Litchfield County's biggest city is Torrington, at its eastern edge. Incorporated in 1740, it grew into the area's industrial center, with the largest collection of Art Deco buildings in the state. By the turn of the twentieth century, Torrington's brass mills and metal factories provided work for a surge of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, whose cultural influence can be tasted in the sausages and grinders at Carbone's and in the pastas and meat dishes at Marino's or the Venetian. Still largely blue-collar, the city launched a thirty-million-dollar redevelopment in 2006 to revitalize the downtown; the restoration of the 1931 Warner Theatre as a performing arts center was finished in 2002. The city's eastern outskirts have been sacrificed to commercial sprawl—a jumble of shopping centers, multilanes, traffic lights, big box stores, and construction.

There, just south of the Walmart, on a tidy street of otherwise unremarkable houses, is the eighteenth-century brick home of potter Reggie Delarm. In the back of her garden is the studio where she works and teaches, a little barn jam-packed with pottery, remnants of clay, tools, and clay dust. An unpretentious and soft-spoken strawberry blond, Reggie is inspired by local history and skills. My son Aidan and I spent an afternoon with her, learning how to make boxes out of slabs of clay. As we struggled to make a box that looked like something you would want to keep, Reggie worked, effortlessly, at making them too, stopping occasionally to help straighten out one of our sagging slabs. She talked about the properties of different clays and the yellowware she specializes in, its traditional designs and glazes, potters' history and local history combined. Commercial paint-a-pot studios, where you glaze some prefab ceramic object on a rainy day, have proliferated of late—but the boxes we made at Reggie's were of a different order. Most obviously, they testified to our lack of skill, but in their unevenness and floppiness, they showed just how far we would have to go to do this well. I bought myself one of Reggie's big yellow mixing bowls as consolation.

In comparison with Torrington, Litchfield is twee, with a spacious green, impressive big white Colonial Revival houses, and some very nice antiques shops. Torrington had the Naugatuck River, which allowed it to undertake industrial chores, but Litchfield, settled in 1721, was the social center of the area, the hub of trade and the seat of the merchant class. The town did very well, particularly in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War. The country's first law school was here (founded by Tapping Reeve, it educated more than fifteen hundred lawyers for our new nation), as was one of the first academically ambitious schools for women. Litchfield's location put it smack-dab at the crossroads of the routes from Boston, Providence, and Hartford to New York and Philadelphia. The town lost its luster only after the railroad passed it by.