History, camping and the culture of Salisbury come together in the tale of Billy’s View

This is part one of a two-part story. 

SALISBURY — This is a story that pulls together strands of what life was like in Salisbury a half century ago, what it’s like today and what it could be in the future. It’s about family and generations and community. It’s about hiking and camping and the Appalachian Trail.

The nugget of all this is actually a pretty short tale — but it’s best told with some explanatory digressions, like a research paper with footnotes or an article in The New Yorker.

For those who prefer their information to come in Twitter-size bites, here is the nugget:  There is a marker on the Appalachian Trail in Salisbury that calls out “Billy’s View.” The Billy in question is now a 77-year-old retired attorney who divides his time between Salisbury and New York City.

In November, Bill Forsyth had introduced himself on the Next Door app saying that he was the “Billy” of “Billy’s View.”  He told me that he was taking two of his grandsons up to the view for the first time in their young lives (they are 12 and 10).

At this point, the story will become complicated but, if you want to understand  Salisbury and what ties it together, it will also get more interesting. It is complex enough that we will run it in two parts.

‘The Changing Landscape’

Salisbury is so attractive in part because its history is deep and involves remarkable people working together to do remarkable things.

Sometimes they leave and share their skills and intelligence with the outside world. Often they return. One such person was Christopher Rand, who was one of the old “China Hands”: the journalists who covered the Chinese Revolution in the 1940s.

Rand grew up in Salisbury, along with his brothers Bill and John “Jake” Rand (whose widow, Charlotte, eventually married another China expert, the journalist Harrison Salisbury).

Jake Rand, was a well-known Salisbury farmer who started the milk processing plant, Salisbury Farms Milkbar (now the Iron National Bank) and later became an attorney, serving as a state Congressman.

His son, Curtis Rand, and daughter, Rosina Rand, are still in Salisbury (Curtis is the town’s longtime first selectman).

Although Christopher Rand roamed the world as a foreign correspondent for most of his life, he returned often to Salisbury and wrote many essays for The New Yorker about life here in the 1950s and 1960s. Those essays were collected into a book in 1968 that is called “The Changing Landscape.”

Like many newcomers to the region, once I discovered “The Changing Landscape” it became a sort of Rosetta Stone, unlocking mysteries of life in a landscape that had changed somewhat but (actually) not all that much.

Many of the people and places he describes were still here when I moved to the Northwest Corner in the 1990s. As a journalist new to Salisbury and The Lakeville Journal, I spent many happy months meeting people that Rand had known, and hearing more stories about his larger-than-life exploits, here and abroad.

Norm Sills: farmer, historian, hiker

One of many sources that helped me unlock the world of the Rand family was Norm Sills, who had been the head farmer on a Salisbury estate called Hamlet Hill that was created in the early 1730s.

By the early 20th century it was in the hands of William Blanchard Rand, a gentleman farmer and state legislator; and his wife, the portrait artist Ellen Emmet Rand, considered one of America’s most famous female portrait artists. Her work is in the collections of many major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum in New York City and the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

William, called by his middle name, “Blanchard,” and Ellen were the parents of Christopher, Bill and Jake. Eventually the Rand family sold Hamlet Hill, and the Forsyth and McClintock families were summer residents there from the mid-1950s until the family sold the property in 1979. Members of both families continue to be connected to the property.

Libby McClintock, a cousin of Bill Forsyth, died tragically in a riding accident in South America at the age of 66. An architect, she had designed two famous New York City restaurants of the 1980s, called Ernie’s and America, which started a trend toward large and lively dining spaces.

Libby’s mother and Bill’s mother were twin sisters and the children, according to McClintock’s obituary, were more like siblings than cousins.

All that togetherness can, of course, be delightful but also overwhelming.

‘Billy’ builds a campsite

For Forsyth, the many acres of forest that surround the farming portion of Hamlet Hill became a place he could escape to when he wanted some time alone. By the time he was in law school, hiking in the woods became more than ever an essential way to clear his head and find equilibrium.

