By Kim J. Harmon

When Christina Kennedy decided to leave for the greener pastures of North Carolina, it was a decision born of frustration over the changing character of Newtown. But she leaves behind many fond memories and many fond friends.

Christina is one of the founding members of the Newtown Bridle Lands Association.

Formed back in 1978 down on Aunt Park Lane as the Newtown Bridle Lanes Association (well, it was briefly known as the Aunt Park Lane Bridle Lanes), it was almost exclusively a social group. As with Leslie Hudson-Tolles and the Consiglios, it seemed as if everyone had a backyard horse back then and the club formed with that common interest.

“It was an excuse to go riding,” Christina remembers.

About a year or so later, the small group heard of this thing called a hunter pace and set about organizing its own. Though there were maybe a half dozen entries, it was the beginning of the popular Frost on the Pumpkin Hunter Pace that continues to this day.

“Everything back then was sort of spur of the moment,” Christina said, “but once people started hearing about us and started joining, we felt like it needed to be more structured.”

Sort of a “poor cousin” to the Fairfield County Hounds, she said, the NBLA borrowed a lawyer and wrote up some by-laws. Soon its mission came into sharp focus – to preserve, protect and maintain riding and hiking trails and to focus more on efforts on working with landowners and developers to maintain crucial links in the Newtown trail system which was created back in the 1940s.

Today, the NBLA tries to maintain a connection with landowners, developers and town land use commissions to keep the focus on existing trails and the preservation or creation of new trails. The NBLA has been able, with the aid of developers, to carve new trails, define old trails or create links between two adjoining trails.

Christina – a former state trooper and probation officer – has a sense, though, that it may be a losing battle.

“It seems like the administration doesn’t care about preserving open space in this town anymore,” she said. “In other towns, it’s paramount to preserve open space.”

Christina sees the horse as an American icon – an icon that is the center of an important industry – but even in a county and state that has one of the highest rates of horses per capita, she sees fewer and fewer feed stores, veterinarians, horse dentists, horse hospitals and tack shops that ever before. And the idea of a horse park that was briefly floated for the Fairfield Hills property, though perhaps pie in the sky, brought a flutter to her heart.

But now she is moving on. She packed up the whole kit and caboodle – the horse Andiamo and Drifter, the donkey Ilko, and the cats – and begins a different phase of her life in North Carolina. Yet she brings with her a lot of memories.

“Nothing stays behind,” she said. “I’m taking Newtown with me. It’s terribly sad to be leaving my friends who were such a big part of my life. But the NBLA members are still very sincere and believe in the mission of preserving open space and the riding ideal.”

And Christina Kennedy helped foster that ideal. Hopefully, it can live on.