DOES CONNECTICUT BELONG IN NEW ENGLAND?

(continued from p. 115) highways, it’s unmistakably New England: the rivers, hills, and forests; the abundance and saturated color of the towering trees; the deep, dappled shade; the stone walls enclosing fields now gone to goldenrod; the lichen-dappled old gravestones; the town greens; the Congregational churches with their whiteclapboard siding.

You can, of course, also see this New England character being eroded by 1960s ranch houses and 21st-century McMansions (a tale of too many gables), and by the Walmarts and Stop & Shops on the periphery of old downtowns. You can see New England’s lost industrial character, its waning Yankee ingenuity, in the cavernous brick factory buildings left idle, with tattered “Now Leasing” banners up top.

I stopped at Norfolk, the most altitudinous town in Connecticut, at 1,280 feet, and also “the icebox of Connecticut.” When I brought up my question about whether Connecticut belongs in New England, a local promptly replied, “It does in Norfolk.” A former farming and mill town, it’s one of the northwestern hill communities that reinvented itself, with the coming of railroads in the late 19th century, as a summer colony. Norfolk became an enclave for professors, artists, musicians, and writers. A thinking person’s town. For a time in the 1930s, the experimental-poetry journal New Directions was published from a barn there. (A local family recalls pelting Ezra Pound with grapes during a swim at Toby Pond.) Generations of visitors have also regularly assembled in Norfolk’s long, shingled, church-like music shed (hard seats, no air conditioning, great acoustics) for a celebrated summer concert series affiliated with Yale.

The thing about Connecticut is that if you pick around almost anywhere, you turn up tantalizing threads of history. Sometimes it’s in the garden, in the form of shell middens or a George III penny. Sometimes it’s in the attic, in a squirreltorn letter from an Italian countess to her Yankee ship-captain husband. And if you follow the thread back in time, it becomes a story.

In Norfolk, historian Ann Havemeyer has done much of the thread-following, and as we sat in her office at the town library, she shared the results, starting with an early-20th-century architect named Alfredo Taylor. On the cover of her book An Architect of Place and the Village Beautiful, “Fredo,” as he was known to his friends, cuts a jaunty figure in white jodhpurs, a checked tweed jacket, and a bow tie, with unruly white hair, a full beard, and a Sherlock Holmes sort of briar pipe hanging down from his lips.

Though he practiced in New York, Taylor designed more than 30 buildings in Norfolk, and they’re eclectic: an English Tudor house for one client, a Swiss chalet for another, a Serbian summer cottage for a woman who had fallen in love with a Columbia University professor from Serbia. “What Taylor did expressed the individuality of the client, and of the architect,” Havemeyer said. It was distinctive, not like the work of architects associated with nearby towns, who simply reached into their kit bags to lay on a veneer of imaginary New England colonialism.

Robert Dance, a fellow historian in Norfolk, chipped in, more explicitly: “It wasn’t like Litchfield. Litchfield made itself a sort of fake New England town, like Williamsburg. It’s beautiful, but those avenues of white-clapboard houses? They never looked like that.” (Did I mention that rivalries with nearby towns are the essence of local identity in Connecticut?)

But Norfolk reimagined its identity, too, Havemeyer added, and that had to do not just with the coming of the railroads, but of the Irish, generally regarded as the Mexican immigrants of their day, only worse. The Irish worked at the woolen mill and worshiped at a Catholic church in Norfolk’s lower village. From the pulpit, the minister of the Congregational Church (upper village) raged in 1859 against the trend among local families of moving to larger farms out West, “leaving our homesteads to degenerate under the semibarbarous usage of foreigners.” The Irish were entirely at home taking over the rocky, unforgiving fields they left behind, even if unwelcome.

The rivalry between old and new passed from pulpit to street, at one point taking the form of “gang warfare,” Dance said, with rioting mobs flinging stones at one another. The warfare also took place along more discreet lines, in the tidying up of the town green and the commissioning of traditional New England public buildings to give permanent form to the dominant hierarchy.

In the early 1920s, the growing Catholic population needed a bigger church, and Taylor once again provided architecture that expressed the individuality of his clients (this time at no cost). The result was an ocher-colored stucco-and-stone structure, evoking medieval Spain, or Tuscany, or ancient Ireland, depending on your point of view. Its location also made it the first thing visitors saw on arriving in Norfolk from the west, “and the local elite were mortified,” Havemeyer said. They responded by hiring a different architect to add an imposing two-story colonnaded portico to the front of the Congregational Church. Thus Norfolk rejected what Havemeyer describes in her book as Taylor’s idiosyncratic “architecture of place” and “firmly wrapped” itself “in the Colonial Revival culture of recall.” The newcomers no doubt took in the abiding lesson of life in Connecticut: We are together, but we stay separate.

There is, let’s admit it, something amiss with Connecticut, but it’s certainly not a lack of New England identity. Maybe it’s a temporary breakdown of values, from having lost the industries that once gave purpose to individual lives, communities, even entire valleys: clockmaking and brasswork on the Naugatuck River, textiles on the Thames. Danbury, Bill Hosley told me, “used to manufacture 75 percent of the world’s hats, a couple of dozen major players, all gone. Now it’s where the help lives for Greenwich.”

Maybe the sense of emptiness is a reflection of stark income inequality, or of the industries that still thrive here: arms, insurance, financial services. Connecticut, the writer and radio host Colin McEnroe joked, is “about killing people elsewhere, and preventing anything