Visit to Satan's Kingdom, New Hartford, CT
Last Saturday, when going to breakfast with my friends from my former employer (The Torrington Company), I was early and driving by Satan's Kingdom, so I decided to stop and take a few pictures.
Click on any picture to 'embiggen'.
Satan's Kingdom is a State Recreation Area (as the sign says) that sits on the Farmington River, which is a very hot place for tubing in the summer.
Here's a picture of the river as it approaches the park. The leaves, as you can see, are mostly off the trees. Fall, is truly here in Connecticut.
The next picture (above) is looking down-river. It's a beautiful place in the spring and summer, but in the fall, it's so desolate and quiet. The Farmington river winds it's way down through central Connecticut from Massachusetts for 81 miles.
This next picture is a bit more of a close up. The river is just perfect for tubing as it's no wider than a hundred feet or so, and for a few miles in this area, no more than 4-5 feet deep.
This picture, shows the picnic tables that, during the earlier parts of the season, are always full of people enjoying snacks before, and after tubing. There's also great fishing in the river.
Lastly, looking even more down-river, I passed over this bridge getting here.
I hope you enjoyed this small journey into Satan's Kingdom!
posted by Dave
4 Comments:
That is a nice park. It's nice to see pictures of natural spaces from that area. We southerners often forget that the northeastern states are not wall-to-wall city.
Really pretty photos, Dave. The name is a bit scary - do you know how it got its name?
YAY for you being back in the public :-D *HUGS*
Karen, here's what I found on the name:
According to legend, Satan once used the rocky gorge of the Farmington River bearing his name as his exclusive playground. Here, he and his band of lesser demons gamboled away their days and nights, until the day finally came when the Angel Gabriel blew them all away with one blast from his golden trumpet. Gabriel and the good angels had decided that the rugged area was just too lovely to be cluttered up with demonic denizens.
Whether the tale of Gabriel's environmental beautification program is true or not is hard to say, but according to the historical record, the Satan's Kingdom district did, in fact, once serve as a refuge for a scattering of human beings who might easily have been mistaken for devils. Either attracted by the place's name, or -- more likely -- its isolated and inaccessible location, a notorious group of "Indians, Negroes and renegade whites" settled in the Kingdom, in the last years of the eighteenth century.
Using their settlement as both home and hideout, the inhabitants ranged the region far and wide, begging, robbing, vandalizing and stealing anything that wasn't nailed down. Before the nest of thieves was finally cleared by law enforcement officers -- Gabriel was not available -- they say that Satan's Kingdom had grown so evil that it was even giving the Devil a bad name. Anyway, the raid may have marked the beginning of the end for the Devil in Connecticut.
Wow - I've got the chills. Good riddance to him.
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