Tail-wagging fun at Kent Library
Animal Control Officer Lee Sohl and her puppy, Gavin, read to a visitor at the Kent Library, May 2.
Lans Christensen
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Letters to the Editor - August 6, 2026
Lakeville Journal
Aug 05, 2026
Thanks for a successful ‘Summer Nights’
As the excitement of Summer Nights of Canaan comes to an end, we would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who helped make this year’s celebration such a success.
First and foremost, thank you to the incredible group of volunteers who generously gave their time, energy, and flexibility—especially when Mother Nature had other plans. Your willingness to adjust and keep things running smoothly made all the difference.
Thank you to everyone who came out to enjoy the carnival, purchase ride wristbands, and support the many events throughout the week. Your participation means so much to us. The North Canaan Events Committee receives a small percentage of carnival ticket and wristband sales, and those proceeds, along with the generosity of our sponsors and donors, help make community traditions like our annual fireworks display possible.
Thank you to Safari Amusements for bringing another fantastic carnival to North Canaan, and to Doug Palmer and Pyrotecnico for an unforgettable fireworks display that lit up the night.
We would also like to extend our sincere appreciation to NBT Bank for their generous donation in support of this year’s fireworks. Their commitment to our community helped make this beloved tradition possible.
Thank you to Just Ask Rental/Riva Associates III Rental for providing the tables and chairs that created a welcoming food court where attendees could relax and enjoy the delicious offerings from our local food vendors.
A special thank you goes to the team at Tidewater Residences for always stepping up when help was needed—especially at the last minute. Your positive attitude, willingness to lend a hand, and hard work never go unnoticed.
Summer Nights of Canaan wouldn’t be the tradition it is without the many organizations and volunteers who dedicate their time each year. Thank you to the Canaan Fire Company for bringing back Old Time Bingo (it was greatly missed), fire truck rides, the parade, and their annual raffle; the North Canaan Volunteer Ambulance for the Family Buffet Breakfast; William Perotti & Sons Inc. for hosting the always-entertaining Bed Race; and St. Martin of Tours CT for their famous Chicken BBQ dinner. Together, these events create a weekend that families look forward to year after year.
Most importantly, thank you to everyone who attended, volunteered, sponsored, and supported Summer Nights of Canaan. Your continued support keeps these hometown traditions alive, and we are grateful to celebrate them with such an amazing community.
Next up: Canaan Railroad Days! August 6–9.
We hope you’ll join us for another wonderful weekend of community fun!
Jenn Crane
Canaan
Urgent need to protect Historic District
As an avid Historic Preservationist, I write to call attention to the urgent need to protect the integrity of the Lakeville National Register Historic District. This coveted designation by our national government on the little village of Lakeville is sought after by many a small New England town. It is not only an honor bestowed but with it comes a responsibility to protect it and maintain it for generations to come. Our past should be prologue. As one who has restored three late 18th century homes in 3 towns in 2 states, two purchased from the heirs of the families who built them in approximately 1795, I believe I can speak as one who is not a johnny come lately to this issue of historic preservation.
The Historic District is not a singular entity but a composite of its individual parts all of which contribute to its status. One of the criteria for inclusion was “The Transportation Significance of Historic and the Iconic Lakeville Railroad Depot Building”.
It is no accident that this 1871 building still exists at all. It was gift to the town by Frederic and Ruth Bauer, along with a large portion of the surrounding land including what is now Bauer Park and Factory Pond. They left funds which are now much lager to provide for their care. The area has been the center of an important regional transportation network since the mid 1700’s. The earliest colonial roads to New York and Sharon, as well as to local iron mines and the forge on Lime Rock converged here.
Ultimately after earlier ventures by the Alexander Holley and others, a through route from Millerton to Lakeville to Hartford was established. According to the National Register Historic District records, the Hartford Connecticut Western Train was one of the trains bringing thousands of people to Lakeville on June 20th, 1883 to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of Montgomery Lodge on the Sharon Road.
