Amenia real estate sales reach a high in November

The almost 27-acre site of The Stone Resource on route 343 sold for $3,402,000 - well above its assessed value of $555,400.
Photo by Christine Bates

The almost 27-acre site of The Stone Resource on route 343 sold for $3,402,000 - well above its assessed value of $555,400.
AMENIA — The Town of Amenia recorded five real estate transfers in November, spanning a range of property types: one single-family home, one luxury property at Silo Ridge, one mobile home, one parcel of land, and one commercial property.
All five properties sold above their assessed values.
The median sale price for a single-family home, excluding Silo Ridge transactions, rose to $380,500 in November — the highest level of the year, though still below the town’s historic peak of $430,000 set in December 2022.
In Mid-December, 14 single homes were listed for sale with four over $1 million and eight below $500,000, with a median listing price of $410,000. Two commercial properties and ten parcels of land were also available.
10 May Knoll — 4 bedroom/2.5 bath home built in 1927 on 1.95 acres sold to Nour Elgharib for $500,000.
4 Eagle Pass — 3 bedroom/3.5 bath Silo Ridge home on .24 acres built in 2023 sold to Mark Lewallyn for $5.25 million.
4950 Route 44 — Manufactured home on 1.7 acres sold to Michael A. Scorzelli for $70,000.
Cascade Mountain Road (#025181) — 10.87 acres of wooded, vacant rural land sold to Mason W. Morjikian for $185,000.
3417 Route 343 — Classified as a mine, this 26.88-acre commercial property sold to Stone Feeder Property Vehicle LLC for $3,402,000.
*Town of Amenia property transfers in November sourced from Dutchess County Real Property Office monthly reports. Details on are from Dutchess Parcel Access. Only arm’s length transactions are included. Recorded transfers typically lag closed sales. Market data from Smart MLS Info Sparks does not include private transactions or Silo Ridge sales. The Dutchess County parcel number (*) is indicated when no specific street address is included. Compiled by Christine Bates, Real Estate Advisor with William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty, Licensed in New York and CT.
Jumpfest 2025
There’s just one month until Jumpfest’s 100th anniversary weekend of ski jumping in February, and the celebration is already underway. For the first time, Jumpfest organizers have launched a community restaurant month as part of the milestone event, running from Jan. 4 through Feb. 4, inviting locals and visitors alike to dine around town in the lead-up to the historic jumps.
The inaugural promotion includes 42 participating restaurants across the Northwest Corner, ranging from cafés to pubs. Participating spots include The White Hart Inn, Black Rabbit Bar & Grille, Roma’s Pizza, Sweet William’s Coffee Shop, The Boathouse, and The Woodland, among many others.
Diners can take part by downloading an entry form at jumpfest.org/100/one-month-to-the-jumps or picking one up at participating eateries. To be eligible to win, participants must visit as many participating restaurants as possible during the month-long promotion. The five diners who visit the most restaurants will each receive a free ticket to Jumpfest 2026, celebrating the event’s 100th year of ski jumping. Completed entry forms must be submitted by 4 p.m. on Feb. 4 at the Salisbury General Store on Main Street, with winners announced the following day.
The all-volunteer Salisbury Winter Sports Association (SWSA) has hosted ski jumping on Satre Hill in Salisbury since the 1920s, keeping alive one of the few Eastern U.S. ski jump venues and introducing generations to the sport.
So grab your appetite and eat your way to the jumps — no skis required.
Gary Dodson casting at dawn on the Salmon River in Pulaski, New York in late April. It was cold but it sure looked nice.
I was very optimistic as winter loosened its grip in the early part of 2025. I had a couple new rods to play with, my rotator cuff problem on my casting arm was resolved in a satisfactory manner, and I joined a private fishing club in the Catskills and was looking forward to exploring new water.
Some of the exploring and trying new things with new rods happened, but a lot of it did not. I blame Nature.
(Listening to anglers complain about the weather is as tedious as it gets, so feel free to skip the next bit.)
Just for laughs I plotted out the Housatonic flow from April 1 to Nov. 22 on the United States Geological Survey website. What I got back was an inverse bell curve, with high flows at the extremes and a long period of very low flows in between.
Amazingly, this corresponds to the rain, or lack thereof, between April 1 and Nov. 22. It’s just science.
So, looking back at the Tangled archives and my own hastily scribbled journal notes, I see that I started out when the snow and ice were still on the ground on the Blackberry in North Canaan and Macedonia Brook in Kent.
