Photographer Christina Cole takes a wild journey through Connecticut’s oddities

Yes, especially during the COVID lockdown when we were stuck in our homes. “I wanted to put in some of the quirky, fun things to lighten the COVID mood. Since we weren’t allowed to do much without strict guidelines and masking up, driving around seemed like a good break for people that might have cabin fever.”

Cole was out there, driving all over Connecticut, seeing and photographing. But it didn’t take the pandemic to get her started; she had been exploring the state and taking photos since 2012, when she began flying up here from her home in North Carolina to visit a friend in Stratford.

“Landscape-wise it’s a beautiful state,” she says as she sits in the kitchen of her house in the woods of Killingworth that she has shared with her boyfriend and their three dogs since they moved here in 2015. “In Connecticut you really have to look within. There’s so much tucked away, so many nooks. Every place has a little niche. Each town and city has its own entity that makes it special.”

She uses her hometown as an example. “If you look at Killingworth, it seems there’s nothing here. You have to really look and then you’ll find it. It’s amazing what’s tucked in.”

Look “within” and you’ll see what’s in Cole’s town, as shown in the photo on page 65 of her book: the gravestone of Hugh Lofting, who wrote the beloved children’s book series on the adventures of Dr. Dolittle. In her book, Cole notes Lofting lived in Killingworth (from the early 1920s until about 1936). Who knew? Not many of us.

Here’s some more: although I have lived in Connecticut for nearly 50 years, I had never heard of the Trackside Brick Oven Pizzeria, located literally along the train tracks of Wallingford in a 1920s Philadelphia subway car. Thanks to Cole’s discovery, I’m going to get out there for some slices. “New Haven style” pizza? We’ll see about that.

And did you know there’s a Tree of Life Barn Quilt Trail in New Milford? Cole photographed one of the 19 colorful quilt patterns hand-painted and hung on barns and other historical buildings.

Many of us know that circus impresario P. T. Barnum is buried in Bridgeport (at Mount Grove Cemetery) but Cole didn’t merely include a photo of his gravestone; she added one of the gravesite of Col. Tom Thumb, Barnum’s legendary sideshow act. He’s buried close to Barnum, with a small figure atop the main stone. Barnum paid for the stone monument.

In the chapter on Connecticut landmarks, Cole shows us two bridges I hadn’t known about: the Beehive Bridge in New Britain and the Thread City Crossing or the “Frog Bridge” in Willimantic. The four frogs, perched atop thread spools, allude to “the frog fight” of 1754, when residents were alarmed by a dreadful sound in the hills. Were those war drums? No — it turned out to be a multitude of frogs searching for water.

Cole’s chapter nine, like the book itself, is entitled “The Wild, Weird and Wonderful.” The lead photo: the head-turning 300-foot-long condo complex in Guilford that resembles a UFO and leaves you wondering how it ever got past the town or neighborhood planning board. Also featured in that chapter are multiple shots of the Cushing Brain Collection on display at the Yale School of Medicine building — an assortment of hundreds of jars of abnormal brains.

In addition, Cole’s book has chapters on our dinosaurs, birds, parks, lighthouses and folk art. She captures this in evocative color photos, 149 in all. But her publisher, America Through Time, limited her to 96 pages and didn’t give her much space to describe what she photographed.

“They sent back my first version,” Cole says. “They told me if they printed it, it would be equivalent to War and Peace. I felt like there was so much to tell about a lot of the places, but I had to cut it down to their word requirements. I hope what got left out somehow translated through the pictures.”

Cole should have been provided a better fact-checker and proofreader. She calls Connecticut “the smallest state” (it ranks third, behind Rhode Island and Delaware) and there are glaring misspellings when she writes about Hammonasset Beach State Park and Dr. Dolittle. 

This isn’t Cole’s first book about Connecticut. In 2021, America Through Time published her Abandoned Connecticut: First World Wasted. She focused on bleak but compelling sites such as Holy Land USA in Waterbury and Sunrise Resort in Moodus. She was drawn to the bizarre beauty and “rot” of the once-popular Moodus hot spot — its abandoned dance hall, restaurant, picnic tables and campers’ quarters.

When I ask Cole about her “quirky” taste in photo subjects, she says she prefers to put it this way: “I have a darker taste than other people. I tend to lean toward apocalyptic photography — clouds, not blue skies.”

Where did that come from? She says she was raised in a house filled with art that had religious iconography and dark images. They included “an iron patina green man with a laughing demonic face.”

Terminal illness in her family and a potentially fatal disease in her case have also played a large role in Cole’s life. Her mother and stepfather died from cancer, and in 2016 Cole was diagnosed with breast cancer. That experience motivated her to follow the firm advice she gave to her mom and stepdad: “I kept urging them to get off the couch and see some of the world before they went, to use the good days they had left.”

“I don’t want to die in my spot in the couch,” she adds. “So I think it pushes me harder to do things. I get really aggravated when I see people waste time and life.”

Thus Cole hopes her book will encourage us to travel around our state, “to appreciate art, light and color. Connecticut has so much to offer from town to town. It’s an incredible place for things to do if you have an open mind to look for it and do it!”

Randall Beach is a former columnist and reporter for the New Haven Register. His essays are at randallbeach.substack.com and he can be reached at rbeach8@yahoo.com.