Trinity Church, Lime Rock, Salisbury, America, the World In New History Book

Some books are better when you dip into them, and don’t try to read them end to end. Cookbooks are an obvious example. Marcel Proust’s epic multi-volume masterpiece is another, in my opinion.

For journalists, the “Associated Press Stylebook” works that way.

A new, region-specific example is historian Geoff Brown’s 650-page history of Trinity Episcopal Church in Lime Rock, Conn.

Lime Rock is one of the five villages that make up the town of Salisbury.

In modern times, it might be best known as the location for a small but active race track.

Historically, it was a center of the iron industry that helped build the Northwest Corner of Connecticut. The most important company involved in that industry was called Barnum & Richardson.

Brown explains in his introduction to the book that Trinity Church is the last part of Barnum & Richardson  that is still fulfilling its original function.

It’s a beautiful stone church, designed by Henry Martyn Congdon in the 1870s — and it takes 73 pages of history before you arrive at the birth of this lovely new (now old) church, which is on Route 112 just across from the race track.

The book begins roughly “475,000,000 years before the present (YBP)” with the Taconic Orogeny and then proceeds to “2,000,000 YBP” and the Pleistocene Epoch (the Great Ice Age).

Somehow Brown, who has an easy, conversational writing style, makes those early bits of planetary history interesting and relevant: It was that prehistoric geologic activity that helped create the physical landscape of the Northwest Corner — and that put in place the elements that made this part of the world a center of iron production in the 18th and 19th centuries. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that this part of the world is what it is today because of iron ore.

Brown generally follows the funnel style of writing, in which he begins with the larger context for an event. He does it like a skillful math teacher, who starts you off counting straws into bundles of 10 and pretty soon has you adding, subtracting and doing fractions.

This tale moves inexorably toward the 21st century, but there are stops along the way to explain everything from the Irish potato famine to the annual mud season in this part of the world (March and April!) to the war in Vietnam.

All of it has an impact on Trinity Church and on Salisbury and the surrounding towns. Brown only writes a couple sentences on all these things but he skillfully pulls it all together.

Normally, a history of a small church in a small town would only be of interest to parishioners of that church; or to dedicated historians.

But Brown has made it a fascinating history of the world at large, and of Salisbury’s place in the world. An experienced historian, Brown is founder of the Salisbury-based Between the Lakes Group, which publishes history books and articles about states and towns all along the Eastern Seaboard. Find out more about those books, choose from a deep well of history articles and enjoy some cool historic postcards at www.betweenthelakes.com.

Like “Trinity Lime Rock in Context: A History,” the website is a wonderful place to dip a toe in from time to time. Every time you visit, you’ll be glad you did.

Short visits to the book are easy to manage, because of the way Brown has organized the text into short snippets, separated by date and topic.

Order “Trinity Lime Rock in Context: A History” on Amazon; the paperback edition is $29.95.

Information on services at Trinity Lime Rock can be found online at www.trinitylimerock.org.