I moseyed down to Housatonic Meadows State Park late Saturday morning on Aug. 16 for a Trout Unlimited smallmouth bass event put on by the Mianus chapter.
“Wait a sec,” you say. “If it’s Trout Unlimited, why are they fishing for smallmouth bass?”
The answer is two-fold.
First, the Housatonic River in summer is primarily a smallmouth fishery. The water is too warm for trout but it doesn’t bother the bass much.The trout are hiding out in the thermal refuge areas and are off-limits until mid-September.
Second, the word “unlimited” suggests wiggle room.
When I rolled in there was a small pop-up tent with the words “Trout Unlimited” on it set up by the upper parking lot. Being a trained observer, I spotted this vital clue almost immediately.
There was a folding table under the tent. It was empty, but it seemed likely there would be food on it at some point.
Trained observers are also patient. I tabled the food question and motored down to the lower parking area, where I beheld half a dozen men with fly rods casting into the low, slow river with varying degrees of proficiency and enthusiasm.
The nearest to me turned out to be Eddie Curtis, who hails from southern New Jersey. “About 15 minutes from Philly,” he said.
Curtis was a fortuitous choice of subject. Chatty and easy-going, he embarked on an angling monologue that included adventures on salt and fresh water and an incisive critique of fish and game practices in his home state.
All the while he chucked lazy downstream casts. On about every tenth one, he hooked a smallish smallmouth bass.
I asked him what fly he was using. The answer -- a black Wooly Bugger -- wasn’t surprising. That’s a standard pattern for this kind of fishing. Almost a cliche.
Curtis was using a black Wooly Bugger with an unusual feature — a little propeller or spinner.Patrick L. Sullivan
But this was different in that it had a little propeller attached just below the hook eye.
I last saw something like this in the mid-1990s in New Mexico, where a rustic saloon I just happened to be in had a small display case of standard trout flies with the same kind of propellers attached. The brand name was “Pistol Pete.”
Curtis said they work almost too well. He jerked his thumb behind him and said “He ties them for me.”
I resolved to catch up with “he” when everybody took a break.
I ambled back to the car and exchanged camera and notebook for rod and vest.
I tried four different flies, two surface and two subsurface, and failed to move anything.
Not anxious to perform the Walk of Shame, I tried a black Wooly Bugger, no propeller.
That did the trick.
Back up at the tent my finely honed instincts proved correct.Food had materialized, in the form of two giant submarine sandwiches, a couple of jumbo bags of potato chips, and sodas.
Gerald Berrafati was in charge of this. He is the chapter coordinator for the Mianus Trout Unlimited chapter, and he was talking a mile a minute about various dam removal and stream reclamation projects in his bailiwick.
Since the state of Connecticut east of New Hartford and south of Torrington is a complete mystery to me, I had only a vague idea where these places were.
But it sounded good.
Antoine Bissieux, who does business as “The French Fly Fisherman,” made a cameo appearance. Some years back he was with a couple of sports on the Hous in similar circs — warm, low, late summer -- and I swapped him a handful of mop flies for a sampler of his perdigon nymphs. If he remembered this he didn’t let on.
The six or eight of us at the tent did a number on the chow and talked some guff between bites. The sandwiches were good. So was the guff.
Warren Nesteruk of Southbury (I think) said his wife was giving him a hard time about having so many fly rods.
I asked how many he had.
“Fifteen,” he replied.
When I informed him I had something like 80 rods, he grew thoughtful, as if my awful example might buy him some space.
Then it struck him.
“You’re not married, are you.”
One loose end remained. I hate loose ends, and I wanted to find the fellow who added propellers to his flies.
But they had left.
So if you read this, Eddie Curtis of south Jersey, drop me a line. I’d like to find out if they really do work almost too well.
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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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