News from Bird Bottom Farm Atop Canaan Mountain

News from Bird Bottom Farm
Atop Canaan Mountain

By Ursula B.G. Kilner, Salisbury

During the next to last weekend in October we were blessed with "soft," warmish weather, almost 70 degrees in the afternoons with breezes blowing leaves, and yet the leaves were still colorful on the trees. So for a final jaunt of the season Barbara and I went to the top of Canaan Mountain, where I had not been since the early 1970s, which is awhile back. The road has been improved somewhat and there are a few new houses, fewer as one climbs the winding way to the top.

A dirt road caught our eyes (especially since it said "Dead End") and we took it, albeit carefully. At the end of the dead end loomed a barn and a house across from it, so we turned around and stopped at a small graveyard surrounded on three sides with weathered board fencing. Barbara is not a graveyard enthusiast as I am, but she was curious what the names were on the weathered stones.

Some of the stones had been repaired, and repaired pretty well. Many of the old gravestones that had been repaired had epoxy running down over the lettering, making it impossible to decipher what was chiseled into the stones. There were some Roots and Allyns and Gillettes and other families, some with footstones and some without. Some of the carved verses were legible and some too worn to make out. All of the stones were old enough to have been carved in stone by hand. (Nowadays the "carvers" use acetylene torches, and what would have taken a gravestone carver three days, now a man can do in an hour or less.) One stone had sunk so that the death date was underground, and we could not dislodge the soil enough to reveal the lettering.

The mysteries of old stones can really grab persons who are interested in that sort of thing, and they join with others in the Connecticut Gravestone group and/or the American Gravestone Studies organization. I belong to both, and wish that I had time to explore more around our area.

We made our way from the old graveyard past the lake atop Canaan Mountain. The tops of many of the local mountains (out west, they would be called hills) have had deep dips scooped out by the glaciers thousands of years ago. This lake is the water supply for Norfolk, and it is beautiful and clear with no houses surrounding it—a truly pristine sight. We came down the mountain on the Norfolk side to come out on the Norfolk-Torrington Road very near the Battell Chapel.

Now that the leaves are gone and the days are getting darker, we shall enjoy Canaan Mountain from the valley and look up at it—probably until spring 2002, which isn't that far off. Anyone who says there is nothing to do or see in our corner of the world either has no curiosity or has no knowledge of where to look for fascinating, if obscure, spots in our Northwest Corner landscape.