The spooky abandoned village of Johnsonville is about to be sold, ghosts and all. We investigate the ruins
New lease of life: the pretty town in Connecticut is awaiting a new owner to restore it
It's no accident that the village of Johnsonville, Connecticut, is going up for sale over Hallowe'en. The place is a ghost town.
Of course, it wasn't always so. Back in the 1830s, this was a thriving little hamlet. It was home to the Neptune Twine Company, who harnessed the water power of the Moodus River to produce rope for the US fishing industry.
Gradually, though, demand for Neptune products slowly ebbed away. By the Sixties, the entire population had moved out, and the once-busy town had become a dried-up, abandoned shell.
Enter, at this point a determined, if eccentric millionaire by the name of Raymond Schmitt. He had built up a fortune as owner of successful aerospace engineering company AGC Corporation. And now he had the idea of turning Johnsonville into a top-class tourist attraction.
No one can say he didn't try. Feeling that the place lacked the odd, characterful building or two, Schmitt arranged for scenic wooden structures to be put on wheels, and transported by road. Among the buildings he and his wife Carole brought to Johnsonville was a schoolhouse, built in 1863.
Another attractive edifice to have made the journey was a pretty, little Gothic chapel. This was constructed in 1876, in the nearby town of Waterford. The Schmitts painstakingly took it to pieces, before transporting it 30 miles down the road and re-assembling it in Johnsonville.
Add to the mix a handsome, carriage house and livery stables from 1850 (transplanted from the town of Winsted), and it wasn't long before the Schmitts had created their own small town. It had never actually existed, but they proceeded to turn it into a living history museum.
It wasn't just buildings that made the journey, either; in 1966, the Schmitts installed an old-fashioned steamboat on the Johnson Millpond. They bought it at auction, following the closure of the short-lived Freedomland Amusement Park, in New York. The vessel was towed up the Connecticut River, and made the rest of the journey on the back of a truck.
Piece by piece, then, the Schnitts assembled a working replica of a small Victorian town. As well as a post office, sawmill and barbershop (complete with dummies and a mass of shaving materials), visitors could also visit the Johnsonville jewel in the crown.
This was the handsome, if somewhat spooky-looking mansion known as the Emory Johnson Homestead. Remarkable, in that it was one of the few buildings that had actually started life in Johnsonville, rather than arriving on the back of a lorry.
It was built in the 1840s, and, over the ensuing years, some five generations of Johnsons had lived there. They witnessed first the rise of the Connecticut twine industry and then its slow decline.
Character building: the Schnitts assembled a working replica of a small Victorian town with a post office, sawmill and barbershop
Having bought the mill itself in 1965, the Schmitts then went the whole hog five years later, and purchased the homestead. It became the place where they would not only display their vast collection of antiques, but where they would stage live performances. These included tableaux vivants, in which historical re-enactors wearing Victorian costumes would lead visitors through the house, demonstrating domestic rituals and playing the parlour organ.
The biggest blow to the whole project, however, was the destruction of the mill, in 1972. Struck by lightning, the wooden structure burned to the ground, suffering the same fate as had befallen many other Connecticut mills.
Still the Schmitts stuck to their task. While they never opened the town as a seven-days-a-week tourist attraction, they are fondly remembered by local people. Both by couples who remember being married there, and now-elderly people who remember, as children, fishing in the pond and exploring the woods.
Not surprisingly, those who recall the place in its heyday, are now shocked at its decline. The music on the promotional video does its best to make the place seem romantic. But there's no escaping the fact that the crumbling, cobwebbed buildings and "Village Closed To Public" signs are more reminiscent of a spooky movie than property particulars.
But what eventually spelt the end of the Johnsonville experiment, it seems, was nothing as dramatic as a fiery bolt from the heavens. Instead, it was allegedly an argument over Schmitt's plans to dig another pond, which the local council felt might upset the environmental balance.
Either way, it was the final straw for Schmitt, who shut the place down in 1994, and died four years later. It's rumoured locally that his ghost still stalks the site, lamenting the fact that Johnsonville never really took off. Ohers say that the Emory Johnson Homestead is alive with the spirits of mill workers, whose bodies were always laid out in the parlour before burial.
Visionary: the buildings could be turned into houses, retirement homes, shops or schools
Not that anyone needs convincing that the place is haunted.
"It's an abandoned ghost town, stuck in limbo," confirms Ray Bendici, who writes a blog entitled Damned Connecticut. "It's waiting for someone either to come and restore it, or to put it out of its misery and knock it down."
Both of which might happen. The 62-acre town comes up for online auction, starting price $800,000 (£497,000), over a two-day period, starting at 10am (7pm BST) Pacific Time on October 28, and ending at the same time on October, 29 . And the particulars talk enouragingly about combining the old village with “permitted 21st century uses”, such as houses, retirement homes, bars, restaurants, shops and schools.
The chances are, then, that on Halloween, the village of Johnsonville might shake itself free of its cobwebs, and once more rise from the dead.
*To submit a bid in the Johnsonville auction, you need to register on the website www.auction.com and lodge a deposit of $10,000 (£6,000). Contact Meredith Coleman, 001 646 640 1899 (mcoleman@auction.com); the estate agent handling the sale is Jim Kelly, of RM Bradley, 001 860 241 2704 jkelly@rmbradley.com .You can see a video of the property on : http://www.auction.com/Connecticut/commercial-auction-asset/193019417-15703-Village-Of-Johnsonville-MOODUS-CT-06469-B846
Source : Telegraph.co.uk
No comments:
Post a Comment