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.