Your children, your neighbors, your coworkers…We all know someone served by a local non-profit organization. The Hour Publishing Company, want to spotlight the good work done everyday by non-profits in our community, by giving your favorite non-profit a $15,000 media advertising package to help spread the word about what they do. Vote for your favorite non-profit at Thehour.com.  Only one vote per person , per day, so encourage your friends and family to vote now.   One vote a day everyday.  Thank you for your support!

 Please click on the link below:                                                 

                                                  VoteForWHS

Come spend a very special morning with Westport legend, artist, writer and activist Tracy Sugarman. Tracy will share his artwork and experiences from the Civil Rights Movement. Elizabeth DeVoll will lead a workshop which will celebrate freedom, tolerance and harmony through games, drama, art and music.  Explore art from different cultures and ethnic backgrounds and make a 3D peace sign.  Celebrate our differences and explore what makes each one of us unique and special.  We will play with all the colors of the crayon box and make one beautiful picture.  Bring lunch, snack provided. To register, call 203-222-1424.

50 States. 1 Year. Zero Garbage? Called to action by a planet in peril, three friends hit the road – traveling America with hope, humor…and all of their garbage – to explore the good, the bad, and the weird across every state in search of the extraordinary innovators and courageous citizens who are tackling humanity’s greatest environmental crises. As the YERT team layers outlandish eco-challenges onto their year-long quest, an unexpected turn of events throws the project for a loop in this award-winning docu-comedy. Featuring Bill McKibben, Wes Jackson, Will Allen, Janine Benyus, Joel Salatin, David Orr, and music by Ben Sollee, Daniel Martin Moore, Mark Geary and more.

The Westport Downtown’s Merchant Association has created a unique event to solve all of your holiday gift needs – an Alternative Gift Giving Fair.

Thirteen non-profit organizations including The Westport Historical Society will gather at Christ & Holy Trinity Church at 75 Church Lane to take part in this year’s exciting new event. Here’s how it works: take the money you would have spent on a gift for someone and donate to WHS in that person’s name and specify an actual item that we need. If you donate $30, we will purchase art stools for the children in the Newman Room or make a donation to support any one of our other programs. The DMA has created gift cards detailing the gift you’ve made.

Other participating organizations include Department of Human Services, Earthplace, First Night, Levitt Pavilion for the Performing Arts, Westport Arts Center, Westport Country Playhouse, Westport Home and Energy Challenge, Westport Library, Westport Town Farm, Westport Woman’s Club, Westport Young Women’s League, and the Westport/Weston YMCA.

Join us on December 1st for a truly great way to find gifts for those hard-to-shop for people in your life AND do something great for the Westport community this holiday season. And the next time your friends and family come to the Historical Society, they’ll have the joy of knowing that their gift helped to support Westport’s history.

             Puppet Players Participation Theatre will offer programs at 11am, noon and 1pm. Ms. Jeannie Walker will create puppet plays for all ages using music and song and they’re will be a different show every hour. A puppet theatre will be available and the children will go behind the stage to participate in the actual show.

            Tom Hanford and Nancy Finlay will perform In the Good Old Colony Days at 2pm. Dressed in period costume, they will sing and tell stories of the 17^th and18^th Centuries. Tom’s singing is accompanied by guitar, violin and harmonica. Tom and Nancy have performed for two years together at museums in NY and CT. They are listed in the Directory of Performing Artists of the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism. Nancy performs with the Yale Alumni Chorus and the Russian Chamber Chorus of New York. Tom has performed his historic programs for families in Old Sturbridge Village, The Berkshire Museum in Mass., and locally at the Beardsley Zoo in Bridgeport.

            Suzanne Sherman Propp, Singer Songwriter is back by popular demand to perform with some of her students at the Greens Farms Elementary School at 3pm. Suzanne is a general music teacher and choral director at the elementary school. This year’s theme is Celebrating the Earth! To tie in with the Westport Historical Society’s Back to our Roots exhibit, Suzanne will have a sing-along featuring some of America’s best loved songs: This Land is Your Land by Woodie Guthrie, Down on the Farm, Home on the Range, Oh Susannah, In Wonderful Westport, a song written about our town, to name a few.

Phil and Tom’s Ice Cream Truck will arrive after the performance at 3:45pm for ice cream treats.

The Garden Marketplace is one of our signature events connected to the Hidden Garden Tour, held on the same day. It is a wonderful opportunity for visitors to breach the garden gate or high hedge and walk the grounds of five lavish private gardens. Tickets for the tour can be purchased in advance by calling 203-222-1424 or the WHS website. Tickets are $45; $35 for WHS members. Tickets purchased on the day of the tour are $50.