All these facts and others, bear witness to the fact that whether occurring as a result by benign neglect or sheer abandonment of use, the present condition of and the now 12 years and longer vacancy of this building must come to an end as rapidly as possible. Viewed with the large open construction hole in the Historic District at 7 Holley Street, property also owned by the town, due to possible soil issues according to the town, a death by a thousand cuts, as the phrase goes, comes to mind. Allowed to go on, these conditions will lead to the disintegration of the District as one views this site in conjunction with the inappropriate concrete war zone-style barriers, which now surround the Depot structure and certainly do not benefit the area businesses in any way. Beautiful heavy duty bollards and attractive concrete planters are the preferred way to protect important buildings from traffic damage and could be done here with minimal expense and immediate timing.
Let us work together so we can protect our heritage and our future, and our children’s future can be as bright as our past.
Susan Galluzzo
Lakeville
A port in the storm
That was my car and I am the lady who was stuck in it for three hours on the 4th of July next to the Salisbury Town Hall.
Within minutes of parking at 7pm, a fierce wind caused two trees from the cemetery to come down, pulling down the power lines behind and above me. With that, an explosion of bright orange and red when the transformer blew, sparks flying. Back window blown out, windshield shattered, car completely covered, trapped, buried.
Then.. silence, but for the humming of live power lines.
I sat shocked and stunned. Surely family who had been on their way to pick me up would be there in minutes - but they were turned back from the storm.
Thankfully I was able to call 911 (Jeremy) and he assured me help was on the way. One by one people began to appear. Standing in the cemetery was someone screaming towards me in the storm “Are you ok? Are you injured? We are going to get you out!”. One was Danny B.
For three hours, so many people checked in on me, and reassured me including Matt, “AA”, and then Trooper McNeil from Troop B. And there were others.
And then, Bull Sherwood.
At 10pm, Bull said it was safe for me to exit the car. From the passenger side, I was able to squeeze out, but oh the slippery moss-covered branches. Someone was standing behind me in case I fell. Over one massive branch, then the other, and then I stalled. How will I get over this last tangled mess? To which Bull said “I got you” and before I could blink, he picked me up and threw me over his shoulder lifting me to safety. Well, all I could exclaim was “oh my!”
Roads were closed, power out everywhere, all of us strangers standing in front of the Town Hall mulling, wondering what are we going to do? Two men from Belgo road, and Cathy and her uncle Jamus who serendipitously live on the street of my partner’s mother who lived there for decades long ago and who graciously drove me back at midnight.
When I went by the next morning to see the car, many were taking photos. A woman approached me and said, “you can hardly see it but there’s a car under there!”. I said, “I know!”. She added “and there was a lady trapped in there for 4 hours!” I said, “I know, it was me, and it was 3 hours!”. To which she exclaimed “you’re famous!” Ha!
I’ve been coming to the area for almost forty years, half of the time to Salisbury Lakeville. All of us strangers, yet together as one when something like this happens.
Thank you to each and every one who was there that night and beyond (Alyssa at Arnold’s of Canaan!)
I am grateful beyond measure for family, friends, and the community that is the NW Corner.
Pauline J
Vermont
With thanks, housing dance party a success
I wish to thank the White Hart Inn for once again hosting the the annual Dance Party supporting the Salisbury Housing Trust. Dan Winkley and the staff at the Inn were fantastic in welcoming all our donors and supporters to a magical night of dancing and celebrating the efforts of the Housing Trust to build our community even stronger.
In addition, I wish to thank all our sponsors of the Dance and all who donated gifts for our silent auction.
With your support, the Housing Trust will continue on it mission of opening doors to home ownership in Salisbury.
Finally, thanks to Mary Taylor and her team for the countless of hours it took to organize this event!
John Harney
President,
Salisbury Housing Trust
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How hospice pioneers transformed end-of-life care in the Northwest Corner
Mary Talbot
Aug 05, 2026
On a winter day in the early 1970s, Peter Warner, a young man dying of leukemia, lay in bed at Sharon Hospital, waiting in agony for his next dose of pain medication. Hospital rules insisted he could have it only every four hours. Not a moment sooner.