All of the McClintock and Forsyth cousins spent much of their days in Salisbury in the woods, thanks in part to the teachings of a close friend of the family named Agnes Fowler.

When Fowler was in her mid-60s, Forsyth recalled, “she decided it was time for all the Forsyths and McClintocks to learn how to camp. We seven were like our own little Scout troop. She taught us how to make a fire, how to camp and how to stay quiet in the woods.”

Far from being a local denizen of the woods, Fowler was a part-time resident of New York City, a founder of the Seeing Eye Dog Foundation and a woman of enough importance that when she died in 1976, there was a feature obituary about her in the New York Times.

Many of the trails that the cousins followed through the woods were old logging trails. When he was in his early 20s, Forsyth eventually followed one of them up to a promontory overlooking the Salmon Kill Valley.

“There’s an old logging road from Amesville to the ski jumps at Satre Hill in Salisbury that used to be kept open, I think for horseback riding. Agnes Fowler used to use it.”

Forsyth decided to build a campsite there on the promontory.

“I had a tent and a fireplace I put together with stones. I went up there with a chainsaw and cut about 20 trees to clear the view,” Forsyth recalled. “I would come up on Friday nights when I was just starting to work in New York City, and would spend the weekends there.

“The real problem was getting fresh water. I eventually found a surface well about a hundred yards away. It might have been used at one point for watering horses or oxen. It would silt up in the off season but if I dug it out every spring, I could have water.”

Norm Sills and the AT route

At this point, Norm Sills was the farmer for Hamlet Hill. Norm was a fascinating and lovely man. Born in New York City in 1922, he had come to the University of Connecticut to study agriculture and then ended up as a tenant farmer on the Miles estate in the Twin Lakes section of Salisbury and then Hamlet Hill.

Sills had always been an active and enthusiastic hiker and woodsman, and after 24 years of farming, he sold his farm gear in the late 1970s and went to work for the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC).

The AMC was formed in the early 1920s — simultaneous with the beginning of plans for a national north-south hiking trail, from Georgia to Maine, that would become known as the Appalachian Trail. The AMC manages the Connecticut sections of the trail.

In a history interview with Sills by the Salisbury Association Historical Society (www.salisburyassociation.org/archives/oral-history/sills-norm-2), Sills explains that the trail did not yet have a formal route through this part of the state when he started working for AMC; part of his job was to “create” the trail, and negotiate with private landowners to sell sections of their land or allow hikers to pass through.

This was far from an easy process but Sills managed to move through it and remain an important and respected member of the Salisbury community. In addition to his work for the AMC, he was also the Salisbury town historian from 1999 to 2005.

He wrote trail guides to the AT sections in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts and was elected to the Board of Managers for the Appalachian Trail Conference, which oversees the entire 2,200 mile trail.

Sills died in 2016 but was still active in the region and at Hamlet Hill in the 1970s, when Bill Forsyth was seeking peace and clarity in his woodland campsite. Like all great outdoorsmen, Sills quietly observed everything around him — and that included the activities of the McClintock and Forsyth offspring.

“I was ‘Billy’ to Norm when I was growing up,” Forsyth recalled. “He knew everything that happened around Hamlet Hill and he knew I had a campsite up there.”

Sills was hired to lock in the AT route through the Northwest Corner in 1979. Part of the trail passes through the woods behind Hamlet Hill (it travels down on the other side to Sugar Hill Road on the Amesville side of Salisbury, near the Housatonic River).

Rand’s View and Billy’s View

At two points on the property, there are marked views. One is called Rand’s View. Curtis Rand said he isn’t certain who named it or which family member it was named for, but it was long known as “Rand’s View.”

Billy’s View is less known, although you can find a thorough description of it on the website of the Interlaken Inn in Lakeville, at www.interlakeninn.com/hiking-trails-in-lakeville-and-salisbury-ct.

