Turning Back the Pages - July 9, 2026

125 years ago — July 1901

During the heavy storm of Tuesday afternoon the houses of the late Tryphene Wentworth and Harrison Suydam on Mt. Riga were struck by lightning and the doors and several boards were torn off. Several trees in Salisbury were blown down and telephone wires suffered more or less.

Why do a dozen different thermometers all in the shade give a dozen different records?

A very careless habit is that of throwing paper on the streets. Many a serious runaway has been caused by a paper blowing suddenly around a horse’s feet and at this season of the year horses are more nervous than usual and a little more caution should be used. It is only a small matter, but anybody can see the reasonableness of the precaution. Save your paper till you get where there is a proper place for waste paper.

The patent medicine company who have been holding forth on A. Martin’s lot the past two weeks on Tuesday pulled up stakes and departed for Sheffield. The winner in the watch contest was Miss Jennie Martin.

100 years ago — July 1926

SALISBURY — Mr. and Mrs. Stalker enjoyed a motor trip to the shore.

The luscious strawberries we are eating were presented to us by John Lowe of Lime Rock. There was about 30 of them to a quart, and they were about the finest berries the editorial eyes have yet seen. Incidentally it might be stated that Mr. Lowe has a large crop of them for sale, to anyone desiring the finest quality berries for the table or canning.

50 years ago — July 1976

The birthdays of a centennial maple in Lakeville and a one-year-old girl, Chaffee Loper of Sharon, coincided with the national Bicentennial. A sugar maple growing by the Farnam Road home of Lucille Murray was planted July 4, 1876 by Mrs. Murray’s aunts, Mary and Elizabeth Cleaveland. Chaffee, who celebrated her first birthday July 2, is a distant relative of two other Cleaveland sisters, Ida and Ada, through her grandfather, William Barnett of Lakeville. They were cousins 100 years ago of the two Cleaveland sisters who planted the maple.

David N. Parker, executive editor and vice president of The Lakeville Journal, will leave his assignment at the end of this week to become assistant state news editor of The Waterbury Republican. He will continue to live in Lakeville and will retain an association with the Journal and with The News in Millerton, of which he has been manager.

Kent selectmen will meet next Monday night with a representative of the Department of Environmental Protection to discuss the operation of the Kent landfill. The meeting has been arranged because the DEP is concerned that the landfill may be polluting a major aquifer located below and to the south of the landfill.

If you go to Sharon Hospital after Oct. 1 this year, chances are it will cost you some $8.50 more per day than it did last year. This will still be one of the smallest increases in the state.

FALLS VILLAGE — Funeral services were held Friday July 2 for John Willard Carrigan, 67, of Beebe Hill Road. Carrigan, a retired Foreign Service Officer who served in the South Central America and the Middle East before retiring, died Tuesday at Sharon Hospital shortly after he was taken there for treatment. Medical examiner Dr. G.S. Gudernatch said death was from natural causes.

Our town seemed to receive some kind of special blessing from Nature for the thoroughly enjoyable conclusion to its Bicentennial celebration Sunday evening. Visitors to the Grove kept bringing reports of downpours all around us — in Sheffield and Cornwall and elsewhere — but all we got was a few menacing rumbles of thunder and a glorious rainbow stretching away on the other side of Lake Wononscopomuc. What a compliment for Nancy Belcher and her fine Bicentennial Committee!

Salisbury Central School has a fine pile of oddments ranging from shoes to lunch boxes to prescription eyeglasses left behind throughout the school year by assorted students. The goods will be passed on to a service organization soon, so anyone whose child lost anything during the year should hustle down to the school office and dig through the pile before the middle of July.

CANAAN — There was standing room only Sunday evening in East Canaan’s historic Congregational Church when Canaan began its month-long Bicentennial observance with a religious service and choral presentation. Women in long Colonial costumes greeted the worshippers as they made their way to the church through the cool rainy evening. The main address of the evening was given by the Rev. Frank Blaikie of Christ Episcopal Church, the town’s senior clergyman. Following the religious observance of the nation’s 200th anniversary, Larry Gates of Cornwall, a television and movie actor, gave a reading of the Declaration of Independence. His reading was in turn followed by a choral presentation of music from periods of crisis in the history of the United States.

Catherine Scott of West Cornwall and her horse, Nabob’s Bobby, took first place among 22 contestants in the Junior Pre-training Division at the Glastonbury Pony Club Horse Trials on June 27. Catherine is a member of the newly-organized Housatonic Pony Club.

25 years ago — July 2001

KENT — An air of uncertainty lies in the wake of Friday’s referendum vote to terminate the Kent Center School building project. Meeting Monday, the building committee wondered how to respond to the project’s termination by a tally of 276-256. Friday’s referendum nullified the outcome of an October referendum that approved the project by a 353-263 vote.

Despite an endowment of over $2 million, the newly-elected president of the Salisbury Association claims the group can no longer afford to support the Holley-Williams House, considered a rare and important historical resource. A public meeting to discuss the fate of the house is scheduled for July 14 at Town Hall.

These items were taken from The Lakeville Journal archives at Salisbury’s Scoville Memorial Library, keeping the original wording intact as possible.