His mother, Claudia Warner, watched the minutes tick by while her son suffered. She realized that medical care was failing him, not because it couldn’t cure him but because it couldn’t, or wouldn’t, ease his pain.
Spurred by her grief and frustration—and having glimpsed at Yale New Haven Hospital what a new approach called hospice could offer—Warner began to push for drastic change in how dying patients were treated in our region. Together with two Sharon Hospital nurses, Louisa Lafontan and Donna DiMartino, she pioneered hospice care in the Northwest Corner.
Lafontan, who had helped build Sharon Hospital’s intensive-care unit, mentored DiMartino, and the two became lifelong friends. Inspired by Florence Wald, then dean of the Yale School of Nursing, who had brought hospice care to Connecticut from England, both nurses saw how medicine’s relentless focus on cure overlooked something equally important. “Sometimes people [could not] be cured,” says DiMartino. “They just wanted to be cared for.”
“When Louisa came back and began to talk about hospice, my ears went up,” DiMartino recalls. “All of us as nurses began to see there was a need, and it was right in front of us.”
Claudia Warner created a steering committee on hospice care in the Northwest Corner and recruited Lafontan to lead it.
Change nevertheless unfolded slowly. Like the rest of the hospital staff, the nurses had been trained according to the traditional ethos of Western medicine: save lives, extend them, restart them if possible. “Death didn’t happen in hospitals,” DiMartino says. “It was not an accepted part of life back then.”
As education in hospice care spread—Lafontan led much of the training in the Northwest Corner—health care providers began to understand the importance of treating pain aggressively. “We learned that dosage and timing needed to be for the patient experience,” says DiMartino. At the end of life, addiction to pain medication is not the primary concern; pain management and well-being are.
Medical personnel and volunteers spoke with families, pharmacists, and clergy, toured funeral homes, and learned that dying involves communities as much as medicine.
Medicare’s hospice benefit, enacted in 1983, expanded access but also transformed hospice from a grassroots movement into a more institutionalized system. Lafontan continued training nurses and volunteers and helped bring hospice into long-term care facilities. DiMartino eventually became hospice director at the Salisbury Visiting Nurses Association (now part of the Visiting Nurse and Hospice of Litchfield County), where she trained younger nurses.
Most end-of-life care still happens at home, where family members become the default caregivers. Yet while most people hope to avoid dying in a hospital, not every family can provide round-the-clock care. For decades, Lafontan and DiMartino imagined a place to fill that gap—for their patients and themselves, when the time comes.
In September 2025, East Mountain House (EMH) opened in Lakeville, Connecticut, bringing that vision to life. Housed in a private residence, EMH allows residents to receive hospice support while trained caregivers provide the daily physical care families often struggle to manage alone.
When the two nurses toured the facility together, they were struck by how closely it matched what they had imagined. “We couldn’t have imagined a better place,” says DiMartino. “There are rooms for families to stay, and staff who provide the care, which is monumental.” Nurses from Visiting Nurse and Hospice of Litchfield County check in regularly.
After retiring from nursing, Lafontan and DiMartino became hospice volunteers themselves, sitting with patients, listening to their stories, and giving families a chance to rest.
Both women recall a man dying at home who had a photo of an aircraft carrier on his wall. When they first met him, “he was sort of shrunken up, sitting there in a chair,” recalls DiMartino. By coaxing him to talk about the image, she learned that he had been a pilot whose job was training others to land on the carrier. “I watched his body change into a man who had this great story to tell.”
“When you’re really present with a patient, you [see] them in the whole breadth of their life,” says DiMartino of the human connection intrinsic to hospice care. “The end is part of life, and we’ll all get there. But every person’s life has meaning. You just have to [listen] and you’ll find it.”
To learn more about the origins of hospice in our region and hear an oral history with Louisa Lafontan and Donna DiMartino, visit
eastmountainhouse.org/history-of-hospice/
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Annual choral performance probes the nation’s identity with bluegrass and a call for tolerance
Alec Linden
Aug 05, 2026
The Litchfield County Choral Union performs “Everyday Wonders: The Girl from Aleppo” during its annual concert at the Norfolk Music Shed on Aug. 2.