I do remember trying out a short rod, 6-feet 10-inches, from Zen Tenkara. I used it with two-fly rigs, including weighted flies, which should not work in theory, but it did in practice. The biggest problem was when a guy in the parking lot asked me what it was. I said, “It’s a Hachi” and the guy said, “Gesundheit.”

I had an interesting encounter with a couple of DEEP guys who were putting some brown trout fry in the Blackberry, since they had them to spare and were wondering what would happen. I suggested that they would get eaten up fairly quickly by the adult trout and they agreed but did it anyway.
The private water was a bust. There’s no other way to put it. I got there three times all year, and by the beginning of July the drought had settled in and the stream was nothing but a trickle.
I’m going to reup because I enjoyed meeting my fellow club members and the nice landowners who allow us to barge around their properties This year I’m going to hit it often and hard in May and June, circumstances allowing.
My Catskill fishing buddy Gary Dodson has got the big fish bug bad. We went back to Pulaski in late April and I caught a steelhead using a decadent and depraved method called “plugging.” I’m glad to have done it once and feel zero need to do it again.
I’ve had an 11-foot-4 weight switch rod kicking around for a few years. I never knew how to rig it up. In the two-handed rod world, the line weight designation means diddly. It’s all about grains and different tips and all this stuff that I just don’t want to learn.
Since Gary was already down in that rabbit hole I just gave him the rod, a big inexpensive Redington reel and asked him to get the appropriate lines and tips and set it up for me. Which he did, for about $150.
And I got to deploy it on the water precisely once in September before…
My right hip got the Gang Gong from the medical profession.
Yep. By the time this is published, I will have had my new right hip for about a month.
At this rate I’m going to be about 40% after-market parts.
So the entire autumn fishing routine, normally a happy and productive time, was shot to hell. My hip worked just enough to let me know that the kind of aggressive and active fishing I like to do was out of the question.
So apart from fiddling around in a half-hearted way with the fall stockies on the Blackberry in October, I spent the fall and early winter sitting around watching YouTube fish videos and plotting and scheming for all the excellent fishing adventures I will have with my new right hip.
The unmistakable V-shape of a beaver-hewn tree trunk.
Long before we moved to Litchfield County, there had been a flood on the property caused by the breakup of a beaver dam miles away from the house, near the top of the state forest on Sharon Mountain. There, beavers have a pond whose dam usually slows the run of a stream that journeys down the mountain, under Route 7, through our property and empties into the Housatonic River. Who knows what other damage the water did on its way down from the broken dam, but the resulting flooding left a watermark about knee-high on the inside of our old cottage, now painted over.
What do beavers have to do with ungardening? At its core, ungardening is about restoring native habitats and increasing the diversity of native plants and animals in an ecosystem — aka biodiversity — which we must accomplish because, frankly, our lives depend on it.
For all their practical nuisance to humans, beavers are central to maintaining ecosystems across a large portion of the U.S. They are considered a keystone species: As with the keystone in an arch, an ecosystem will fall apart without its support. In the 18th and 19th centuries, beavers were killed nearly to extinction by trappers who sold their fur. Their return is helping to repair the areas surrounding their habitats. The homes they cleverly engineer filter pollutants, boost plant and animal biodiversity and create resilience to climate change — and they do this quickly.
Most negative human experiences with beavers result from blocked culverts and dammed streams that create the beavers’ ideal pool-like environment. This causes flooding upstream of the blockage and drought downstream.
“We need to find ways to live with beavers,” said Sandy Carlson, a teacher and poet who recently completed the Beaver Institute’s BeaverCorps Wetland Professional training in Southampton, Massachusetts.
“When beavers hear the trickle of water flowing out from a pond or stream, it triggers their instinct to block this release by building a dam. This insight led to a rather low-tech innovation that has allowed beavers and humans to more happily coexist. Cleverly called the Beaver Deceiver, the device lowers the water level of the pond without triggering the beavers’ water-trickle instinct.”
The Beaver Deceiver is a 6-foot-diameter wire mesh cage protecting one open side of a PVC pipe. It is installed in the deepest part of the pond, with the pipe running over the beaver dam — where it can be camouflaged — and into the water on the other side. Water is drawn out of the pond, lowering the water level upstream while maintaining flow downstream.
Carlson has apprenticed with Diane Honer of Beaver & Wildlife Solutions, based in Chester, Connecticut, performing site assessments and installing pond-leveler devices so beavers and humans can coexist. “People are happy because the water level is low, and the beaver thinks the water level is fine,” she said.
