Steve Kemper

Magazine

Classic: Train Conductor Travis D. Ford

Yankee Classic from September 1996 Down in the southwestern corner of New England, where Connecticut resembles a funnel draining toward New York, dour commuters on the Metro-North train suddenly smile when they see Travis D. Ford in his blue conductor’s uniform. The day instantly seems a bit more promising, the rat race a little less […]

Yankee Magazine

Maps Don’t Show Vermont’s Sleeping Roads

What happens when sleeping roads wake up? Do they become beauties or nightmares? Vermont is about to find out. Until recently, the state’s sleeping roads had been hibernating in a dormant law that says that any road ever established by a town remains a town road unless it has been officially discontinued. That sounds innocuous, […]

Curtis & Stephen
Yankee Magazine

Witch Hazel: Connecticut is the Source

It’s only a slight stretch to say that the skin of America’s women depends on a handful of New England woodsmen with rough hands and weathered faces. Without these “brush cutters,” as they call themselves, there would be no witch hazel to put into the dozens of lotions, creams, gels, moisturizers, cleansers, conditioners, and shampoos […]

Comstock
Yankee Magazine

Weekend: Old Wethersfield, CT

Just seconds from the roar of I-91 lies the tranquil center of Old Wethersfield, Connecticut’s first permanent settlement and one of New England’s prettiest villages. The sudden deceleration is disconcerting, then pleasing, like stepping through a portal into the past. The village’s improbable setting — poised between an interstate and the strip-mall blight of Silas […]