Photo by Alec Linden
NORFOLK — Any great weekend in Norfolk ends with music, and such was the case on Sunday evening, Aug. 2, when the Litchfield County Choral Union (LCCU) took over the historic digs of the Music Shed for a novel performance that traced the United States’ complicated lineage through the lenses of patriotic anthem, Americana and global music traditions, all carried by the soaring voice of a 69-strong choir.
As a capstone event for the town’s summer festival, called Weekend in Norfolk, the time-honored singing group, composed of choral singers from across the region, held its annual concert inside the redwood and cedar lined hall of the building. The iconic structure was built in 1906 with the direct purpose of housing the choir, which itself was founded seven years prior. Although the Music Shed’s usage has diversified since then, notably as the primary venue for the Yale School of Music’s Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, the LCCU still hosts its summer performance at its historic home.
Titled “From Roots to Promise: Singing America at 250,” this year’s program was designed as a nod to the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In his introduction included in the concert pamphlet, LCCU Music Director Gabriel Löfvall, an accomplished conductor in his second season with the group, asks, “At 250, who are we as a country? Are we fulfilling the ideals upon which our democracy was founded?”
Löfvall said his curation of the evening’s program was meant to use diverse musical traditions to explore those questions.
Sunday’s performance notably featured accompaniment by a full bluegrass band, complete with fiddle, banjo, mandolin, guitar, upright bass, percussion, fife and piano.
Speaking amid an excited buzz during an after-show reception outside the venue, Löfvall said that “The World Beloved: A Bluegrass Mass,” one of the show’s two centerpieces, is the only work he’s aware of that combines choral music with Appalachian folk traditions.
The piece was composed about two decades ago by Carol Barnett with the libretto — or lyrics — written by Marisha Chamberlain. Löfvall said he enjoyed developing the 30-minute piece with the choir and the bluegrass band, given that it represents an unlikely combination of ideas coming together to produce something new and unique, which he said is representative of the strengths of this country.
“The instruments [Barnett] uses are bluegrass, but the idiom is very complex,” he said, with the term idiom referring to the choral writing. Despite the stereotype that choral music doesn’t necessarily call for barn dances, when it comes to this piece, “it makes you tap your foot,” Löfvall said.
The other centerpiece was Cecilia McDowall’s 2018 “Everyday Wonders: The Girl from Aleppo,” with text by Kevin Crossley, which traces the true story of a Kurdish teenager with cerebral palsy named Nujeen Mustafa when war forced her to flee from her homeland to Europe.
Löfvall, himself an immigrant from Argentina, said that the piece represents to him a vision of the future potential of the United States, and an affirmation of its history as a place where people from around the world interact and exchange ideas.
“I’m always fascinated by the American experiment,” he said, and when it works, “it’s thanks to tolerance and everyone bringing in their best.”
The rest of the performance was bookended with an opening of “Sweet is the Work,” written by Norfolk composer Robbins Battell who died in 1895. The group performs the piece each year in honor of the composer, who inspired the founding of the LCCU.
It was followed by William Billings’ Revolution Era patriotic song “Chester”—“It represents to me the birth of America,” Löfvall said.
The program was capped with a performance of Paul Halley’s “Freedom Trilogy,” composed in 1994, which blends Gregorian prayer song, South African chant and the famed hymn “Amazing Grace.”
The performance closed to an extended standing ovation before the audience slowly filtered out to a reception with refreshments waiting outside just below the Music Shed’s broad facade.
As he fielded congratulations from all angles, LCCU President Felix Graham-Jones said, “That’s what we do for fun in the summer, isn’t it!”
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Trees removed from cemetery after storm, clearing space for Town Hall generator
Patrick L. Sullivan
Aug 05, 2026
Work began last week to clean up the fallen basswood trees at Town Hall in Salisbury. The July 4 storm took down several trees that landed in the cemetery.
