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Among those who have explored Connecticut, few people would disagree that Litchfield County stands apart. In the northwest corner of a largely urban and suburban state, bordering Massachusetts as well as upstate New York, we find a rural county tucked away just south of the Berkshire Hills, at the southern tip of the Taconic Mountains. What Litchfield County may lack in southern Connecticut’s bustling shoreline is more than compensated via a largely tranquil thousand square miles of lakes, ponds, temperate forests, and fertile river valleys from the Naugatuck to the Housatonic.

For all appearances, this rural “quintessence of New England” is both prosperous and unspoiled, as vital as it is historic, an enviable mix of Colonial homes and affordable raised-ranches, of local laborers and second-home telecommuters, of wealthy summer visitors and families whose surnames are the names of roads, lakes, and mountains. Anyone who grew up here would prefer it stayed a secret, but it’s easy to see why Litchfield County draws gaggles of weekend tourists—leafpeepers, antiques shoppers, newlyweds—as well as retirees, artists, professional families seeking “top private schools,”1 and various other urban refugees motoring north a mere two hours out of Manhattan.

It is Route 7 that brings many of them, hugging the curves of the slow, dark Housatonic. Leaving behind the more urban Danbury and suburban New Milford, travelers enter New England proper, it may seem—if to enter New England proper is to enter a space where time moves slowly, if at all—as they follow the river north through dwindling numbers of houses, increasing pastureland, and ever deepening woods, and arrive at a picturesque little town of less than three-thousand people—Kent, a town that, oddly, always has been a picturesque little town of less than three-thousand people.

If Litchfield County is the crown of Connecticut, then it is in the northwest corner of this already northwest county, where we find the crown jewels. Here, as any Appalachian Trail hiker knows, are granite and quartz outcrops bedecked with mountain laurel, overlooking farms and colonial-era homes and no shortage of estates. Even the back porches of more modest homes watch centuries of stone walls snaking over hillsides, divvying pastures, trailing into the dense and seemingly endless woods.

Here, in the late 1600s and early 1700s2, the first white people built their cabins and mill houses with ax and adze. They cleared land deep into surrounding hills and found them filled with limestone and iron ore. They built new towns and named them after old ones. In the hills, they settled Warren and Goshen, and tried and failed at Dudleytown. In the valleys, they began tiny communities along the Housatonic, from Canaan to Falls Village to Cornwall to the land of the Schaghticoke, which the whites then christened Kent. At the southern end of the Berkshire and Taconic ranges, they spread further into the woods, further into Mohican lands, into what would become the aptly-named village of Lakeville, and into the Wetaug settlement they would later rename Salisbury.

They felled nearly every tree, made charcoal, fed furnaces, forged iron. In time, Litchfield County and its neighbors would be called the Arsenal of the Revolution.

One northwestern Litchfield County town armed the Civil War as well. Named after the Hebrew word for “forest,” the town sprung up around the native settlement of Wechquadnach, began producing iron by the 1750s, and a century later produced munitions at its Hotchkiss factory, built (inadvertently) over native burial grounds. The town soon came to be known for a long stretch of wealthy estates that appeared, and that remain today, above the homes of laborers clustered in the valley: Jeremy Barney’s hometown of Sharon.

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Sharon, like neighboring Salisbury and Kent, sits squarely against the upstate New York border. Canaan, to the north, serves as gateway to Massachusetts’ Berkshire County, where Norman Rockwell lived his last twenty-five years—now home to the museum that bears his name.

A museum—though one whose exhibits depict a world much older than Rockwell’s—is also an apt metaphor for the entire region from the Taconics and Berkshires south into Litchfield County. Even New England’s founders, who “valued order above all other social virtues,” would have some difficulty distinguishing between the tidy little communities, today, and those of the Puritans, in which they prized “a beauty of order in society, as when the different members . . . have all their appointed offices, place and station, according to their several capacities and talents, and everyone keeps his place, and continues in his proper business.”3

Litchfield County’s only city, Torrington, is home to just thirty-five thousand people, and the majority of Litchfield County towns have populations under four thousand, making it the most sparsely populated county in Connecticut. What may come as a surprise to readers not familiar with the area, is that many of the towns haven’t seen their populations fluctuate more than a few hundred people over the last couple centuries. Indeed, with its unparalleled beauty, with its little towns that appear to exist almost outside of time, Litchfield County is something of an anomaly, if not possessed of some sort of magic.