Saugatuck River

Led by people in the know: Allen Raymond, Town Historian, Ron Malone, Former Westport Chief of Police and Susan Gold, Executive Director, The Westport Historical Society. Whether it’s Coleytown (where’s that?), Green’s Farms, Longshore or Saugatuck, Westport is filled with historic neighborhoods, and this two-hour tour visits them all. Well, maybe not all of them, but a lot of them. Did you know, for instance, that for years the New Haven Railroad identified the station stop in our town as “Westport & Saugatuck?” What happened to cause the change? We’ll visit Saugatuck and let you decide.

And why was Compo Parkway at one time a Mecca for softball enthusiasts on Sunday mornings, but no more? As we drive by- we’ll make an educated guess. We’ll, of course, visit many close-knit, and historic neighborhoods such as Compo Beach, Old Mill (the late Ken Montgomery called it “heaven”), Old Hill, Sherwood Island (did you know there were private homes on Sherwood Island?) And, if we have time, we may even visit “Downtown”, where some of us will lament the loss of its three hardware stores, its meat market, and department stores.

Professor Thorson will present an overview of New England’s historic stone walls, explaining why they are the signature landforms of the region, and why convey to us such a visceral sense of place.  A special focus on southwestern  Connecticut will be included. Signed copies of his four books will be available for purchase and inscription.

Some of the interesting areas Professor Thorson will include are  answers to:

What is the oldest documented stone wall in New England?
How much fieldstone wall was originally present? And how much of that is left?
When, on average, were most stone walls built, and by whom?Can stone walls be considered works of folk art?
Why is New England so rich in historic stone walls, whereas other regions usually lack them?
How are the walls of Connecticut’s Gold Coast different from those further inland?
In art history, were they so unimportant to the Hudson River School but so critical to the American impressionists?

Robert Thorson was born in 1951 as the second of seven children from a Scandinavian-American family with roots in Minnesota and North Dakota. In sequence, he lived in Wisconsin, Illinois, North Dakota, and Minnesota before leaving for Alaska in 1973. After eleven years of adventure, which included having two children born in the far north, he moved to New England in 1984. Along the way, he earned an M.S. (1975) from the University of Alaska, a Ph.D (1979) from the University of Washington (Seattle), spent five years in California and Washington with the U.S. Geological Survey (1975-1980), and contracted with international, federal, state, and private agencies ranging from the the Japanese Ministry of Culture to the National Geographic Society.

Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Connecticut, he served on the faculty at the University of Alaska (1980-84, Fairbanks) where he established center for ice-age (Quaternary) science, and at the University of Wisconsin (1979-80, Oshkosh), where he exerimented with rural living in a farmhouse on a kettle moraine. Visiting faculty appointments were with the History Department at Yale University (1990), the Geography Department at Dartmouth College (1992), and El Departamento de Obras Civiles (Civil Engineering) at the Universidad Tecnica de Federico Santa Maria, in Valapariso, Chile (1999), where he was a senior Fulbright Scholar. During his last sabatical leave (2006) he diappeared to Conanicut Island (Jamestown) in Naragansett Bay, where he wrote his most recent book, Beyond Walden.

During the first twenty years at UConn, his appointment was with the Department of Geology and Geophysics. In 2005, he joined the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Anthropology (Archaeology), with additional commitments to the Honors Program and the Center for Integrated Geosciences.

His academic career took an expected turn in 2002 after publication of Stone by Stone: The Magnificent History in New England’s Stone Walls. Within a year, it had become a regional bestseller and had won the Connecticut Book Award for nonfiction. Within a year, this accidental writer had also become a stump speaker, ultimately giving over 500 hundred talks at venues ranging from small historical societies to the NASA Engineering Colloquium. He also became an accidental journalist as a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant’s Place, its nationally award-winning Sunday commentary section. By early 2004 he was a weekly opinion columnist, with a beat dominated by science, environment, and education, publishing over 300 columns and essays including invited freelanced magazine pieces. Beginning in 2005, joined the Advisory Board for the Connecticut Center for the Book (a Library of Congress Program), chairing its nonfiction jury for three years. By 2006, he had published his third book on stone walls, Exploring Stone Walls, and had been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop curriculum based on Stone Wall Secrets, (coauthored with Kristine Thorson in 1998), cited by the Smithsonian Institution as a Notable Book for Children. In 2009 he published his second book on signature landforms, — Beyond Walden: The Hidden History of America’s Kettle Lakes and Ponds. It precipitated a freshwater road trip titled Walden to Wobegon, the creation of a website in support of small lake conservation, and a commitment to scholarly work at Walden Pond.