Forsyth recalls the often acrimonious process of negotiating the trail route with landowners in multiple towns. The AT is still gently rerouted from time to time every few years, but in Salisbury it still comes out at Rand’s View and the nearby Billy’s View.

“Norm used to call it Billy’s Campsite,” Forsyth recalled, “but he told me he wanted to officially name it Billy’s View because they didn’t want people camping there.”

It’s been many years now since any Rands or the Forsyths and McClintocks have owned Hamlet Hill.  When they sold the farming portion of the property to the Findlay family, they gave the 350 acres of woods to the Nature Conservancy, with the understanding that it would be passed on to the Salisbury Association, with a route carved out of it to be owned by the Federal government for the trail.

But the Forsyth and McClintock families continue to own abutting or nearby property on Prospect Mountain Road.  Bill’s and Lesleigh’s property is known as the Grey Cottage, “named after a family called Grey who owned it in the 19th century,” Forsyth recalled, although the original cottage was built in 1731.

Like many New York City residents, Forsyth and his wife, Lesleigh, left the city at the beginning of the pandemic.

“We’ve mostly been up here for the past 18 months.”

And of course the woods have been calling to him. One of the stated goals of the Appalachian Trail is that hikers should be able to feel as though they’ve traveled back in time while they are hiking, that there should be large sections of the trail where you can’t see or hear cars or modern life.

Forsyth can travel back in time on those hikes into the woods, but he’s also looking forward to the next generation. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, he took two of his grandsons (Ryan, 12, and Casey, 10) up to see “his” view. The boys did very well on the roughly 45-minute ascent, Forsyth reported.

The view has been obscured by new tree growth in the last 50 years, but, “They tell me that they’re going to clear it again soon.”

The woods are also more wild than when Forsyth used to go bushwhacking through there. There are many more bears now, and (sadly) many more ticks, some of which now carry Lyme disease. There are more coyotes now.

“There weren’t wild turkeys when I was a boy. There were porcupines and birds. You’d sometimes see a fox.”

Of course Forsyth took his own sons to Billy’s View as they were growing up.

“This was our first trip up there with these two grandsons.”

They seem to have understood the significance of having a spot in one’s name on a major trail: “As we were on the trail coming back, 12-year-old Ryan scrambled up on a rock and said, ‘I name this Ryan’s Rock!’ and Casey claimed his own rock. Ryan said he’s going to bring a sign next time we come up.”

A century from now, when hikers wonder how Ryan’s Rock got its name,  they can find the true story in the archive of The Lakeville Journal, along with the history of the local Appalachian Trail and information on the Rands, the McClintocks, the Forsyths, Norm Sills and the many other people who have helped make Salisbury so much more than simply a place where people own houses.

The online archive can be found through Salisbury’s Scoville Memorial Library at https://scoville.advantage-preservation.com.

A Rand family member made corrections to the history of the Rand family included in the first part of this article. Those corrections are included in this online version.

Find part two of the tale of Billy’s View here.

Hiking for the Forsyths of Salisbury is a journey through the history of their family and their town. This year, for the first time, Bill Forsyth, at right in the decade-old photo above, and his grandsons hiked for the first time to the view named in his honor: Billy’s View. Forsyth’s sons had visited this site and other peaks with family connections before, including Rand’s View, seen in this photo, when Forsyth and his son Gilbert backpacked most of the Connecticut portion of the Appalachian Trail. Photo submitted

Bill Forsyth took a hike into the woods and the past over Thanksgiving weekend with two of his grandsons, to show them the site on the Appalachian Trail that was named in his honor. Photo submitted

  

Hiking for the Forsyths of Salisbury is a journey through the history of their family and their town. This year, for the first time, Bill Forsyth, at right in the decade-old photo above, and his grandsons hiked for the first time to the view named in his honor: Billy’s View. Forsyth’s sons had visited this site and other peaks with family connections before, including Rand’s View, seen in this photo, when Forsyth and his son Gilbert backpacked most of the Connecticut portion of the Appalachian Trail. Photo submitted