Clarity on Reservoir Road and the Rochambeau Trail
To The Editor:
After reading last week’s letter to the editor on this subject I am feeling the need to clarify a few points of fact.
When a property gains recognition on the National Register of Historic Places it does not become a public asset that a town can sell. There are countless private properties and homes that have such a designation, and we do not have title to them.
The town does however own its roadways and therefore owns Reservoir Road and a few feet on either side of it. Only about 700 feet of it is paved and maintained by the town. The town owns the full length of Reservoir Road (from Mount Pleasant to Castle Hill) only by virtue of it being drawn as a dotted line on a map published in 1854. It does not appear full length anywhere else.
The “March Route of Rochambeau’s Army: Reservoir Road Newtown” that the National Park Service recognized in 2003 does not extend the full length of Reservoir Road but only about two-thirds of it (specifically 1,800 feet) starting at Mt Pleasant. This is so because, according to the NPS: “The Castle Hill Road alignment . . . in place from the middle 19th century onward, diverges significantly from the French map of 1781 which shows West Street ... intersecting with what is now Reservoir Road.”
There are only a couple of roads on that 1854 map that are dotted (unimproved) instead of solid lines one other being The Old Road. The Old Road has paved sections at each end of it (Mount Pleasant and Currituck) but has an impassible streambed in between. The town still technically owns that stretch and could feasibly reconnect the road like it did with the two ends of Butterfield a couple of decades ago. When they decide to discontinue a road, they lose that option.
The decision by the Board of Selectmen to discontinue Reservoir Road was made because leaving it intact bisected the property meaning each side would be developed individually. There have been other development ideas over the past decade for those two parcels that would have been far more disruptive than what was proposed/approved after connecting the two parcels by discontinuing the road. The initial decision last year did not follow the proper procedures in that there was no proper public notice given in advance of deliberations. Therefore, the decision was negated, notice was given, and a new vote confirmed the discontinuation.
New England’s oldest towns were incorporated with a town meeting type of government (direct democracy) and many of them, like Newtown, retained that style well into the 20th century. However, Newtown transitioned to a representative government many decades ago, and that is why the decision to discontinue a road lies with our Board of Selectmen, our elected representatives.
Randi Kiely
Newtown
There are many private roads in Newtown where they property owner owns right to the center line, for example this is often true in the lake communities. Many of these roads predate and do not conform to the Town’s roads standard and therefore the Town never accepted them into the Town road system. Does the Town actually own this road?
Appreciate your perspective. Rather than litiate all of your opinions expressed here, here….I would like correct your opinion about the BOS having the final authority on road discontinuance decisions. State statute (CT GS 13a-49), requires the BOS’ decision to be approvate by a majority vote at a regular or special town meeting (just like the one Newtown had a few years back to decide to spend the money to build an addition onto the High School). In towns that no longer have any town meetings, that responsibility would fall on the town’s representaive government, or legislative body….in Newtown’s case, our Legislative Council. Failure to follow this statutory process is but one of the reasons the town/the BOS is being sued.
Reservoir Rd. does indeed appear to have an interesting history that I often ponder as I hike the Rochambeau Trail. Early on it was apparently part of a main route from the center of the Borough to Taunton, which went up Mt. Pleasant Rd. and then roughly followed a watershed boundary from Mount Pleasant to Taunton Hill. When the current switchback road was built from West St. to Castle Hill in the 1800s, replacing the indirect route through the campground that Rochambeau used, the part of that original route to Taunton now known as Reservoir Rd. became redundant. But on an 1868 town map and topographic maps from 1892 and 1915, it looks like both routes were still maintained as roads. By the time of the 1934 aerial survey of CT, the connection to Mount Pleasant Rd. (maybe called Reservoir Rd. by then since the reservoir is visible) even had two outlets onto Castle Hill Rd. Since it is only shown as a partial dashed line on a 1953 topographic map, it may have stopped being maintained as a passable through road by then. But on a 1963 topographic map, where the section down to Knollwood Dr. had become a normal road again, the other end is shown as a dashed-line road, still with two connections to Castle Hill Rd., and a structure on the east side where one can still find remnants of a house today. Maybe a longtime resident can add comments about what it looked like in the 1950s and 1960s?