Before I moved to California, Mrs. Dawson, from the foot of Hardscrabble Road, gave me some old photographs of the Wordens of Hidden Hollow. They show John Henry Worden, Otis Durga, Althilla Worden and Mary Beckwith, photographed sometime in the 1920's. They have been the touchstone of my investigation of the house. I am determined to know more about their lives.
A discovery on the Internet took me forward. A local newpaper, the Putnam County Courier is on line. (http://www.localarchives.org/mahopac/) In it, for decades, in the early 1900's, someone wrote a neighborhood news column under the heading "Maple Glenn." Featured were the travels, socializing, births and deaths of the Wordens, the Durgas, the Dawsons and their neighbors on Route 37 in New Fairfield and Haviland Hollow Road in Patterson, NY.
Mrs. Dawson's daughter, now Mrs. Margaret Beagle, figures prominently in the columns, with shopping trips to Danbury, picnics and dances. I printed out the newspaper pages, and took them with me to visit her. She and her family still live one of the Jennings houses near the old mill site. Her blue eyes sparkled as she tried to fathom which neighbor had written the columns almost 90 years ago; this was the first time she'd seen them. She recalled old Henry Worden coming down to play cards and how her mother disapproved of his leaving his wife alone on the hill.
I'm learning that small scale industry came to these Northwestern hills of Connecticut early in the 19th Century. I'm also recognizing that this was a community. We might think it dispersed, spreading as it does, up the hill and across a few miles, but even before automobiles and party lines, trade and family made it a neighborhood.
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