Photo by Patrick L. Sullivan
SALISBURY — Members of the town highway crew joined John Swanson of Swanson Tree Removal last week to clear the large basswood trees that fell into the cemetery behind Town Hall during the July 4 storm, which caused widespread damage and left many residents and businesses without power for days.
Several of the large trees crashed into The Old Burial Ground during the storm, destroying part of the fence and knocking over at least two headstones.
On Friday, July 31, crews fed tree limbs into a wood chipper while Swanson stationed himself in a cherry picker to take down large branches. First Selectman Curtis Rand, Selectman Kitty Kiefer and Jean McMillen also observed from a safe distance.
During a July 20 Board of Selectmen meeting, Rand said the planned tree removal could solve a longstanding problem: finding a location for a generator at Town Hall. After the July 4 storm knocked out power in Salisbury for up to three days, the need for a generator at Town Hall became apparent.
Although officials had previously discussed purchasing a generator, they had not moved forward without identifying a practical location for it.
With a now-clear space on the Factory Street side of Town Hall, a generator can now be put in.
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Enrollments and governance must be priorities in Region One ‘organizational study’
Terry Cowgill
As a longtime observer of local politics and Northwest Corner demographics, I was interested to see Patrick Sullivan’s June 1 story reporting that the Region One Board of Education had voted recently “to move forward with a broad organizational study that could shape the future of education in the Northwest Corner.”
“The purpose of this organizational study is to evaluate the Region’s K–8 structure to ensure long-term educational excellence, equity, and fiscal sustainability,” Region One Superintendent Melony Brady-Shanley told The Journal.
In an earlier interview with the Journal, Brady-Shanley emphasized that no decisions have been made, but confirmed that the study could include discussions about regionalization and potential school consolidation — contentious subjects for years among Region One towns.
It is a subject that I’ve been keenly interested in for some time. I covered Region One, the first regional school district in New England, for nearly four years as a reporter for this newspaper, and my wife and I had two children who happily attended the district’s schools before moving on to four-year colleges.
But if you’ve been paying attention, you know that Region One’s enrollment numbers have been on a downward trajectory for more than three decades — not because of the quality of the educational product, but as a result of regionwide demographic trends that pose significant challenges for the future of Region One and districts like it.
In the last 20 years alone, the declines have been staggering. As of October 2007, Housatonic Valley Regional High School reported having 561 students. Going back even farther, the late former Housatonic Valley Regional High School principal and beloved local historian Ed Kirby told the Republican American newspaper that in the 1970s, there were approximately 780 students attending the school.
At the end of the 2024-25 school year, there were 316 and only 300 in 2025-26. According to the New England School Development Council, enrollment is expected to drop to 284 by the 2029–30 school year. To be fair, NESDEC’s predictions aren’t always spot-on. Still, it’s safe to say that there will be fewer bodies in the classrooms of our community’s high school in four years and that, as a result, per-student costs will continue to rise accordingly.
The situation is largely the same among the K-8 schools in the district’s six towns. Twenty years ago, Region One’s two smallest schools, Lee Kellogg in Falls Village and Cornwall Consolidated, had 101 and 129 students respectively.
As recently as 1998, Cornwall had nearly 200. This year Cornwall had 85 and Kellogg 69. In June, Kellogg graduated an 8th-grade class of two students. Yes, that’s a “2” with no zeroes. NESDEC forecasts some modest gains for those schools next year, but the long-term outlook remains bleak.
And it’s not just in our corner of our state. According to a recent CT Insider analysis of state Department of Education data, public school enrollment in Connecticut is at its lowest in at least 20 years, even as the number of high-needs and special-education students has risen over the same period of time. Consequently, much of the savings that could have been achieved through lower enrollments are offset by the rising expenses of educating these higher-need students, either on-campus or at pricey out-of-district private schools.
The drop in enrollment here in the Northwest Corner has been steeper for a host of reasons. We share the typical causes for declining enrollments here in Connecticut and elsewhere in New England: lower birth rates, high housing costs and a growing interest in nontraditional schooling in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
So as we ponder what to do about this crisis — and I don’t think it’s too strong a word — what should the Region One Board of Education consider as it conducts this organizational study?
