Back to One
by Christine Adams Beckett
An essay about the bygone nature of Lake Waramaug inns
During the 1970s, anyone traveling Northbound on Route 25 - now Route 202 - in New Milford would be enticed to come vacation on Lake Waramaug; there stood a weather-worn wooden billboard, decades old, advertising twelve comfortable inns on our beautiful Lake. At that time there were several still in operation, welcoming guests mostly from NewYork City and the tri-state area.
With the recent sale of The Boulders Inn, which is to go the same way as all of the others by becoming a private residence, there remains one inn on the lake with its shingle still swaying in the summer breezes. The Hopkins Inn, interestingly, was also the first to accept vacationing guests. Thanks to Mary Harwood's A History of Lake Waramaug, we know that a visitor from Brooklyn, Edward R. Squibb, was traveling along the shores of Waramaug in 1864 when he stopped to ask William Hopkins for the opportunity to lodge in his home. Presumably igniting an entrepreneurial spark, Hopkins constructed an addition to his home and hung that still-swaying shingle, making it official: Lake Waramaug, once a fishing spot for the Wyantenock, then farmlands and home to a colonial era village, was finally ensconced as a summer community of the Industrial Age.
During the Victorian era, train travel opened new opportunities to city dwellers looking to broaden their horizons, and Waramaug offered a respite to those yearning to breathe restorative fresh air in a beautiful locale. According to Mary Harwood, out-of-town visitors began to flock its shores in 1840, just after the Housatonic Rail Road opened their New Milford Station. Those numbers only increased when in 1873 New Preston Station opened on Bee Brook Road, now Route 47.
In 1886 the Norris family of Warren added to their Lakeview Farm house to accept seasonal guests and diners. This establishment changed hands only one more time before it became The Inn on Lake Waramaug, under the hospitable patronage of the Combs Family.
Jay Combs, who is one of the current proprietors at The Washington Supply Company, lived at the Inn on Lake Waramaug from his birth through adulthood. His father, the amiable and community-minded Richard, owned the Inn from 1951 to 1986 and operated his business with the idea in mind that all should have the opportunity to enjoy our lake. Events meant to draw in the community filled the Combs' schedule year-round with crowd-pleasers, including horse carriage rallies, clam bakes, and farmers' markets during the summer, witches' spelling bees, pumpkin carving, antique car rallies and turkey Olympics in the fall, a bell choir performance and New Year's Eve dancing to a three piece orchestra during the winter.
In the 1970s, The Inn on Lake Waramaug was a popular spot for local and out-of-town visitors. Their vessel, the Showboat, was outfitted with two twin outboard engines and decorative paddlewheels, and gave tours of the shoreline. During their late afternoon cruises there were sometimes bagpipers aboard, and on a few occasions a Dixieland jazz band, also entertaining those observing from shore. A ride on the Showboat was open to anyone, making stops at the other Inns on the lake, setting sight-seeing passengers back a steep $2.50. There were hot dogs and hamburgers served at the Beachcomber (yes, the family looked for ways to cleverly insert their name), and Labor Day Huckleberry Finn raft races, the rules for which required that entrants make their own watercraft and forego flotation devices of any kind in their design.
Richard Combs organized an association of "Eight Friendly Inns" along the lake and near-by, including The Sachem, The Hopkins, Pinnacle Valley, The Boulders, The LaGrotta Inn, The Loomarwick and The Tinker Hill Inn (most recently the Birches). They shared advertising costs and maintained that Route 25 billboard, organized the July 4 flare display we still enjoy today and hired a seasonal resident and artist, Edd Ash, to design a logo of those friendly Inns. The design offered a nod to Waramaug's original residents by featuring a Native American within a triangle.
According to Jay Combs, The Loomarwick was the largest of the inns on the lake, and offered a variety of activities to their guests. Its name is not a Native American one as is widely believed, but an amalgamation of its three founders' names, financial tycoons out of Bridgeport: Loomis, Marsh and Bostwick. The property was subdivided and sold in the late 1960s, about one hundred years after its founding, and although many of the original buildings were torn down, two became private residences. One of the residences, belonging to the Franks, can boast the suggestion of room numbers, albeit now just faded outlines, on a few of their bedroom doors.
Jack Adams, a West Shore Road seasonal resident, describes his summer as a bus boy at The Loomarwick as an almost camp-like experience for people of all ages. Being a resident of New Milford, it was necessary that he take a cot at what the proprietors called the manery (defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a mansion or a manor deriving from a 16th century term for a men's parsonage of a holy church). The Loomarwick Manery was one of two barns consisting of several rooms of two beds each reserved for the young men employed by the Inn. Mr. Adams bunked with a boy from Waterbury who was the son of the Largay Brewing Company proprietor, famous for their Red Fox Ale, samples of which were available to Mr. Adams and his bunkmate during that summer, circa 1940.
