*If you’re just here for pretty pictures feel free to scroll to the gallery at the bottom, I took a lot!
You know we haven’t done all that much in Connecticut… so on this particular day that’s where we decided to poke around. Only thing is I don’t know squat about Connecticut so I had to conspire with Google. I asked for a town map because I didn’t want to drive much more than an hour. It’d already been a super packed week. On the border of Connecticut I saw Killingly and decided that sounded like a interesting town name and I asked what was there… Cat Hollow State Park was the answer. Even better it was supposed to be a park with the ruins of two old cotton mills in it.
I didn’t really know what to expect. Probably something swank, this is Connecticut after all. And the park was newly established – only running since 2003. What does a baby park look like? Wellllll….
Driving into town it was indeed a posh area filled with great big mansions behind thick brick walls and iron gates. And all the street names had hideously adorably animal names like Doghouse, Cockcrow, Cat Hollow, and my favorite Peeptoad. Did we fall into a fairy book? No, we most certainly did not, because when we drove up to the park it looked thoroughly abandoned. It was a gate across a road with one car parked in front of it, a big trail map bulletin board with NOTHING on it and I mean nothing, not so much as a scrap of paper or hint it ever said anything on it. There was a bench just beyond but it was looking at nothing except the blocked off road. What just happened?! How did we end up here??
Although not impressed by the state of this place we still decided to get out and look around. And in good spirit I decided to place one of my books on the bench to be found by some passerby as part of my book bombing campaign. Who knows, maybe someone will find it and love it.
We were a bit confused at what we saw from there. Beyond the gate it looked like a very new paved road big enough for cars but obviously not driven on by cars. Infact even though the road looked almost brand new it also looked like it’d been left over from some apocalyptic society collapse. It was odd. Not far up the path we found another bench, this one had its leg chained to a pole with no less than three locks but the pole was only 2 feet off the ground which means the chain loop could have easily been lifted over it if someone was insistent on bringing home this bench. Even funnier still the chained loop wasn’t even a loop. Upon further inspection it was just a chain placed on the ground to look like it looped around something. Very odd!
Then we started seeing the weird graffiti. Every big rock seemed to have the same image on it – that of a neon pink spraypainted figure with big X’s for eyes and a crazy hairdo that made it look either like Mom from Futurama or Nosferatu. If there’s anything I have learned in the past few years it’s that teenagers love abandoned places and things. Wherever you can find ruins in the woods you will also find great evidence of teenagers. The two for whatever reason are inseparable and these odd tags throughout the park only further proved this observation.
It wasn’t far in that we came by a fence – the most woeful fence I have ever seen in my life. Behind it there was some sort of wrought iron equipment sat on the river, maybe the remains of a water turbine or something similar. The fence did nothing to keep me away from it as just around the edge of the fence was a path where people were clearly going around to see it anyway. And beyond that there was a rough path into the wilderness which I honestly couldn’t tell if it was made by humans or deer but I figured what the hell might as well “bushwhack” our way through this as one internet guide suggested we might have to do in this park. And it wasn’t too far away that we found the first substantial set of ruins over this river.
This trail seemed to have ended at these ruins so after poking around we headed back up towards the road and continued on foot from there. Apparently, this road extended for half a mile. We wouldn’t get that far though before we found more trails jutting off the sides. We decided to take another one right around the edges of a fence that seemed to have a different set of ruins behind them. This one brought us into the woods to a very serene little spot where the river had more or less dried up so we could wander over it at will.
It was then we realized all the rocks at the bottom of this riverbed were blackened which seemed very weird. Was this some sort of pollution form the 1800’s? Probably not, after coming home I learned these mills all burned down, one as recently as 2001. You could see the charred line on some of the larger rocks a little downstream.
We walked along the river’s edge for quite a while until we came to the biggest feature of the park – a giant stone wall over the river that on a normal day is a beautiful waterfall. They must be suffering drought this year as there wasn’t so much as a trickle. There was however a young man meditating on a rock underneath it, weary of our presence. We wandered on.
I think we ended up doing the trails ass backwards because this is when we found the “picnic area” and the sign denoting the beginning of the trail being choked out by vines. This seemed fitting for this part. Here we also found more graffiti (with one rock literally looking like a kindergartner painted on it) and of course another trail that led under some bridges and out into a field on Main Street. It was cool under the bridges, and we loitered for a while digging the graffiti salamander looking down at us.
After returning from that dead end we found what looked like another trail on the high ground making jokes about bigfoot and starting to sweat from the oppressive heat and humidity. We took a few breaks and just mucked about before finding our way back from where we came. I’m told there’s a mile and a half of trails out there but every map shows something different and when we were on the ground there wasn’t any markers or guides or even any way to note when a trail had started soooo…. it was a fun place to wander but uh, poorly organized on the park’s side. That being said seeing the ruins were very cool and we both enjoyed just chilling out there in nature.
When we finally managed to find our way back to the car it was only then we found the signs saying what we could find here in the park and where to go. They were… in rough shape. Could have been used as the set of a post-apocalyptic horror movie. But hey, I guess it’s an E for Effort?
Sadly no one took my book in the two hours we spent puttering about.