Professor Thorson lives a largely settled (middle-age, middle-career, middle-income) life southern New England, where his hobbies are reading, writing, cooking, walking beaches, and learning the rules of journalism through trial and error.  He and his wife of 34 years, Kristine, now empty-nesters, raised four children together.

Link to a childhood photo as an early naturalist.

Evening Quiet

If your knowledge  of Hardie Gramatky is limited to his legendary children’s books, Little Toot and Hercules, you will be surprised and pleased to see his stunning watercolors of familiar Westport landscapes.  Choose from giclees of 38 local scenes or from hundreds of others done by him, Dorothea Cooke  Gramatky or other leading watercolorists, and WHS will still receive 30% of the sale. 

Limited Offer: Buy Gramatky Westport Watercolor Giclées to support the WHS!  

  How better to celebrate the 2011 holidays than to buy glorious images of “the way Westport was” for yourself, family and friends, and—in so doing—donate to the Westport Historical Society? 

For a limited time only, thanks to the extraordinary generosity of WHS members, Linda Gramatky Smith, and her husband, Ken, visit CaliforniaWatercolor.com, enter the special code*, and the WHS will receive 30% of your online or gift shop purchases of giclée prints of work by: 

• Linda’s father, the late, great Westport artist, Hardie Gramatky,
• her mother, artist Dorothea Cooke Gramatky,
• or any other watercolorists in the CaliforniaWatercolor.com catalogue.

Enjoy this opportunity to buy outstanding prints done by Hardie Gramatky, whose three original watercolors of local barns were included in last summer’s WHS “Back to Our Roots” and “Barns” exhibits. 

Giclées of illustrations from Gramatky’s Little Toot books–a terrific gift to frame for a child’s room–also are included.   And—best of all–the giclées have been reduced in price for the holidays so they range from $95 – $245! 

 What is a giclée? A very high-tech, high-quality reproduction process that exactly replicates the color and texture of the original watercolor artwork. For most of us, only the small embossed mark in the lower corner of the work would distinguish it from the original. Examples are on display in the WHS gift shop. 

 According to Linda: “These giclée prints are some of the best you can find anywhere.  They are printed on heavy Provence watercolor paper and have an identical look and feel to the original paintings, so you can decorate your home—as we have–with Westport scenes or give a special holiday gift to someone who grew up in this area.” 

HOW TO ORDER online: 

1)       Visit www.californiawatercolor.com 

2)      To expedite shopping, in the search box, enter “Gramatky Westport” to find all the Gramatky artwork done locally or “Gramatky” to see all his California and other watercolors done in California (he was a founder of the California Watercolor movement) or around the world.  

3)  *When you are ready to check out, BE SURE to enter the order code “WHS” to receive a bonus 10% discount and send 30% of the profits immediately to the Westport Historical Society account.  

OR, ORDER through the WHS Remarkable Gift Shop: 

1)       Come visit the WHS Remarkable Gift Shop to see two matted samples and let us take your order there.  The cost to send them quickly by FedEx is only $19.95 for 1-4 giclées.   

Remember, this offer is limited… To be sure that the WHS benefits, PLEASE ORDER TODAY!

SAVE ENERGY DOLLARS WITH THE CLICK THAT MAKES THE DIFFERENCE!

As a Connecticut resident, did you know that you pay the 2nd highest rate for electricity in the entire country? And it continues to increase every year. We can reduce your high energy bills while at the same time making your home both healthier and more comfortable to live in. Sign up for your low-cost, CT Energy Efficiency Fund sponsored home energy assessment and begin the process to…

• Reduce your energy bills up to 40%
• Eliminate drafts, moisture, mold and contaminated air, which cause allergies, asthma and other illnesses
• Increase the value of your home—the National Assoc. of Appraisers says that for every $1 in energy saved annually the home value increases $20
• Reduce your carbon footprint and fight climate change while helping to increase our security and energy independence

New England Smart Energy—your complete source for home energy efficiency. 

Also: Join Neighbor to Neighbor Energy Challenge and Help Your Community!
One of the most effective ways to reduce energy use is to join the Neighbor to Neighbor Energy Challenge.  This is a dynamic program helping 14 Connecticut communities and their residents reduce unnecessary energy use.  The Challenge is encouraging all residents to conduct a Home Energy Solutions visit to start plugging energy leaks. They’re also hosting Energy Workshops that help communities and local organizations earn valuable rewards when residents get involved.

Not only does your Home Energy Solutions visit earn rewards for your community and get you on the path to saving money, it pinpoints other ways improve the performance of your home. When you follow through on these recommendations your home will be more comfortable, you’ll be reducing even more energy waste, and you will have earned your community a bundle of points.

Join your neighbors who are already doing their part for community wide energy reductions!