More than a decade ago, Geoff Brown, the Principal Partner of Between the Lakes Group, was asked by the Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area to conduct a Lime Rock Walking Tour. He repeated the tour by request a few years later.
Trinity Church in Lime Rock graciously hosted the tour and provided hospitality as well as access to their archives. Lime Rock Park provided a highly knowledgeable historian of the track to tell us a bit about that internationally known institution from an insider’s point of view. Many others helped in ways too numerous to mention.
But there was one problem. A number of people told us they would like to go on a Lime Rock Walking Tour, but they were not physically capable of walking the three miles that even a minimal tour would require. What could we do? The answer was soon in coming: we would prepare a Powerpoint slide show of the walking tour, and while those up to the walk could experience it in real life, those who could not would be able to watch the slide show in Trinity’s Walker Hall in comfort.
As we prepared the slide show, it quickly became clear that we would be able to put far more information about Lime Rock in the slide show than actual participants in the Lime Rock Walking Tour would actually get to see. We could include sights too distant to walk to. We could include historic photos and maps of features of Lime Rock that were no longer there. We could include concise summaries of things we would talk about on the walk. We could include photos of sights that still remain that are not accessible because they are on private property.
Ultimately, the slide show accompanying the Lime Rock Walking Tour became considerably more comprehensive and satisfying than the tour itself!
Subsequently, we decided to make the slide show of the Lime Rock Walking Tour available as a CD-ROM. We sold quite a number in that format, but when the time came to retire our CD business, the slide show became unavailable.
However, we recently resurrected the slide show and, realizing we could republish it as a PDF file, could include even more information and photos than the slideshow format permitted. For example, we could provide the old maps in a way that people could study them as long as they wanted. We were able to add considerable information that would have passed too quickly to be absorbed in a slide show. We could even improve on the original slide show by incorporating information unearthed since the slide show was created.
Coincidentally, we had two “real” books in the works. Research for our forthcoming “The Lakeville Crucifix” and “History of Trinity Lime Rock in Context” had turned up huge amounts of information that permitted an updating of the Lime Rock Walking Tour slide show that genuinely improved it.
This is all in the way of announcing that the new, enlarged and enhanced Lime Rock Walking Tour is now available as a download in PDF format. Now 141 pages long, we feel that it is something that belongs in the collection of any student of Lime Rock or the Town of Salisbury or the historic iron industry of the Upper Housatonic Valley.
More information and an opportunity to download the document are on our Lime Rock page. We encourage you to take a look! CLICK HERE to find out more about it!
Here’s one of the items we particularly like that appears in the Lime Rock Walking Tour: