This past weekend my wife and I took a fall foliage drive through northern Connecticut. The area is not as picturesque as northwest Connecticut (Litchfield County), but there are some things to see and charming roads with fall foliage to enjoy.
This year was not a good year. Connecticut and New England in general have been in a drought. The drought monitor for our area lists us as either being “abnormally dry” or in a “moderate drought”. Well, considering that our ponds are half full and it rained perhaps just once a month all summer, I would hate to see what an “extreme drought” is.
According to Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, the area we toured was at peak foliage. I was underwhelmed compared to past years. The colors were dull and washed out compared to last year. But, no matter what, living in the northeast means road trips to see the forests in their fall splendor!
Southbury and apples
We started out in Southbury, stopping by the Hidden Gem Orchards to pick up some apples. We got apples for baking, apple sauce, and for eating as a snack. The place has a huge variety of apples for all tastes and uses
Next to Hidden Gem is the Southbury Training School. The school is being wound down and will eventually close for good. Throughout its history it was used to house profoundly developmentally disabled children. As I understand, the last residents there are adults who cannot be safely discharged into the community. Once these residents are gone, that will be it. As a result, most of the ground that once made up a vast complex housing kids from all over the state has been left to nature. Below is one of the buildings in a state of decay.
Simsbury and Hartford area
From Southbury we drove northeast to the area around Canton, Avon, and Simsbury. The further you progress on the route, the more suburban it gets. The area is commuter land for Hartford. To the south is the Hartford-Farmington-New Britain metropolitan area. Not much to see there in terms of foliage, nature, and quaint New England towns.
We were hoping to see tobacco farms on this trip. As someone who likes a good cigar every now and then, Connecticut produces exceptional tobacco for cigar wrappers. Wrappers are the outer tobacco leaf around the cigar. Connecticut wrappers have the color of café au lait and produce a mild to medium cigar. I am a fan of them as opposed to full-bodied cigars with maduro or natural wrappers, which can be too strong for me.
Anyway, no luck finding a working tobacco farm on this trip. However, we stumbled across Meadowood in Simsbury. This was once a tobacco farm where Martin Luther King Jr. worked in 1944 as a teenager before starting at Morehouse College. He was part of a group of iterant laborers who worked the tobacco fields while adult men were fighting the Second World War. Letters that Dr. King wrote home indicate that his time at this farm, far removed from the Jim Crow south, had a profound effect on him and may have inspired a vision of what could be.
Below is a photo of the tobacco barns where he worked. As you can see, the land now produces corn—cigar smoking is not as popular today as it was in the 1940s—and is owned by the Trust for Public Land. Thus, these historic structures have been saved from the bulldozer.
Bourbon
Our last stop was for a quick bite and drink at the Red Stone Pub in Simsbury. It had a nice beer list, friendly staff, and decent bar food. Afterward, I wandered around to take some photos as the sun was beginning its retreat for the day while my wife waited in the car. I found an old train station that was converted into a small distillery. It was home to a startup called Powdermen Spirits Company. They made a pretty decent bourbon, and I got to see what bourbon looked like when it came out of the still. Don’t laugh, but I always wanted to see what it looked like and sample it. They graciously obliged as part of their tour.
What does it taste like? Whiskey! That’s what it tastes like. It does not have the complexity that it gets from time in the barrel, but it is suitable to drink. If you come from certain parts of the country, you will know this product as moonshine or white lightning.
One thing that struck me about the place was that it smelled like a bakery. More exact, it had that yeasty aroma you get from proofing bread dough. This, I was told, was because of the distiller’s yeast used to make the wort. You might find it off-putting, but I found it delightful.
After that, we headed back down Route 10 to the Wilbur Cross Parkway and home. Next week we might do Mystic and a cider mill.
Stay tuned!
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