MILLERTON – The reopening of Eddie Collins Memorial Park on Saturday, Oct. 1, drew hundreds of people from the community at-large to mark the completion of the first phase of the revitalization of the park that has served as the recreational center for the region for decades.
The party came to life starting around noon as the 100-car parking lot filled to capacity, forcing an overflow across Route 22. Families arrived with strollers and excited children who ran into the wide-open spaces. Basketball games started immediately on the new basketball courts. Soccer players — young and old — took to the new regulation-sized soccer field. Mothers and fathers streamed into the expanded, repaired and resurfaced handicap-accessible playground.
The party atmosphere was fueled by rock music that filled the air, and food booths that served tacos and other traditional fare. The hot dog booth ran out of buns, but hamburger buns became an option.
Parker Plouffe, a toddler from Sharon, enjoyed a hot dog without a bun. His mother said this is their preferred playground. There was face-painting, small horses for petting and the basketball got serious with a tournament and a referee. Free doughnuts!
A handicap-accessible walkway extends from a renovated pavilion to the Little League field.
The park is named after Eddie Collins, who played major league baseball from 1906 to 1930 for the Philadelphia Athletics and the Chicago White Sox. Born in Millerton in 1887, Collins was not only a big leaguer, he was Ivy League, having graduated from Columbia College. He also was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Stephen Waite, chair of the project committee for the park, recalled that he used to play baseball at the park as a youngster.
“When my nephews started playing here,” he said Saturday, “I saw that it had really deteriorated, and I thought we should get the community and its volunteers to make it a project.”
Waite, a quadraplegic from an accident 35 years ago, is proud of all the volunteer efforts and also of the fact that the park is handicap-accessible, which also includes extending the sidewalk along Route 22 to the entrance.
On Saturday, the air of success was punctuated with news of a state and municipal grant of $125,000 toward making the Little League field accessible to those in wheelchairs (the walkway and a set of bleachers to be installed in the spring). New York Rep. Didi Barrett (D-106) made the announcement, and she also gave Millerton Mayor Jennifer Najdek a New York State Assembly citation congratulating the village and its residents and partners for successfully completing this phase of the revitalization of the Park. More than 30 community partners teamed up to help with the day’s festivities. Fundraising has raised $2 million for the park.
Political leaders who attended, besides the mayor and Rep. Barrett, were Sen. Susan Serino (R-41), Gregg Pulver, (R), chair of the Dutchess County Legislature and Chris Kennan, North East town supervisor.
The Millerton Police Department’s Mike Veeder, officer in charge, was giving out bike helmets to children, carefully adjusting them for the right fit. The helmets were donated by the Stop DWI program.
The next phase of the work will include a pool and pool house and a recreational center with a community room, commercial kitchen, locker rooms and showers. The new swimming pool with a handicap-accessible entrance will also include a water slide and kiddie pool.
“The pool was the No. 1 interest,” Waite said, “when we asked people what they wanted.”
Photo by Olivia Valentine
From left, North East Town Supervisor Chris Kennan, State Rep. Didi Barrett, Stephen Waite, Chair of the Park Project Committee, Millerton Mayor Jennifer Najdek and State Sen. Sue Serino.
Photo by Olivia Valentine
Watching the big boys.
Photo by Olivia Valentine
From left, North East Town Supervisor Chris Kennan, State Rep. Didi Barrett, Stephen Waite, Chair of the Park Project Committee, Millerton Mayor Jennifer Najdek and State Sen. Sue Serino.
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Marge Parkhurst with a collection of historic nails recovered from wall cavities during restoration work.
“At first it just looked like old paint,” said Parkhurst, who has been painting and restoring historic homes in Litchfield County for decades. “Until I realized it was a stencil, a beautiful pattern that repeated.”
She kept going carefully — a wet sponge, hot water, a little fabric softener — peeling back until she could see it clearly. A climbing vine emerged, applied in vertical runs to give the wall the look of wallpaper. Someone had signed it. The signature was faint, tucked above the baseboard in the corner, not fully legible. But the date was clear: 1870.
Parkhurst, owner of Cottage & Country Painting Co., has worked in enough old houses to develop a practiced eye for what they conceal — understanding that layers of paint, paper and plaster in a 19th-century New England home form a kind of compressed archive of the people who lived there.
The stencil bore a strong resemblance to what historians call Moses Eaton-type stenciling — a tradition of itinerant craftsmen who traveled New England in the early 1800s with portable kits of cut-pattern stencils. Their trade flourished because imported wallpaper was expensive. Stenciling offered the same visual effect at a fraction of the cost.
“These stencilers typically worked for a combination of cash, food and lodging,” Parkhurst said. “Their compensation was modest by any standard.” She paused, “He was a tradesman. But the work he left behind — that’s art.”
The vine pattern was dull with age but still legible. One section had survived intact beneath the layers of paper. The homeowners chose not to paint over it — instead building a wooden frame around it, a small window into 1870.
“Preservation means protecting something to prevent further deterioration,” she said. “Restoration means returning something to a previous state. In that room, we preserved what was there.”
A collection of historic nails recovered during restoration work.Photo courtesy of Marge Parkhurst/Cottage & Country Painting Company
A Station’s Secrets
Not every discovery is decorative. Some are written into the bones of a building.
Parkhurst’s own home in Colebrook is a former railroad outbuilding moved from Canaan in 1920. Scraping the trim revealed it had once been sage green — and beneath that, a warm orange-brown soaked into the wood grain. “Old paint was made more like a stain back in the 1800s,” she said. “It penetrated the wood rather than sitting on top of it — so there’s never a shine.”
Up in the attic, eye bolts still anchored in the framing mark where cables stabilized the building during its move a century ago.
The most memorable find came by accident. Cutting open a wall under the stairs, she found a clear glass bottle sealed with a glass stopper held by a rusted wire. The label read: Hartmann Brewing Co., Bridgeport, Conn. It took days of careful oiling to free the stopper. Inside: a handwritten list of sandwiches and drinks, a postage stamp still attached. Not treasure. But a treasure just the same.
“I worked for days to get that thing open — and it was just somebody’s lunch order.”
Newspapers stuffed into wall cavities, hand-wrought nails, paint layers thin as stain — over 50 years, Parkhurst has cataloged the details that tell a trained eye when a house was built and by whom. Litchfield County’s architecture is unusually varied: Georgian and Federal-style houses on Litchfield’s Main Street, industrial buildings along the rivers in Torrington and Winsted. “Each town has its own fingerprint,” she said.
The most consequential mistake she sees is changing a home’s character. “When you paint over stained woodwork, you hide the details. You can’t get them back.” She has talked more than a few owners out of it. Some have listened.
Not long ago, Parkhurst and her grandchildren gathered a few small objects, wrote a letter and tucked it into a wall of her Colebrook home. Someone will find it — a record of people who were once here.
“Walls still surprise me,” she said. “If you look hard enough, you can find buried treasure.”
In a county full of houses whose walls hold untold stories — stenciled by traveling tradesmen, nailed together by farmers, papered over by housewives following the fashions — Marge Parkhurst has spent a lifetime reminding us that history doesn’t only live in museums. Sometimes it’s hiding just behind the wallpaper.
Sarah Belzer is a writer, editor and creative director whose career has crossed journalism, advertising, film and cultural commentary. Managing Editor of The American Rant and founder of Jump Advertising, she has spent three decades shaping narratives for media and national and global brands. Marge Parkhurst is the owner of Cottage & Country Painting Co. She can be reached at marge@cottageandcountryct.com or 860-379-4748.
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