The first obvious step would be closing or consolidating the K-8 schools with the smallest enrollments. At the low end is the Kellogg School. The aging building on Main Street was built in the 1950s and was renovated in both the 70s and 90s.
It would make sense to close that school and bus its students six miles or so down Route 7 to Cornwall, which has a much more modern building and plenty of excess capacity. Or some of the Falls Village students could be bused to North Canaan, which would be a shorter bus ride for some of the Kellogg students. These towns could form a new K-8 school district or Falls Village could simply tuition its students into the other towns. The former arrangement would allow Falls Villagers at least some representation on the new school board.
Unfortunately, my experience covering the town for this newspaper from 2005 to 2008 makes me highly skeptical that Falls Villagers would ever approve of such a plan.
In letters to the editor and in public statements on social media, they have largely resisted any arrangement that would result in the closing of their beloved but tiny school, which I recall 20 years ago was the most expensive comprehensive public school in the state (as of the 2024-25 school year, Sharon Center School was the leader at $48,747 per student). Cornwall, which is nearly as expensive, would surely welcome the Falls Village students and the revenue they would bring with them.
Newcomers to the region might wonder why the Region One Board couldn’t simply close one of the schools and reassign its students, or at least put the matter to a district-wide referendum. This points to a barrier in the way the district is organized.
Most regional school districts in Connecticut are fully regionalized, meaning that all the schools within the district’s borders are governed by the same board of education. A few, including Region One and Region 7, have high schools and services such as special education that are fully regionalized, but beyond that, the individual town elementary schools are left to govern themselves.
As the Region One website acknowledges, “Each of the towns in the region (Falls Village/Canaan, Cornwall, Kent, North Canaan, Salisbury/Lakeville, and Sharon) has its own K-8 elementary school governed by an autonomous board of education.”
This arrangement is virtually unheard of in any of the other states I have lived in or worked in as a journalist. The late Jack Mahoney, a Massachusetts native who led Housatonic as principal for a dozen years, once told me of this decentralized structure, “Ours is the most expensive way to do it.”
Each of Region One’s six K-8 schools have their own paid clerks for their local boards of education. Their budgets are prepared and reviewed independent of Region One, and approved or rejected by town residents in separate votes. Some, including Salisbury Central, even have on-staff specialists who manage the K-8 schools’ finances.
In a fully regionalized regional school district, such as the newly formed Region 20 in Litchfield, budgets, board functions and financial staff for individual schools are overseen by a single board of education at the regional level, thereby reducing redundancies and streamlining operations.
For example, 30 years ago when the fully regionalized Webutuck Central School District still operated two small elementary schools in Millerton and Amenia, NY, those two schools eventually shared a single building principal who split her time between the two locations. That kind of cost-saving arrangement is all but impossible in a region split into six separate K-8 districts.
Our current hyper-localized arrangement not only equates to higher taxes for residents, but it renders Region One essentially powerless to consolidate low-enrollment schools and become more efficient.
Finally, in its organizational study, the Region One Board of Education might want to take another look at how the district is funded on the local level. For as long as anyone can remember, taxes needed to fund the regional school district have been assessed against individual towns based almost entirely on the number of students they had enrolled in the high school during the previous school year.
One Falls Village resident so objected to this method of taxation that she filed a lawsuit, insisting that it unfairly punishes less wealthy towns. In 2000, former Falls Village First Selectman Gabriel Seymour unsuccessfully sued the Region One Board of Education over its per-student method of taxing member towns.
Residents and public officials in North Canaan have long complained that their town carries the highest burden for funding Region One simply because it sends the most students, while much wealthier Salisbury has a roughly 30% higher population but sends fewer students to Housatonic and, consequently, pays a significantly smaller share of the Region One budget than North Canaan.
The Region One board certainly has a laborious task in front of it. It will be hard work that will surely include lots of public input. The only certainty is that no one will like every aspect of the final product.
Terry Cowgill is a resident of the Lakeville section of Salisbury.