57 Indian Trail Road

Clapboard house of 1755 at the bottom of a private valley in the Merryall district of New Milford. The town assessor carries that date without qualification, along with the fabric: clapboard walls, a gable roof laid in wood shingle, a foundation of stone and concrete, floors in hardwood on the main level and pine above, three fireplaces, two stories and a finished half story. Merryall itself was named in 1726, when a survey party stopped for dinner beside a spring and, as Samuel Orcutt set down in his 1882 history of the town, all had become merry. The house went up 29 years after the naming and four years before the district opened its schoolhouse.

The estate was assembled rather than subdivided. New Milford's grand list shows it as three adjoining parcels held together: 38.88 acres around the house, 31.61 acres carried as pasture, and 2.43 acres of woodland. Eighteen of those acres are open ground. Two ponds sit on the flat, and Merryall Brook, which runs southeast out of Kent to meet the West Aspetuck River, crosses the low part of the land. Indian Trail Road is gravel the whole way in, and the Northwest Connecticut Land Conservancy holds a parcel of its own along the same road.

The main house was expanded in 2005 to 6,236 square feet across twelve rooms. A great room with a stone fireplace opens to the kitchen and a formal dining room. A sitting room and a library share back to back fireplaces. A guest suite on the main level has a full bath and a sitting room of its own. Upstairs the primary suite carries a lofted sitting area with a fireplace and a private deck, and two more bedrooms share a hall bath. The lower level holds a gym and a wine cellar floored in cobbles.

Every structure on the place has a date on the card. The guest bungalow, 952 square feet with one bedroom, one bath and a fireplace, was built in 1950. The stables carry a caretaker's apartment of 710 square feet added in 1990, clad in cedar outside and floored in hardwood in. The barn was restored. The gazebo is screened and set out over a pond. The pool is 694 square feet of heated gunite, salt water, with a spa and a pavilion beside it, and multi level terraces of dry laid stone step down from the house to a fire pit and a grilling area. Kent, New Preston and Washington are each about fifteen minutes away. The land records show one family has held the valley since April 1998, which makes the 2005 expansion, the terraces and the planting all theirs.

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