record in 2020, complete with biographies, that was distributed among her family as a pandemic passion project. As a result, she is thoroughly researched on her lineage, which includes many notable figures in the Berkshires, such as the Ramsdell family for whom the public library in the Housatonic region of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, is named.
While Coughlin had most of this regional branch of the family pinned down in a cemetery in Housatonic, she said the fate of Fuller’s daughters eluded her own searches, as well as the extensive investigation conducted by her mother and her mother’s cousins.
“They’re all buried in that one cemetery there,” she said. “So we know where they all are, but we never could find the girls. Now we know where the girls are.”
Among her mother’s generation of family researchers, only one cousin, Molly, is still alive. Coughlin is set to visit her in a few weeks to celebrate her 96th birthday and share the news. “She’s just going to be thrilled to death because she — along with my mother and then Lorraine, the other cousin — they were the ones who started this.”
Even without a familial connection, others were similarly excited by the discovery. Kent Historical Society President Deborah Chabrian has labored for hours over the half-worn epitaph on the daughters’ grave since the Oct. 10 grave cleaning, visiting the site at different times of day to photograph the etchings under various light angles and manipulating the images in Photoshop to reveal difficult words and letters.
She said that while the mystery is driving her to try to decipher the text in full, it’s the stone’s, and its writing’s, ability to convey emotions across centuries that drew her in the first place.
“The fact that it’s partially obscured is what makes it more interesting in a way,” Chabrian said. “But one thing rings very clear: It’s very heartfelt, very poetic. Obviously, these little girls were very loved.”
She added that the grave keeps the story of the girls alive: “They lived a short life, but here we are talking about them right now.”
Below is a draft of what Chabrian, with help from Marge Smith, has been able to pull from the stone thus far. She qualified that it is a work in progress, and certain words may not be entirely correct. “We may never know all the words,” she cautioned, “but what we do know tells us how much they were loved and loved each other!”
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Legal Notices - October 23, 2025
Oct 22, 2025
TAX COLLECTOR TOWN OF
SALISBURY CT
LEGAL NOTICE
Pursuant to Sec. 12-145 of the Connecticut Statutes, the taxpayers of the Town of Salisbury are hereby notified that the second installment on the Grand List of October 1, 2024 is due and payable on October 1, 2025. Payments must be received or postmarked by November 3, 2025. If said Real Estate and Personal Property taxes are not paid on or before November 3, 2025 interest at the rate of 1 (18% per year) will be added for each month or a fraction thereof which elapses from the time when such tax becomes due and payable until the same is paid. Minimum interest charge is $2.00.
Taxes can be paid by mail addressed to: Tax Collector, P.O. BOX 338, Salisbury CT 06068 or Town Hall, 27 Main Street, Salisbury CT. There is a drop box in the vestibule of the Town Hall available 9am-4pm, Monday-Friday or the 24-hour drop box on the back side of the building off Factory Street. Tax Office is open Mon, Wed, Fri, 9am-4pm, closed 12:30pm-1:30pm. The Town is urging taxpayers to use the option to pay by credit card or e-check. Please go to the Town website salisburyct.us, View/PayTaxes Tab. Dated at Salisbury, CT this 9th day of September, 2025.
Jean F. Bell
CCMC Tax Collector
09-18-25
10-09-25
10-23-25
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Wake Robin Inn is located on Sharon Road in Lakeville.
Photo by John Coston
The legal case, if approved by the court, would nullify a 2024 zoning regulation change that allows hotels in the RR1 zone via special permit application.
LAKEVILLE — At nearly 11 p.m. on Monday night, Oct. 20, Salisbury’s Planning and Zoning Commission voted 4-1 to approve, with conditions, Aradev LLC’s controversial application to redevelop the Wake Robin Inn.
The decision came more than 4 hours after the meeting began at 6:30 p.m., and more than a year since Aradev submitted its first application to expand the longstanding country inn. The approved plans call for a new 2,000-square-foot cabin, an event space, a sit-down restaurant and fast-casual counter, a spa, library, lounge, gym and seasonal pool.
Aradev withdrew its first application in December 2024 after P&Z indicated it would likely deny it based on concerns about sewer approval, noise levels and the general size and intensity of the proposed development. During a pre-application meeting held with Aradev in January 2025, the Commission informed the developer that those three topics were the cruxes of both P&Z’s and the public’s objection to the first proposal.