The Loomarwick served three meals to their guests daily and entertained them with dances in the evening in their lakeside Pavillion ,which burned down in the 1970s, was replaced by the next owner with a box-like structure, and is now a beautifully vernacular private cottage. There, the bus boys and wait staff were required to ask the guests' daughters to dance, if the young ladies lacked any names on their card.
Christine Wilkinson recalls the women's accommodations at the Loomarwick, housed in a glorified barn-like structure on the hillside that resembled a chicken coop. During the summer of 1961, she was employed by the Inn as a waitress. As one of the more recent hires, Ms. Wilkinson was assigned to cater to the more difficult guests in the dining room; menial tasks were assigned to those with little tenure. Many of the summer employees hailed from the New York City area, and made great efforts to spruce up their no-frills living arrangements with flowers and brightly colored bedspreads. They stayed for the summer and had living expenses deducted from their salary.
Ms. Wilkinson recalls her employment as a rustic experience, one which reflected the transitional nature of the American summer. By then, the Victorian Ages's month-long stays in the country were long gone but certainly remembered by many. The Loomarwick by that time was old, dated, a "rattle trap of a dilapidated Victorian structure." There were simply more choices available to the average New Yorker: air travel was more widely utilized, automobiles were becoming more comfortable, those who loved the Lake were beginning to buy their own homes along its shores. Economic changes seemed to coincide with the shift in the nature of the summer holiday.
During the 1980s, the inns were entertaining a dining crowd as much as appealing to overnight guests. Restaurant staff consisted of a cohesive mix of summer residents and locals. Saturday nights drew in hundreds of diners to the Boulders Inn. The kitchen crew worked late hours to wrap up a shift in stained, sweaty white cotton aprons to free the once-gleaming stainless steel countertops of flying parsley leaves and stacks of dirty dinner plates. Sometimes Jim Woolen, proprietor, would chip in by scrubbing pots and pans with his dress shirt rolled up to his elbows, his tie flung over his shoulder with his hands plunged into the greasy water of a deep stainless steel sink. Mr. Woolen was a former Midwestern banker who grew tired of administering foreclosures on farms, and chose to run a lakeside country inn instead with his wife, a former ballerina, and three children.
The Boulders was closed to diners on Mondays, but open, of course, to houseguests, who were required to stay a minimum of two nights. Sophisticated picnic fare was served, and always featured clever and artistic watermelon carvings by sous chef Dan Cornish, in which fresh fruit salad was served. Particularly memorable were a delectable Volkswagen beetle, a curlicue-tailed pig, a dinghy with oars. One of the more notable houseguests one summer was Robert DeNiro, seeking solace while shooting the film Stanley and Iris in nearby Waterbury with Jane Fonda.
Our summer community has most certainly changed as have our accommodations. It is decidedly more private, quieter, calmer. In many ways these changes have brought us closer to the lake's origins, when the first holiday seekers arrived: there were no cars to choke the lake road, the train was still a four mile buggy ride away keeping it exclusively open to those who could afford the trip and to the locals. The Combs family is no longer receiving complaints, some deserved and others misdirected, about the noise of their lively parties and receptions. Our sense of community comes from other sources, clubs, associations, restaurants, chance meetings on the road or water.
Sam Beckett, a teenaged summer resident of Loomarwick Road, recently took part in a summer excavation project with the Litchfield Hills Archaeology Club. On the slopes of the Hopkins Vineyard, he was thrilled to be able to aid in the discovery of artifacts dating back more than five thousand years. Most frequently discovered were tightly packed clumps of charcoal marking the spot of a summering Wyantenock's hearth, where he or she likely cooked fish pulled from our waters. They came here during the summers for sustenance then, both physical and spiritual.
The same was true for Sam. He celebrated a wonderful summer dig with his archaeological cohorts that Autumn, when the leaves were in full fiery brilliance, igniting the waters. He took advantage of the seasonal opportunity to freely pursue a passion without the pull of scholastic responsibilities. The fire they lit was lakeside, where club members roasted marshmallows instead of bass at The Hopkins Inn beach. There the suggestion of a squeak from that swinging shingle could be heard in between discussions of erosion, the ease of digs on a hillside, and that singular arrow head found. The shingle read "The Hopkins Inn, established 1847", and serves as a relic of the nature of a Victorian summer holiday on Lake Waramaug.
*Author's Note: the discrepancy of dates of the establishment of the Hopkins Inn is due to conflicting reports from Mary Harwood's The History of Lake Waramaug and The Hopkins Inn website, which claim 1864 and 1847 respectively.