Expanding New Milford's Barn Quilt Trail -The First in Connecticut

With your help, colorful barn quilt blocks will be added to these 11 barns or historic building sites. They will join eight completed in 2017 to create a longer barn quilt trail throughout our town: GMS Rowing Center at 172 Grove Street (a repurposed tobacco barn), 13 Dorwin Hill Road (antique tobacco barn with intact louvers),  93 Upland Road (repurposed antique barn), Finnegan’s Farm West at 55 Upland Road (contemporary barn in traditional style), Hipp/Centerbrook Farm at 150 Chestnutland Road/Route 109 (vintage barn still in use as an active farm), Larson Farm Barn at 388 Danbury Road/New Milford High School (dairy barn), New Milford Historical Society at 6 Aspetuck Avenue (old store), 155 Chestnutland Road/Route 109 (antique barn), Sunny Valley Farm/The Nature Conservancy at 55 Sunny Valley Road (vintage dairy barn), Weatinoge Heritage Land Trust at 60 Upland Road (hay barn) and 42 Main Street (home of GeronNursing & Respite Care).

To find out more about the existing eight sites, click here.

Expansion of the New Milford Barn Quilt Trail is an all-volunteer-led 12-month project to more than double the original size of the trail from eight to nineteen sites.

Working with our local Trust for Historic  Preservation, we identified almost 30 surviving antique and vintage barns—to everyone’s surprise at the quantity. Using criteria like architectural quality, condition and proximity to public roads, we extended invitations to 11 to become barn quilt block hosts. 

Next, we found pro bono graphic designers to help the barn owners either identify traditional quilt patterns they liked or help them design original ones that mean a lot to each family.  These are almost complete. The next step is for a local nonprofit art center to copy designs onto 8’ x 8’ quilt blocks and paint them.  Finally, our Town’s Facilities Department will, pro bono, use the cherrypicker to hang the quilt blocks on the trail barns.  Other nonprofit entities who are partners in making our project happen include the New Milford Commission on the Arts, the New Milford Trust for Historic Preservation, the New Milford Farmland & Forest Preservation Committee and the New Milford Corporation for Economic Development (aka New Milford Economic Development Corporation).

Meanwhile, the Mayor’s office has made available to our committee the digital skills of the Town Resource Officer and financial expertise of the Town Grant Writer and Compliance Officer to provide invaluable support to the social media campaign to help our Ioby.com efforts to reach our almost $17,000 goal.

Here are our remaining steps to project completion:

• March 1: Launch the www.ioby.org crowdfunding campaign with enough barn quilt owner stories, old photos, new video clips and third-party historical research to post on social media during the six weeks of the ioby.com campaign
• April 1:  Turn in all the barn quilt block designs to be painted at a local art center
• April 15: Once sufficient funds have been raised, purchase the all-weather polyurethane quilt blocks to be primed and painted with all the designs
• May 15-July 15:  Hanging of all new barn quilt blocks on the selected barns
• May 15-Aug 1: Design, completion of all printed brochures, cards and elaboration of state-wide distribution program in conjunction with update of our webpage at http://newmilfordfarmlandpres.org/barn-quilt-trail/
• Sept. 1: Plan and organize a town-wide free public inauguration of full 19-site trail comprising the eight barn sites from the 2017 completed phase and the eleven additional barn sites from this 2020 expansion

The six volunteers of the Barn Quilt Expansion Committee are thrilled by the excited reaction to expanding the New Milford Barn Quilt Trail from eight to nineteen sites by people throughout the town, local businesses, town officials, plein air artists—and the eleven barn owners who have responded so enthusiastically to the invitation to host barn quilt blocks.

This project brings economic and quality of life benefits to our community.  With nineteen barn sites, we now have enough to create a complete circuit throughout much of this semi-rural town, Connecticut’s largest. It will begin and end at our famous Green, drawing residents and visitors to our downtown Village Center to patronize our shops, theater and restaurants.

A recent marketing analysis study commissioned by our Town urged us to come up with strategies to make New Milford, often referred to as the “Gateway to Litchfield County”, a destination, rather than a “pass-through”  for new residents and visitors both. Our envisioned 13-mile River Trail is less than half-completed in an era of constrained state, federal and town resources. Efforts to attract new business and bring back passenger rail service may take just as long and lots of money.

So a barn quilt trail—popular in over 40 US states—is, to us, a very immediate, very low-cost strategy with which to draw visitors to our town.  And it can be done in just a few months with exuberant, can-do volunteer energy. At the same time, it is giving our delighted residents civic pride at having a unique regional attraction. It also makes New Milford’s rich agricultural heritage come to life for everyone from the times when tobacco and dairy were king around here and American author Edna Ferber wrote in her 1931 novel American Beauty  of the “rich green valleys of that part of Connecticut…a rich and heartening sight.”