The nine-page, 40-condition draft resolution that was ultimately approved on Monday night states that in the revised application, those “three major areas of concern have been addressed.” The document, which is available for public viewing on P&Z’s “Meeting Documents” web page, lists a number of changes that have eased doubts: a reduction in the number of auxiliary cabins, a tightening of the central campus that brings external elements like the spa and pool closer to the core of the development, a thorough sound analysis and noise pollution mitigation plan, approval from the town’s Water Pollution Control Authority, and moving the “event barn,” once planned to be a free-standing structure, into the main inn building expansion.
In the Commission’s deliberations following the closure of the public hearing for the revised application in September, several commissioners expressed their satisfaction with Aradev’s responsiveness to the commission’s and community’s concerns. During the first deliberation session on Oct. 7, Chair Michael Klemens said he found the new plans to be “much better designed this go around,” though he did qualify that the proposed development was “still large.”
At the same meeting, commissioner Allen Cockerline voiced his approval of the renewed application’s technical details, such as its sound survey, a robust stormwater management plan, and relocating the event facility inside the main building, which he described as a “very, very positive move.”
Vice Chair Cathy Shyer, though, felt differently. “The bottom line is, this is a big development,” she said during the Oct. 7 discussion. “It’s as big as the last one.”
During the seven public hearing sessions that took place in August and September, cries that the revised application had not mitigated in any meaningful way its most invasive components — namely, the “inappropriate” size and scale of the development in a rural residential (zoned RR1) neighborhood — were a common refrain from neighbors of the inn.
Over the course of those seven meetings, and an additional six during the hearing process for Aradev’s first application last year, P&Z heard hours of testimony from the community, the vast majority of it in opposition to the project.
Shyer echoed those sentiments at the Oct. 20 meeting: “Some things just don’t belong in some places.”
She expressed her frustration at the Commission for its debate over conditioning the approval to remove three of the four cottages in the site plans, which she felt was a red herring towards the broader issue. “This project is so big and so intense that taking three keys away is not making any difference.”
The meeting eventually took a 45-minute recess to allow Land Use Director Abby Conroy to draft a new resolution that included the stipulation to remove the three cottages, leaving only one still included in the plan. Upon resuming the meeting at 10:30 p.m., Klemens asked for a motion to approve the resolution, which was followed by a lengthy silence before Cockerline eventually offered it up. The vote passed 4-1, with Shyer voting no.
The moment marked the end of an application process that has seen heightened emotions, community organizing that includes two petitions against the project with hundreds of signatures each, and litigation against P&Z for a regulation change that allowed the proposal to see review in the first place.
The legal case, if approved by the court, would nullify a 2024 zoning regulation change that allows hotels in the RR1 zone via special permit application. Klemens said that, because of this, “the applicant is proceeding totally at its own risk.”
P&Z’s attorney Charles Andres stated that he believed it was unlikely Aradev would even be able to begin construction in the next several months as the case sees court review: “It’s highly unrealistic that they will proceed while that is still pending.”
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Amanda Cannon
Oct 20, 2025
Amanda Cannon
Amanda Cannon
SALISBURY — Amanda Cannon, age 100, passed away Oct. 15, 2025, at Noble Horizons. She was the wife of the late Jeremiah Cannon.
Amanda was born Aug. 20, 1925, in Brooklyn, New York the daughter of the late Karl and Ella Husslein.
She was widowed at the age of 31 and worked as a bookkeeper for the Standard Oil Company and other oil companies in New York City until she retired at age 72.
Amanda moved to Noble Horizons in 2013 to live near her daughter Diane and son-in-law (the late) Raymond Zelazny.
She enjoyed her time in the Northwest Corner and was an avid nature lover, albeit considered herself a native New Yorker as she was born and resided in NYC for 88 years.
She was a faithful parishioner of St. Mary’s Church in Lakeville and attended Mass regularly until the age of 99.
Amanda was the grandmother of (the late) Jesse Morse and is survived by her daughter, Diane Zelazny, her grandsons, Adam Morse, Raymond Morse and his wife Daron and their daughter and her great granddaughter Cecelia Morse.
A Mass of Christian Burial will take place on Thursday, Oct. 23, 11 a.m. at St Mary’s Church in Lakeville, Connecticut.
Memorial donations may be made to St. Mary’s Church.
The Kenny Funeral Home has care of arrangements.
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