Northeast CT Country Loop

The Quiet Corner without Route 169: leave Phoenixville on CT-198 north through Natchaug State Forest, continue on CT-171 and CT-197, which crosses 169 at North Woodstock without running it, reach Quinebaug and drop on CT-131 to Thompson and Putnam, then head west on US-44 through Pomfret and Abington. It's 43 miles of forest, stone walls and villages with their greens. Watch the downtown Putnam traffic and the US-44 crossings.

This is the heart of the Quiet Corner, inside the Last Green Valley, a National Heritage Corridor created in 1994 that stands out at night from satellites as a dark patch in the Northeast's urban corridor. CT-198 runs north through Natchaug State Forest, more than 13,000 acres where Bigelow Brook and the Still River join to form the Natchaug River. In Eastford lies General Nathaniel Lyon, born in Ashford in 1818 and the first Union general killed in the Civil War, at Wilson's Creek in 1861.

On the way back you reach Thompson's hilltop green, laid out when the town was founded in 1735, where the Vernon Stiles Inn opened in 1814 at the crossing of two turnpikes. Putnam, incorporated in 1855 and named for General Israel Putnam, grew around Cargill Falls on the Quinebaug, where the first cotton mill in Windham County was built after 1806, and today it calls itself an antiques town. On US-44 in Pomfret you pass Mashamoquet Brook State Park, where the Wolf Den marks the cave in which Putnam is said to have killed Connecticut's last known wolf in 1742. This route doesn't take Bigelow Hollow, which sits about 3 miles off the CT-171 and CT-197 junction, out and back.