Turning Back the Pages - March 5, 2026

125 years ago —
March 1901

Several of our horsemen have had their trotters out on the ice last Saturday afternoon. A.B. Landon seemed to be master of the situation. Abram Martin took second.

CHAPINVILLE — Charles Fuller the hunter that lives under mountain killed a wild cat this week Wednesday that weighed 32 pounds. This makes the second one he has killed this winter.

100 years ago —
March 1926

At Ottawa, Sunday, John Satre won the Canadian championship in the cross country race. His brother, Olaf Satre, was second, three minutes and fifty nine seconds behind.

Editor Freeman of the Connecticut Western News was a fraternal visitor at the Journal Office on Tuesday.

50 years ago —
March 1976

John Fitch of Lime Rock is an inventor who likes to tinker with concepts and ideas that interest him. Fitch gained acclaim for his inventiveness in 1969 when the “Fitch Inertial Barriers” were demonstrated at Lime Rock and proved to minimize the impact of automobile crashes. Fitch, a tall, thin 58-year-old, didn’t stop churning out ideas and inventions with the successful marketing of the highway safety barriers. In an interview Monday he said “I usually have two or three things going at once.” His latest developments are a fireplace stove that he says will better use heat from burning logs and a design for a solar energy heated house. Inventing is a natural penchant for Fitch. One of his forefathers, also named John Fitch, made nautical history when he launched the first steamboat on Aug. 22, 1787. Some 18 years after Fitch’s ancestor propelled a boat by steam, Robert Fulton put a steamboat on the Hudson River, and won praise and publicity. Fulton is generally credited with inventing the steamboat. “He had all kinds of trouble,” Fitch says of his predecessor.

SALISBURY — The ringing of a bell rather than the banging of a gavel will open future Salisbury town meetings. The town has acquired a Bicentennial copper bell mounted by a wrought iron hanger on a black walnut plaque with each piece hand-crafted by members of a senior citizens group.

25 years ago —
March 2001

In anticipation of St. Patrick’s Day, Lillian Pitkin, who is 103 years old, joined students at Town Hill School in Lakeville Tuesday morning and told them of her childhood in Belfast, Ireland, as well as her youth in Brooklyn, N.Y. “Can you imagine a street without cars or house without a phone?” she asked the children. “I was seven years old when electricity first came in.”

FALLS VILLAGE — John Mauer resigned from his position as chairman of the Region 1 Board of Education Monday night, calling the board “dysfunctional.” In an interview Tuesday morning he said the board can’t seem to agree on anything and he is tired of personal attacks from reporters who misquote him and take his comments out of context.

LAKEVILLE — A fundraising drive has been started to help Kelly Allison pay medical expenses incurred after her car crashed Monday morning into a Peterbilt truck on Route 44 in Salisbury near Ore Pond. Ms. Allison is known to many area residents because she works at the Scoville Library in Salisbury, Lakeville Wine and Spirits and the Douglas Library in Canaan.

BIRMINGHAM, United Kingdom — Championship Auto Racing Teams Inc. and Skip Barber Inc. have merged a proven training and scholarship system with three internationally renowned racing series to create a training- development- realization cycle that is unprecedented anywhere in motorsports. The Barber Dodge Pro Series, which will race at the Dodge Dealers Grand Prix at Lime Rock May 25-28, is now the “Official Entry Level Professional Race Series of CART.”

CANAAN — One of two mysterious portraits discovered recently in the basement of the Douglas Library has been identified. Cornwall resident Helen Tennant called the library about two weeks ago to say, without a doubt, that one of the portraits is of poet John Greenleaf Whittier.

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