Easier to understand, however, is its appeal to the preponderance of notable personalities who reside there—artists, authors, clothing designers, film and television stars. Lest anyone confuse Litchfield County with Los Angeles, however, the former attracts a more amiable, quiet, garden-tending sort, the kind of celebrities who don’t mind shopping alongside locals at the village market—Whoopi Goldberg, Meryl Streep, partners Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, the late Arthur Miller and Lynn Redgrave, even the occasional heavy-metal rockstar turned horror-film director, such as Rob Zombie. In recent years, Tom Brokaw, Hayden Carruth, Ted Danson, Oscar De la Renta, Mia Farrow, Milos Forman, Michael J. Fox, Dustin Hoffman, Ralph Nader, Mike Nichols, Joan Rivers, Phillip Roth, and Diane Sawyer all have made Litchfield County their home—or, at least, home to the “country house.” Though hardly one to chat with neighbors at the IGA grocery, none other than Henry Kissinger has resided in Kent for decades, where Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane as well as Yours Truly were born and raised.4

No one makes a fuss, of course. No celebrity needs fear the throngs. If not entirely anesthetized to fame, most locals would prefer anyhow not to make a scene. For all of its left-leaning celebrities and artists, Litchfield County remains, above all, “a quiet community.” Formal. Reserved. The home of the late William F. Buckley, Jr.4.5, the county also has the distinction of having the most conservative voting record in the otherwise largely Democratic state. One of just two counties to vote for George H. W. Bush in 1992, Litchfield was the only county to vote for George W. Bush in 2004.5

To be sure, Litchfield County’s is a moderate conservatism.6 As befits the pastoral landscapes and the measured pace of its inhabitants’ seemingly “charmed” lives, nothing about the county clashes against the backdrop of reliably “blue” Connecticut. In 2008, Litchfield County voters even joined the rest of the state in electing Barack Obama for President. Yankees are also nothing if not smart, and Yankees who are fortunate to live in bucolic Litchfield County tend to waste little time arguing politics if they can be home picking apples, or raking leaves, or just spending another sundown watching the deer graze in the fields. . . .

[Excerpted from No Evidence, No Jury, No Justice: The True Story of Jeremy Barney (forthcoming, 2012).]

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1 Canterbury, The Gunnery, Kent, Hotchkiss, Indian Mountain, Marvelwood, Rumsey Hall, Salisbury, South Kent, Taft, etc.

2 Although, in the late 1600s, men began to clear land in what would become Litchfield County, the county would not formally established until October of 1751, by which time seventeen townships had already been established, including Litchfield, Canaan, Salisbury, Cornwall, Kent, and Jeremy’s hometown of Sharon. Litchfield County is, geographically speaking, Connecticut’s largest, now comprising 32 towns, villages, and boroughs, as well as two cities (populations 36,00 and 7,400), and covering 945 square miles. The county also has the sparsest population density: roughly 200 people per square mile, with the inclusion of the city of Torrington, or 160 per square mile without. No Evidence, No Jury, No Justice focuses primarily on Litchfield proper, founded in 1719, and the handful of villages and towns comprised by the Region One School District in the northwest corner of the county: Canaan, Cornwall, Falls Village, Kent, Lakeville, Limerock, Salisbury, and Jeremy’s hometown of Sharon.

Records for Litchfield County’s native peoples are sketchy at best, and I apologize for any inaccuracies. (Please correct me at christianpeet [at] gmail [dot] com). I have done my best to cobble together even these brief mentions of their history from records at various Litchfield County historical societies and their websites at http://www.sharonhist.org and http://www.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org), as well as the website for the Schaghticoke and a variety of sources that can be found in the bibliography. For a more complete accounting, see Timothy Binzen Research Publications at the UMASS Dept. of Anthropology Archeological Services.

3 Bushman, Richard L. From Puritan to Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ Press, 1980).

4 Our first collaborative project was, I think, around the age of eight (?) Written by me, painstakingly typed by my cousin Tanya, and illustrated by Seth—whose artistic abilities appeared fully realized from the time he could hold a pen—we created a handful of stories about my hamsters, called The Hamster Adventures or some such, which were published in Kent’s local paper, the Kent Good Times Dispatch. On the heels of the hamster stories, Seth began his first weekly cartoon at the GTD soon after: Walter Crouton. Good times, indeed!

4.5 The Buckley estate is in Jeremy Barney’s hometown of Sharon, CT (cf. Buckley Jr.’s Young Americans for Freedom “Sharon Statement”).

5 Leip, David. Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections online at http://www.uselectionatlas.org.

6 Republican state Senator Andrew Roraback, who has represented Litchfield County since 1994, says he has seen the change coming. In the spirit of tolerance for which New England is known, and speaking as the representative of the county that bore abolitionist John Brown, among other forward thinkers, the senator says he embraces political dialogue. “I tell my fellow Republicans,” says Roraback, “you can’t get elected here unless you’re willing to pursue a moderate agenda.” [Quoted in Rinker Buck’s “Litchfield Hills Turning Blue,” published on the third anniversary of Jeremy’s arrest, January 7, 2007, in The Hartford Courant.]