Last year, a family of beavers moved in nearby, building a low-profile home against the side of a large tree trunk that had fallen into a relatively deep part of the Housatonic. This created a small, pond-like area on the downriver side of the trunk.
I wasn’t aware of these creatures until one day, while walking along the river, I stopped in my tracks. Like one of those puzzles where you’re meant to spot the differences between two images, something was missing. A weeping willow we had planted a decade earlier, flourishing on the riverbank, had disappeared from view. Up close, the unmistakable V-shape of a beaver-hewn trunk was almost cartoonlike — yet not at all funny. That tree was one of the few nonnative species we planted, and I had imagined it fulfilling the romantic “leaf cascade over the water” look willows do so well.
My son told me beavers seek out willow for its salicylic acid content — the active ingredient in aspirin. I imagine they had a drug-addled willow fest at our expense.
The solution to this particular beaver problem is even more low-tech than the Beaver Deceiver: installing wire mesh or a plastic cage around trees you want to protect from beaver teeth. It also helps to know which woods beavers prefer. Their favorites include aspen, poplar, willow, alder, birch and maple. Protect those first, before hardwoods and conifers.
Let’s welcome the beaver and its ecosystem-restoration superpowers.
Dee Salomon ‘ungardens’ in Litchfield County.
What a rotten decision to terminate the contract with Northern Dutchess Paramedic (NDP) and to replace it with a single paramedic assisted by an EMT.
When I was an EMT with Salisbury, beginning in 1985, we were an advanced life support (ALS) service, and we had an ALS member on each team who could start IVs, use MAST trousers and, I believe, intubate.
These members were available on each shift but did not come out for calls where they were not needed.However, the state of Connecticut, not understanding the needs and abilities of our area, sent down a decree that we had to have an ALS person respond to every call even if it was a simple injury with no need for advanced life support.
So, due to a shortage of people who wanted to take the advanced EMT-I training, we were forced to give up our EMT-I service and just be a basic life support service with NDP coming out for an increasing number of calls.
The current plan is risible for its inadequacy, a patently obvious cost-shaving ploy, that will strain volunteer services and endanger patients. I have no idea if it is even a possibility for local volunteer services to resume ALS even if they can staff the calls adequately.
With the growing number of talented, smart people coming into the area, many of whom actually want to do something good around here, I wonder if the local volunteer services couldn’t train enough ALS personnel so that we could once again be more than just BLS services. Otherwise, I foresee a lot of needless morbidity and mortality arising from this ill-considered decision.
Marietta Whittlesey
Gallatin
Recent public discussion regarding paramedic services in the Sharon community has understandably raised concerns. As such, we welcome the opportunity to clarify the facts and, more importantly, to reassure residents that emergency medical services in Sharon are not only continuing but strengthening.
Sharon Hospital is now part of Northwell Health, the largest health system in the Northeast, with extensive emergency transport and EMS capabilities across western Connecticut and the Hudson Valley. As part of this system, Sharon Hospital is supported by a licensed and experienced paramedic program already operating in the Danbury and New Milford region, with the ability to extend those services to appropriately support the Sharon community.
Effective January 1, 2026, Sharon Hospital will ensure 24/7 emergency medical coverage for the community. This includes support for emergency response, interfacility transport and critical care needs, backed by the depth, redundancy, and clinical oversight of a larger health system. These capabilities are not theoretical – they are already in place and functioning successfully across our region.
Some commentary has focused on the hospital’s decision not to continue sponsoring Northern Dutchess Paramedics (NDP). It is important to note that NDP was acquired in October by Empress Ambulance Service, a private, for-profit, out-of-state organization. We recognize that the change in sponsorship may disrupt NDP’s business interests in the Sharon community, yet it does not represent a loss of emergency medical services for residents who rely on us for care.We want to be clear: no EMS services are being eliminated, and no gaps in coverage are anticipated. Our responsibility is to ensure safe, reliable, and compliant emergency care for our patients and our community, and our current plan does exactly that.
Change can bring uncertainty, and we recognize the importance of open communication. Sharon Hospital remains committed to transparency, collaboration with local EMS partners, and continued engagement with community leaders and residents. We invite you to a Town Hall on Thursday, January 8th at 5-6pm in the Cafeteria at Sharon Hospital to answer any questions you may have. Please RSVP to Griffin.Cooper@nuvancehealth.org.
Our focus remains where it belongs: on delivering high-quality, dependable emergency medical care to the people of Sharon and surrounding towns, today and into the future.
Christina McCulloch
President,
Sharon Hospital