Looking Back On Ye Ole Days of Tolland

When Thomas Wolfe penned, "You Can't Go Home Again," he was speaking a wisdom I have only recently understood. Having gone away to college in 1988, and having been in the Atlanta-area since 1993, I had become pretty well removed from the idyllic, colonial New England town where I grew up. When I went back in 1998, for the first time in years, this notion was made well apparent.

Located up I-84 about twenty-five minutes north and east of the state capital in Hartford, Tolland had evolved from the crossroads town I knew. The woodland back roads I remember as nothing more than avenues for late-night youthful rebellion had been freshly paved, dangerous curves having been straightened and built up with expensive homes. Large segments of thick forest and farmland now held cluster homes and other such developments. There was even a strip-mall where I remember a couple of sand hills.

But whereas all this I could understand as simple progress, it all came "home" to me - this certain feeling of alienation - when I turned south off of Garnet Ridge, my one time street of residence, and onto Old Kent Road. This stretch of road had a generation before been turned into a narrow winding mile-long dirt trail that led to a secluded turnaround when the Wilbur Cross Highway (now I-84) barreled its controlled-access lanes through town and cut the road in two. I figured that some things just can't change. And the turnaround at the end of Old Kent was the bulwark of my theory.

But what I came across wasn't a remote forgotten road, a place that had been big adventure when I was a kid and a perfect place to stash beer in the days when that became a concern. Instead I drove up to a shining new housing development, complete with fresh pavement and sod yards. I was completely disoriented, might as well have been on the surface of the moon. If for some reason Wolfe is posthumously looking for verification of his theory, he has to look no further than Old Kent Road.

Figuring that the early settlers might look upon my Tolland with a nostalgic dismay aligned with my own, I thought I would write about the eighteenth-century days of a Tolland I never knew. Regardless of the growth that has recently enveloped the town, Tolland still contains that unique character only "Ye Olde" New England townships can produce. Its history is, by American standards, an ancient record …

Click here to read more of Buckhout's exploration of Tolland's history, originally published in Summer 2001, as "The Early History of Tolland, Connecticut," in  The Almanack: The INHERITAGE Journal of History & Lore, Heritage Travel & the Arts.

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Dave Buckhout grew up traipsing through the woods behind Garnet Ridge and Old Post, swimming and skating on Crandall's Pond, playing ball at Lions Field, taunting Ellington fans at THS basketball games, partying at K-D camp, etc., etc. He graduated from THS in 1988, and after receiving a BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology (Rochester, NY) in 1992, relocated to Atlanta. What was planned as a short stay prior to moving west, turned long-term when Buckhout caught on with the city's nascent interactive media industry at the start of the wired boom. 

In 1999, he & wife Kerri founded InHeritage, a company devoted solely to website design & online operational development for the historical community & preservation arts. InHeritage fuses a love of history, travel, writing and media development. Through InHeritage, the couple has been privileged to work with small town & county historical societies, state & regional historic sites, museums, preservation artists, an array of historians, authors, educators and documentarians, a national history education organization, and some of the most renowned historical associations in the United States. Buckhout currently serves as the manager of online operations for the White House Historical Association. 

The Buckhouts, their cats, dog and squirrel (yes, squirrel) live just outside Decatur, Georgia, "in-town" metro-Atlanta. Dave is still a frequent visitor to Tolland, amazed at once by how much continues to change, while so much - thankfully - stays the same.