SALISBURY — The Lakeville Journal Street Fair took place on a blocked-off Academy Street Saturday, as families brought children to get their faces painted, receive a custom-tied balloon, a toy duck and/or octopus, and sing along with Danny Tieger.
Meandering down Academy Street attendees encountered the sibling team of Izzy and Charlie Wolff, who were selling bracelets they made themselves for $10 apiece to benefit Camp Jabberwocky, a camp for persons with disabilities in Martha’s Vineyard.
Missy Wolff, their mother, said that this was the third summer the children had been selling the bracelets. They had raised some $6,000 over that period, which is impressive at $10 a pop, and even more so at $5, which was the original price.
Audrey Cole, whose business card refers to her as being with the “Senior Medicare Patrol” for the Western CT Area Agency on Aging in Waterbury, was securing her signs and pamphlets from a persistent breeze.
She said her specialty is Medicare fraud as committed against unwary senior citizens.
In a nutshell, her advice to anyone who gets a dodgy phone call about their Medicare status is “Don’t engage.”
What makes a call dodgy?
“If you didn’t initiate the call.” In other words, this isn’t someone calling the senior back with an answer to a question.
Other signs of skullduggery are calls that raise fear in some way. (Sometimes it’s as crude as a threat to cancel a person’s Medicare unless they give up bank account information.)
Or calls that come during holidays.
Cole said that when banks and government offices are closed, it gives the crooks more time to empty a victim’s bank accounts.
On a more bucolic note, Danny Tieger (with his guitar) was singing to an ever-shifting group of children, most of whom seemed to know him.
Danny Tieger played guitar and sang for a group of children during The Lakeville Journal Street Fair Saturday, Aug. 2.Patrick L. Sullivan
As parents held up phones to record the doings for posterity, Tieger got a group to pitch in on a number called “Penelope Poppins.”
Over in the non-profit organization tent, State Rep. Maria Horn (D-64) chatted with Lakeville Journal Editor John Coston as well as Anne Childs and Caroline Collins from Great Mountain Forest.
Christine Gevert was urging visitors to sign up for season tickets for Crescendo, and Craig Davis and Lynn Martorell were spreading the word about East Mountain House, a new hospice facility opening soon in Lakeville.
Vance Cannon from the 21st Century Fund for HVRHS had a special treat for the younger set: little octopi that were made with a 3D printer at the Mahoney-Hewat Science and Technology Center at Housatonic Valley Regional High School.
The octopi made an excellent set when paired with the toy ducks available at The Lakeville Journal tent.
At the balloon and face painting tent, the youngsters who weren’t having their faces adorned were choosing from a balloon menu that included a sword, dog, flower, snake and magic wand.
Northwest Passage, with Ed Thorney, Scott Camara, Greg Riess and Dave Mallison started their set at about 1 p.m., opening with “Drift Away.”
Those with an appetite could try a lobster roll, tacos, specialty candy and vegan wraps and burgers.
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Marge Parkhurst with a collection of historic nails recovered from wall cavities during restoration work.
“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.”
A collection of historic nails recovered during restoration work.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.
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. Marge Parkhurst is the owner of Cottage & Country Painting Co. She can be reached at marge@cottageandcountryct.com or 860-379-4748.
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