LIFE

A person driving down Main Street these days can’t help but notice that a huge real estate development is underway. This is Kelson Row. It is intended primarily as a residential development with shops on the lower floors.

“The second of July will be the most memorable ‘epocha’ in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding generations, as the great anniversary festival … it ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shews, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more.” John Adams, July 3, 1776.

Last October, dozens of people gathered around the Riverfront Community Center and planted hundreds of daffodils to honor the memory of children who died in the Holocaust. By the time the third annual Holocaust Remembrance Evening is held in April, those blooms will help symbolize hope for the future.

I stood on a trail footbridge over a rusted gate that once fed water that helped to power a paper mill. I walked along an earthen dike to the remains of a brownstone dam that now looks strangely out of place in the middle of the woods. I climbed aboard an abandoned railroad to an old trestle bridge high above the Hockanum River.

One of the many interesting things about Rocky Hill is its relationship to the Connecticut River. In addition to our proud seafaring history, we are the home of the Rocky Hill-Glastonbury Ferry, the oldest ferry in America, and for many years had a booming fishing industry. The Hale family has been prominent in all these areas.

As Michael Camilleri was approaching graduation from Trinity College, he was reluctant to enter law school and considered getting a master’s in business instead. He attended a career fair at Trinity and, after speaking with a judge for several hours, left the fair with a recommendation for UConn Law.

"Heublein Tower, which looks like it's been there forever, is actually the fourth tower to grace the mountain," says Scott Lewis, author of Avon, Connecticut's First Century: Visionaries and Victims. "There were three predecessor towers and they were all located in Avon, not Simsbury."