I have a deep love for my city. So much so that I ran a website dedicated to it and the goings on around town. For 11 years, I let folks know what was happening around the city on any given night. Want to sing karaoke, listen to a cover band, take a free yoga class? I’m on it!
I had to give it up for several reasons, one of the things that happened during my time on What’s on the Menu? was that I decided to use the platform of my site to help spread my love for the city of Stamford to others. Our town is losing more and more of its history daily due to overdevelopment and I was trying to find a way to try in my own way to get more folks involved in stopping it.
While I am an admitted history geek, I know that many find it boring. I needed to figure out a way to gain the interest of my readers. So several years ago, I came up with the idea to create a series of pieces on the Lost Legends and Twisted Tales of Stamford in order to get more folks interested in the history of our area in order to save it. To learn about the history behind the tales, rumors and stories that had spread about so that it was a more fun way to get the lessons across. And what better time to do it, than Halloween!
For a little background, I had been privileged with my WOTM website to be able to do things around Stamford I had never thought I’d get to do. One of my favorite things was a true bucket-list item and that was a real live archaeological dig! The historical society was planning on moving the oldest house in the city, built in 1699 to make way for the new police station and I had been invited to not only cover it but to participate in it as well. Those of us who joined in got to dig and try our best to salvage what was left under the grounds before the move began and I was immensely honored to be a part of it. It was also because of this that made me want to push the historical aspect of the site over the ‘happenings’ area of it.
I had made the decision that the posts of the Lost Legends series would be published on midnight of Halloween and each piece would have three to five stories within them. Not going to lie, I researched the hell out of each one. I would start early in the year and would still be typing at 11:59pm October 30th waiting to hit ‘publish’ at midnight on the 31st. It was some of the hardest writing work I’ve ever done and absolutely thrived on it. To me though, the research was my favorite part and I enjoyed every second of it. It was actually the editing that took the longest as I tried to narrow down the information I had collected over the months/years into just a few short paragraphs.
I have said for years that I am planning to put these stories and more into a book. That has been the idea all along. As life has hit with some twists and turns, this mission of mine has been delayed. But this is a goal that I will not give up on and hope to make a reality someday.
Now that my WOTM site is closed, (although I keep it live as a kind of archive for myself…11 years of work is hard to let go of), I do hope to be adding to this series here on my personal site. I don’t think I will stick to the Halloween deadline, but hey! You never know!
So allow me here to share the links to the original pieces, again I will add them also to the ‘past works’ page here so they don’t get lost in the shuffle of this page. I hope you enjoy them and I hope they inspire you to also take the time to #LearnWhereYOULive as well!!
Links:
New Chapter Cove 