THE SETTING OF “SHARON MOUNTAIN” 

The novel SHARON MOUNTAIN is set in a real place: on the top of Sharon Mountain (which is really more of a hill than a mountain, but for Connecticut, at 1400 feet, pretty high) in rural Sharon, Connecticut. Northwest Connecticut, tucked in a corner with Massachusetts and New York, was sparsely settled in 1833, when the book takes place - and it’s not so heavily populated now, with a population that has stayed constant for the last 100 years. The land was rocky, and fields are still bordered by the huge stone walls that all farmers had to build because the land seemed to grow rocks - they reappeared as fast as the farmers labored to pull them out of the ground. When farmers began to settle and took down much of the forest, to make way for fields and grazing lands, there was nothing to hold the soil. As it washed away and the ground heaved with ice, stones were pushed up. It was a cold place and a tough life for farmers, and until the first quarter of the nineteenth century, it was subsistence living for most of them: they grew only what they could use, because there was no way to get goods transported anywhere else. 

Sharon is about 100 miles north of New York City, a two hour drive today, but an overnight trip in a dusty and bumpy carriage in 1833. Roads had not yet been paved, and many of them were just tracks. The road that ran in front of the Caldwell’s house on Sharon Mountain crossed right over the mountain. Because the house sat halfway between the towns of Cornwall Bridge and Sharon, it was a stopping-off place for travelers. They would have rested their horses and given them water, while the travelers needed to get out and get something to eat and drink. Railroads were just starting to be built. Riding in a horse drawn carriage for long hours with only leather flaps for windows was very uncomfortable, slow and expensive - but if you had to get somewhere, it was all they knew. 

There would have been a few other houses within walking distance of the Caldwell’s house, but anyone living here would have been accustomed to isolation. The Caldwells ran a very successful tavern when Asa was a child, with travelers and locals frequenting the tavern. This meant that Asa’s father was primarily not a farmer, a source of friction between him and his own father. But having a tavern also meant that there were a lot of opportunities to feed and host people, which Julia was able to tap into later. 

Are the Caldwells real? No, they never existed. But there were many who led a hard working rural life as they did, and the way Julia grew up in the village of Sharon is very realistic. Her brother’s store would have been another place, besides a tavern and the meeting house or church, where people regularly congregated. Life in the town was more sociable, but up on Sharon Mountain, the tavern was the only place where neighbors expected to encounter each other. Sharon still has a lovely village green surrounded by clapboard houses, and a few dairy farms remain, but most of the open fields are now gone, replaced by second growth forest. It is still a beautiful place.